Ernest Hemingway- Short StoriesIntroduction

In this volume, which contains seventy separate pieces of fiction, Hemingway addresses a broad spectrum of social concerns and themes. Excluded from this discussion are the first forty-nine stories in this volume, which have been in print since 1938 and have generated a vast amount of critical commentary. These are the stories on which Hemingway's reputation as a master of the short story rests. There are two other categories of "story" included in the collection. Part two is subtitled "Short Stories Published in Books or Magazines Subsequent to The First Forty-nine,'" including fourteen pieces; the third part is headed "Previously Unpublished Fiction/' and includes seven new pieces, ostensibly "short stories."

Of the fourteen pieces in the second section, three are segments from novels ("One Trip Across," and "The Tradesman's Return" from To Have and Have Not and "An African Story" from The Garden of Eden); two are not, properly speaking, short stories but fables — "The Good Lion" and "The Faithful Bull"; one, "Summer People," is a very early story (1924), with a corrupt text (missing page), yet it is still of considerable interest even if Hemingway never intended to publish it; another text of great interest is "The Last Good Country," not a story at all, but a posthumously edited, rewritten, and bowdlerized portion of a novel-in-progress manuscript that Hemingway worked on between 1952 and 1958. Thus only seven of the fourteen purported short stories published in this section may accurately be called short stories published with Hemingway's approval and final editing. These are "The Denunciation," "The Butterfly and the Tank," "Night Before Battle," "Under the Ridge," "Nobody Ever Dies," "Get a Seeing Eyed Dog," and "A Man of the World." The first five date from the late 1930s and constitute a grouping of Spanish Civil War stories.

The social concerns and themes of these Spanish Civil War stories turn on the complex political issues brought into focus by that conflict: questions of left and right, Communism and Fascism, and every shade and nuance of political and social engagement or disengagement. As a group, these stories represent Hemingway's effort to clarify for himself his own political attitudes toward the Spanish Civil War, as a prelude to the writing of his masterpiece about that conflict. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Social and political concerns are the strong point of these stories, characterization the weakest point. The first story, "The Denunciation" (1938) deals with the question of the writer and narrator of the tale as a foreign observer of a war, and the attendant moral and aesthetic involvement and responsibility of such a writer. There are troublesome currents in this story, and some critics feel that Hemingway is engaged here in self-denunciation; that he is confessing his own guilt over his attacks on fellow writer and former close friend, John Dos Passos; or, more generally, confessing his personal bad faith in certain aspects of his involvement with the Spanish situation. Of course, other critics argue that the writer-narrator is not to be confused with Ernest Hemingway. In this instance, that argument does not ring true, for it seems that there is much that is deeply personal in this story, as in others in this series. The second story of the sequence, "The Butterfly and the Tank/' evokes the same questions of moral responsibility. In addition, some commentators find here — and throughout this story group — a pattern of "wasteful deaths" and "Christ figures." The third story of the series, "Night Before Battle," deals again with action close to Hemingway's experience and observation of the war, the disparity between the soldier's view of war and the view of the writer that reports that war. The fourth story, "Nobody Ever Dies," generally considered the least successful of the lot, probably represents Hemingway's working sketch of material that would appear in For Whom the Bell Tolls, such as the scenes of the two heroes and the two Marias. Perhaps the best of this group of stories is "Under the Ridge." Whether one agrees with the critical view that this is the final variation of the theme of Christian sacrifice and communion or, more straightforwardly, sees it as an eloquent evocation of the theme of the illusory nature of victory in war, it is a fine and moving story, almost up to the level of Hemingway's earlier stories. This series of Spanish Civil War stories, then, which Hemingway considered making into a separate collection, is important, for him, as a warm-up exercise for For Whom the Bell Tolls. For the student of that novel, they provide valuable background, sidelights, and undertones.

The two other stories, properly speaking, in the second part of The Complete Short Stories, are "Get a Seeing Eye Dog" and "A Man of the World." These are very late Hemingway stories, the last to be published (in 1957), while he was still alive. They are both sketchy and dimly focused, and what they demonstrate, more than anything else, is the tremendous decline in Hemingway's mastery of the short story form. Commentators have rarely deigned to mention these stories, except to dismiss them in brief asides as trivial and abortive sketches from the hand of a failing master.

