Literary Analysis of Ernest Hemingway Essay

Ste fightt, Matthew C (2000) quite rightly points out that If literary tincture is a register of how deeply an author has felt the subject be most which he writes, and so Hemingway felt in truth deeply about his war experiences, for these are some of his finest stories. They are In A nonher land, directly I Lay Me, and A representation Youll N ever so Be. The first humbug very fairly anticipates A Fare easy to Arms in its disruption paragraph, its setting and the themes it raises. It depicts the ruined lives of wounded soldiers in a hospital, in event the physical therapy of the American narrator and an Italian major(ip).It is clear that the physical therapy is unprofitable and that some ramify of metaphysical, perhaps spiritual, therapy would be more(prenominal) fundament in everyy semiprecious for the psychically battered men. The second story, as stated above, depicts cut off and an Italian soldier lying awake at night near the front, unable to sleep. The Ame rican narrator dreads sleeping because he fears that his soul impart take into account his body. The final story depicts chip off Adams returning to the Italian front as a would-be morale booster, hardly he has been shot, receiving a head-wound that has r exterminateered him exactly able to control himself at the front.Indeed, his principal task is to hold onto his sanity. These triad war stories are remarkable for their literary quality, for their high degree of autobiographical resonance, and for the way they illuminate A Fare well up to Arms and from each one other. almost to the immediate declare oneself, however, is to assert that they constitute additional too soon evidence that prick Adams was severely traumatized by the war. Lynn and Crews build a version of Hemingway as a world-renowned, middle-aged author pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and critics during the mid-forties and fifties.Twenty-five years after the fact, they of importtain, Hemingway fabri cates the inclination that the war affected him. to that extent In Another Country and Now I Lay Me were sedate only two years after Big Two-Hearted River, and A Way Youll Never Be was composed in mid-1932. These are Nick Adams stories they are set at the war they guide Nick as physically and psychically wounded. The opening pages of Now I Lay Me even rebound hu military man racey particulars of Big Two-Hearted River, including the central action of trout fishing as psychic restoration.Hemingways finest explorations of the human consequences of war. Hemingway discussed his war nightmares with his first wife in the twenties for the kindred reason? Hemingway as both young and middle-aged man undoubtedly kidded, exaggerated, misled, pulled legs, manipulated, hoaxed, and lied. notwithstanding the existence of these early war stories argues strongly against the idea that Hemingway decided to lay claim to the importance of the war in his sprain belatedly and factitiously.The inca pacity to find his way through with(predicate) questions he cannot solve, his reservation the admission of his own weakness, those familiar steps on the path of the individualistbring Hemingways contemporary to forsaking on principle. The theme of desertion is not new to Hemingway. Long ago Nick Adams fled from his home town, then he fled to the front. tho here too the fearless arditti decorated with all sorts of medals is a potential deserter at heart. For utilization, that if all the stories about Nick Adams were collected and entitled In Our Time they would not have the twist which In Our Time does have.The Killers and Now I Lay Me might fit, moreover Fathers and Sons and A Way Youll Never Be would not. Hemingways favorite hero-ever the same under his changing namesand you begin to realize that what had chitchatmed the writers face is barely a mask, and by degrees you begin to discern a different face, that of Nick Adams, Tenente Henry, Jake Barnes, Mr. washbasinson, Mr. Frazer. Hemingway shows us how complicated he is by his very attempts to be simple.A tangle of conflicting strains and inconsistencies, a subtle clumsiness, a tang of doubt and unrest are to be seen even in Hemingways earlier books as early as his presentation of Nick Adamss cloudless young days, but as he restoration on the way of artistic development these features show increasingly clear and the split between Hemingway and humanity widens. Closely following the evolution of his main hero you can see how at first Nick Adams is but a photo film fixing the whole of life in its simplest tangible details.Then you begin to discern Nicks ever growing instinct of blind protest, at which the manifestations of his go forth practically stop. The well trained athletic body is good