Hemingway's narrative technique as a short story writer
Analysis of Hemingway's Narrative Technique as a Short- Story WriterFor many years, the narrative technique of Hemingway has been under debate. Writers before him had already achieved works that bear the characteristics of the modern short story, and many of their works could stand today, with those of Hemingway and of writers like Faulkner, as representative short stories of modern times. What distinguishes Hemingway both from his predecessors and from his contemporaries, however, is the theory he produces to deal with the challenge of spatial limitation which every short story writer has to face: how can he say more than his space actually allows him to say? The principle of the iceberg, as the theory is called by Hemingway, leaves distinctive imprints on his short stories: a clipped, spare style, naturalistic presentation of actions and observations, heavy reliance on dramatic dialogue, and a pattern of connection extending backwards and forwards between the various stories.Because of the above, it is helpful to have some understanding of his theory. In Death in the afternoon, Hemingway (1932,191) points out that no matter how good a phrase or a simile a writer may have, he is spoiling his work out of egotism if he pu
The simple sentences are typically Hemingway when they are linked by a chain of repeated "and", as can be observed in a sentence in "The Short Happy Life Francis Macomber":His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa. He could hear the men talking and he waited, gathering all of himself into the preparation for a charge as soon as the men would come into the grass. The overall impression is that of a pointless story told in a very native language. To write about gangsters, for example, Hemingway adopts their own language, with its slang and vernacular, as can be found in "The Killers": "hot town" ,"what the hell", "talk to goddam much" ,"blow his head off". All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush. " Nick's fishing trip, if it is to make sense, should be regarded as a sort of escape from his nightmarish experiences. Consider a passage in "Big Two-Hearted River":There was a tug on the line. Yet, observe, in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", how such scrappy speech can reveal the situation of a character:"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said. Take, for example, "Big Two-Hearted River" where the "plot" is simply a trout fishing. What must first be said about Hemingway's dialogue is that it is made of seemingly casual conversational exchange, of scrappy speech. Ever go to the movies?"Once in a while,"You ought to go to the movies more. In fact, some of these stories cannot be understood at all if read separately from other stories. Just as life never permits us to say "farewell to arms" to life, there can never be "another country" where death is concerned.
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