Some observers refuse to regard any of the pieces in the third section ("Previously Unpublished Fiction") as short stories, or even as fiction worthy of publication, regarding them as sketches or family anecdotes. Also included in this section are excerpts from a novel manuscript (Jimmy Breen) written and abandoned by Hemingway in the 1920s. The last so-called story of the volume, "The Strange Country," is an excerpt form a fragmentary Hemingway manuscript which was apparently an early version of certain Islands in the Stream (1970) materials. These pieces, like most of the other newly collected and newly published fiction in this volume, can hardly be said to be realized fiction, capable of sustaining thematic and stylistic and character analyses. Obviously, since Hemingway chose not to publish most of this material, he was well aware that this work fell far short of the mastery evident in the stories he had written and published between 1923 and 1938. Yet it is possible to argue that it is valuable to have under the covers of one book such pieces as the early "Summer People," which sketches a vivid picture of the young artist and the young lover, and the later "Strange Country," which gives an all-too-vivid portrait of a somehow prematurely ravaged and diminished older artist and lover. Some readers, too, will be grateful for all the Hemingway they can get.

The reception of The Complete Short Stories has been a mixture of outrage, disdain, and disappointment. The title of the volume is a misnomer in other ways, too. Not only is much of this material inappropriately given the label "short story," but the volume is far from being what it says it is — the complete stories. Other stories remain unpublished, some of them better, more finished than some included here. In fact, since the publication of this volume, two of these stories, "A Lack of Passion" and "Philip Haines Was a Writer," have appeared in The Hemingway Review (Spring 1990). In summary, students of Hemingway will have to wait for another volume if they are truly to have the complete stories, and the critical verdict appears to demand that such a volume should include material that is not here and should certainly omit some of the falsely labeled short stories and the fragmentary, abortive material that is included here.

Hemingway’s style and subject matter are archetypal of American writing. Hemingway broke new literary ground when he began publishing his short stories. Furthermore, not only was he an American writer, but he was not an ivory-tower esthete; he was a man’s man. He hunted in grand style, deep-sea fished, covered both World War I and World War II for national news services, and was married as many times as Hollywood celebrities—and yet he found time to write novels and stories that feature men and women facing both death and emotional crises with grit, gumption, and grand tenacity.

Hemingway’s heroes are characterized by their unflinching integrity. They do not compromise. They are vulnerable but are not defined by their vulnerability. Hemingway’s men and women are often defiant of what society expects of them: They eat with gusto, devour adventure, and have sex—simply and directly.

In the beginning, Hemingway wrote about himself, and he would continue to write himself into all, or most, of his characters until his death. His first persona was Nick Adams, a young boy who accompanies a doctor to an American Indian camp and watches the doctor use a jackknife to slice into a woman’s abdomen and deliver a baby boy.

At that early age, Nick vows never to die. Later, he defies death and the sanity-threatening wounds that he receives in Italy during World War I. He rotely repeats, in blind faith, the knee-bending exercises for his stiff, battle-scarred knee. Instinctively, he returns to the north woods of Michigan to heal his soul of the trauma of war. Hemingway himself suffered a bad knee wound during the war and returned to hunting and fishing in Michigan’s northern woods.

In his more mature stories, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway creates far more complex characters and situations for his characters. “Snows” is a stylistic tour de force, a perfect dovetailing of intense, invigorating, interior-monologue flashbacks as contrasts to sections of present-time narratives, during which the main character, a writer named Harry, is slowly dying of gangrene. Symbolically, Harry is also rotting away because of the poisonous nature of his wife’s money. As his life ebbs away, he realizes that his writing talent has been ebbing away for years, as surely as his life is, symbolized by the hyena and the buzzards who wait to feast on his carcass.

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Hills Like White Elephants” are examples of Hemingway’s most pared-down style, in which he removes himself from the role of narrator. The stories are almost wholly composed of dialogue. One must engage him or herself in the narratives and ignite his or her imagination to understand the emotional core of each of these stories. Hemingway expects us to.

Hemingway’s genius as an American original was evident long before he produced his novels that are today considered    masterpieces of American literature. Both critics and readers have hailed his short stories as proof that a pure, true American literature was finally possible. American literature was no longer merely watered-down British reading fare. American literature had at last come into its own. Hemingway set the standard—and the writers who came after him honored his achievement.

Indian CampSummary

This story is a good example of the “initiation story,” a short story that centers around a main character who comes into contact with an idea, experience, ritual, or knowledge that he did not previously know. Hemingway wrote a number of initiation stories, or as they are sometimes referred to, “rite of passage” stories, and the main character in most of these stories is Nick Adams, a young man much like Hemingway himself.

In this story, Nick Adams is a very young boy in the Michigan north woods, accompanying his father, Dr. Adams, and his uncle George to an American Indian camp on the other side of a lake. Hemingway’s own father was a doctor, who spent much time with his son in the northern woods of Michigan (most critics read this story as somewhat autobiographical). Here, a very young Nick is initiated into concepts that remained of highest importance to Hemingway throughout his writing career: life and death; suffering, pain, and endurance; and suicide.