of strength, it seeks for moments of tension that would justify this sort of life and finds them in boxing and skiing, in bull fighting and king of beasts hunting, in wine and women. He makes a fetish of action for action, he revels in all that threatens to destroy. But the mind jerkinged by the war, undermined by doubt, exhausted by a squandered life, the poor cheated, hopelessly miscellaneous up mind fails him.The satiated man with neither meaning nor purpose in life is no longer capable of a lengthy consecutive effort. You oughtnt to ever do boththing too long and we see the anecdote of the lantern in the teeth of the frozen corpse grow into a tragedy of satiety when nothing is taken in earnest some(prenominal) longer, when there is no fun anymore. Action turns into its reverse, into the passive pose of a stoic, into the courage of despair, into the capacity of keeping oneself in check at any cost, no longer to conquer, but to give away, and that smilingly.The figure of Jake mutilated in the war grows into a type. It is the type of a man who has lost the stave of accepting all of life with the spontaneous case of his earlier days. For example the wounded Nick says to Rina ldiYou and me weve make a separate peace. Were not patriots. Tenente Henry kills the Italian sergeant when the latter, refusing to fulfill his order, renounces his part in the war, but inwardly he is a deserter as well and on the following day we actually see him desert. In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more ( In Another Country).This theme of sanctioned treason, or desertion in every form, so typical of the extreme individualist, recurs throughout Hemingways work. But to learn to do it is no easy job, especially for one whose mussiness is limited by the blinders of sceptical individualism. Life is too complicated and full of hoax. The romance of war had been deceit, it is on deceit that the renown of most writers rests. The satisfaction of the Eliot couple is but self-deceit Jake is cruelly deceived by life for Mr. Frazer everything is deceit or self-deceit, everything is dopereligion, radio, patriotism, even bread.There is despair in the feeli ng of impending doom, and morbidity in the foretaste of the imminent loss of all that was dear. All stories if continued far enough end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he ofttimes lives most happily, dies in the most lonesome fashion. There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlives her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. A variety of later stories The Revolutionist,In Another Country,A saucer-eyed Enquiry,Now I Lay Me,A Way Youll Never Beaffirm the various phases of Hemingways thesis the suffering of the war, the resistances and defenses of his people, their ways of ignoring the prospect around them which apparently they cannot control. The depression of the nineteen-thirties was thus a sort of rape to our writers, rather like the insulin treatment in modern therapy, which brought them back from the shadows of impassivity to American life at best, and active hostility at worst.This a great deal of the expression of the thirties Hemingway anticipates in his own withdrawal and return to our communal life, though the pattern will vary with our other literary figures, and with John Dos Passos and William Faulkner we have both an apparent exception to the rule and a real one. But we cannot deny that if the return to social sanity through shock is better than no return, it is in the end a manner of desperation rather than a counsel of perfection.Our Americans are also to show its effect in their work of the decade, as Hemingway has already. The crisis of the new age has caught him well along in his career. Can he discover, who has discovered so lots and left much unsaid, the genuine method of unifying his work and his times, the compact of the I and the we which will further illuminate the sad impulses he has made his own? We recall the phrase which summarized Hemingways solitary position a way youll never be. With such native capacities, the inheritance of wisdom and eloquence, the sand of bottomless intuitions we oft have with Hemingway, the prophetic texture which marks his talent, will Hemingway now find a way to be? For what a grand teacher Hemingway is, with all the restrictions of temperament and environment which so far fasten his work What could he not show us of living as well as dying, of the positives in our being as well as our destroying forces, of grace under pressure and the grace we need with no pressures, of unexceptional life-giving actions along with those superb last gestures of doomed exilesTenente Henry enjoys the definite, clear relations between people, the good comradeship We felt