Ernest Hemingway ( 1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway

-1961)

- Hemingways technique was analagous with the modernist poetic doctrines of impersonality and the objective correlative[made famous by T.S.Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919) : The way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

- Hemingways tight linguistic economy, setting limits on false experience and rhetorical impulse was initially displayed in the short story. T Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1924), first printed in Paris, established his style and introduced, in seven of the fifteen stories of the latter volume, Nick Adams. The tight style complements a tragic stoicism. This manner of writing is a kind of existential realism that seems to derive directly from experience but implies acquaintance with a new historical condition leading to a world of trauma, awareness of nada, of all meaning lost except that which can be arduously reconstructed.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) - written partly out of disgust with the empty Bohemianism of The Lost Generation, set among the Parisian expatriates. If we take the novel to be an epistemological novel, then we will understand what happened to the war-wounded narrator Jake Barnes as a point of departure in learning how to live in the world. Jake and Lady Brett Ashley are in love, but unhappily, because a wartime injury has emasculated him. Jakes wound is the central symbol of the intolerable intrusion of pain and history into the self, which is the ultimate reality, the fundamental modern initiation. Much of Hemingways later fiction will concentrate on that sense of direct encounter between struggling man and the seemingly implacable universe. There are also other characters like Count Mippipopolous for whom life means knowing to extract value from experience. He has stripped his stockpile of illusions to a minimum., transferring the capitalistic ethic of exchange values to the sphere of the emotions. His opposite is Robert Cohn who refuses to pay the price of self-knowledge because he has become an expert in the illusion-creating art of self-deception.

A Farewell to Arms (1930) - Frederick Henry is a self-less, unrooted American, practically nonexistent. His character grows during the novel. He develops from blankness, carelessness, non-identity and disguise to responsability, caring and existence. The wound and the loss of his lover, Catherine Barkley make him wake up to life through awareness of death.

- the typical Hemingway hero finds his self and the meaning of life by fighting against nada (Sp. nothingness), chaos and lack of meaning. A response is necessary to offer man identity and sense to existence.