held together by there being something that had happened, that they did not understand, and the feeling of risk while it lasts. But soon along with the debacle at Caporetto he finds himself set about by the cruelty of the rear, choked by its lies and filth, hurt by the iniquity of the working people to gli ufficiali. And as his shellshock had lost him his sleep so does the stronger shock of war make him a different man.By the time the war is over he has learned to discern liars that lie to nations and to value their sweetened talk at what it is worth. Year after year Hemingway steadily elaborate his main lyrical theme, creating the peculiar indirectly personal form of his storey (Soldiers Home, Now I Lay Me), sober on the surface, soon enough so agitated and as the years went by, the reader began to perceive the tragic side of his books.It became more and more apparent that his health was a sham, that he and his heroes were wasting it away. Hemingways pages were now reflecting all that is ugly and ghastly in human nature, it became increasingly clear that his activity was the purposeless activity of a man vainly attempting not to think, that his courage was the aimles s courage of despair, that the obsession of death was taking hold of him, that again and again he was piece of the endthe end of love, the end of life, the end of hope, the end of all.The bourgeois patrons and the bourgeois readers tamed by prosperity, were gradually losing interest in Hemingway. To follow him through the concentric circles of his individualistic hell was becoming a bit affright and a bit tedious. He was taking things too seriously. In early days both critics and readers had highly admired the romantic strength, the exotic bull-fights, the male athletic style but now Hemingways moments of meditation, his too heart gazing at what is horrible,According Hannum (1992) the trial of courage Nick so often faced had begun at least by the time of the Boulton episode. The doctors backing obliterate before Boulton no doubt spurred Nicks long fascination with boxing (his immediate recognition of Stanley Ketchel, Ad Francis, and Ole Andreson in the road stories) and his o wn concern with fistfights (the brakeman and Ad) and other challenges to his own courage.In The light(a) of the World he flinched and put up money when the bartender endanger Tom and him (292) in The Battler he smarted under the brakemans trick punch, then found himself briefly overmatched in the near-fight with Ad (101-02), but in The Killers he risked his life to warn Ole Andreson. In In Another Country Nick considered himself a dove in contrast to his hunting-hawk (208) comrades in Milan, though he learned a new courage from the Italian major whose wife died of pneumonia, and in A Way Youll Never Be puked and felled seam back in his first infantry attack (314), but thereafter found courage in grappa.(Hannum 92) Conclusion If on closing Hemingways books you recall and assort the disjoined pieces of the biography of his main hero you will be able to trace the decisive points of his life. Nickfirst a tabula rasa, then turning away from too cruel a reality Henry struggling for his life and trying to assert its joys, Jake and Mr. Johnsonalready more than half broken and Mr. Frazera martyr to reflection and growing passivity.So we witness both the awakening and the ossification of the hero whose psychology is so intimately known to Hemingway himself, and as opposed to it a file of brave and stoic peoplethe Negro in Battler, the imposing figures of Belmonte and Manola, the broken ogre Ole Andreson in a wordthose people for whom Hemingways double has so strong an instinctive liking, first worshipped as heroes and then brought down to earth.Works Cited Hannum, Howard L.Scared Sick Looking at It A construe of Nick Adams in the Published Stories. Twentieth Century Literature 47. 1 (2001) Hemingway, Ernest. The Art of the shortstop Story. Ernest Hemingway A Study of the Short Fiction. Ed. Joseph M. Flora. Boston Twayne, 1989. 129-44. Nolan, Charles J. younger Hemingways Complicated Enquiry in Men without Women. . Studies in Short Fiction 32. 2 (1995) Nolan, Cha rles J. Jr. Hemingways Puzzling Pursuit Race. Studies in Short Fiction 34. 4 (1997) Paul, Steve.Drive, He Said How Ted Brumback Helped Steer Ernest Hemingway into war and Writing. The Hemingway Review 27. 1 (2007) Paul, Steve. Preparing for War and Writing What the Young Hemingway Read in the Kansas City Star, 1917-1918. The Hemingway Review 23. 2 (2004) Stewart, Matthew C. Ernest Hemingway and World War I Combatting late Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War. Papers on Language & Literature 36. 2 (2000) Tyler, Lisa. Hemingways Italy impudently Perspectives. The Hemingway Review 26. 2 (2007)