Nick’s father goes to the American Indian camp to help a young American Indian woman who has been screaming because of severe labor pains for two days, still unable to deliver her baby. When Dr. Adams arrives, she is lying in a bottom bunk; her husband, who cut his foot badly with an axe three days before, is lying in the bunk bed above her. Doctor Adams asks Nick to assist him, holding a basin of hot water while four American Indian men hold down the woman. Using his fishing jackknife as a scalpel, Dr. Adams performs a cesarean on the woman, delivers the baby boy, then sews up the woman’s incision with some gut leader line from his fishing tackle. Exhilarated by the success of his impromptu, improvised surgery, Doctor Adams looks into the top bunk and discovers that the young American Indian husband, who listened to his wife screaming during her labor pains and during the cesarean, has cut his throat.

Although this very short story deals with violence and suffering, with birth and death, sexism and racism, Hemingway’s emphasis is not on the shocking events themselves; instead, Hemingway shows the effect of birth and death on young Nick Adams. Nick’s progression in this short story is vividly portrayed in polarities. For instance, on the way to the camp in the boat, Nick is sitting in his father’s arms; on the way back, Nick sits on the opposite end of the boat. Similarly, while his father wants Nick to witness the birth (and his surgical triumph), Nick turns his head away; when the American Indian husband is discovered dead in his bed, Nick sees it, even though his father wants to protect him from it. The fact that Nick sits across from his father in the boat on the way back after this experience can indicate a pulling out from underneath his father’s influence.

The young boy asks his father why the young American Indian man cut his throat and is told, “I don’t know. . . . He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” However, there are more subtle undercurrents for the American Indian husband’s suicide as well. The treatment and attitude of Dr. Adams toward the woman, who is an American Indian, are key also. When Dr. Adams tells Nick that her screaming is not important, it is at this point that the American Indian husband rolls over in his bunk toward the shanty wall, as he is found later, after slitting his own throat with a razor. While this failure to confront the events at hand indicates fear, it can also indicate the American Indian husband’s resignation to the thoughtless racism of the White men who have come to help her.

Some have suggested that Uncle George is possibly the father of the child, as he seems to have a friendly relationship with the American Indians in the beginning of the story and hands out cigars to everyone after the birth. His handing out cigars to the men present could possibly be interpreted as paternity, although one could also surmise that he is simply sharing his way of celebrating the miracle of birth with the American Indians. Additionally, he stays behind in the camp after Dr. Adams and Nick leave. Following the interpretation of Uncle George being the baby’s father, the husband’s suicide could be seen as an inability to deal with his own shame and the cuckoldry of his wife.

Here, Dr. Adams emphasizes to Nick that although this young American Indian man committed suicide, women rarely do. Fear conquered the young American Indian man; he did not have the courage and strength to cope with it.

He failed his test of manhood. During the boat trip back across the lake, while Nick and his father are talking, the reader learns that Nick feels “quite safe—that he would never die.” Even at this young age, Nick vows never to succumb to fear. His resolve never to bow to fear is so great that he’s ready to defy even the concept of natural, mortal life.

Throughout his entire writing career, Hemingway would write about men who could “stand things” and men who couldn’t “stand things.” Of vital importance to him was the concept of being able to “stand things,” no matter how violent and painful the situation is. He called this strength “grace under pressure.” A real, authentic man never succumbs; most of all, he does not kill himself. Ironically, both Hemingway and his father committed suicide.

In his later stories about Nick Adams, Hemingway explores how this young boy matures and how his vow never to bow to fear is central to the crisis in each story.

Characters

Adams

A general practitioner and emergency surgeon    who lives near a lake on the northern peninsula of Michigan. Using makeshift surgical instruments, he delivers a baby boy to an American Indian woman who has been in excruciating labor for two days.

Uncle George

Dr. Adams’ brother; he accompanies Dr. Adams to the camp and with the help of three American Indian men, holds the American Indian woman down while Dr. Adams performs a cesarean.

Nick

Dr. Adams’ son, about eight or nine years old; he goes with his father and uncle to the American Indian camp.

American Indian Woman

Having screamed for two days while trying to give birth, she is helped by Dr. Adams, who makes an incision in her with a jackknife and delivers a boy.

American Indian Husband

The presumed father of the baby that Dr. Adams delivers by cesarean surgery is found dead in his bed. Hearing his wife scream for two days and during the painful, crude surgery drives him mad. Silently and secretly, he cuts his throat.

The doctor and the doctor’s wifeSummary

Dr. Adams hires two American Indians to cut some logs that broke free from a shipment bobbing downstream toward a large sawmill company. They are glad to make some extra money and are in a good mood, good-naturedly teasing the doctor about stealing the logs. The doctor becomes furious and fires the men, then goes upstairs, where his wife lectures him with platitudes. Disgusted with his wife and himself, the doctor goes outside and accepts his young son’s invitation to go where they can see some black squirrels. The doctor in the story’s title refers to Dr. Adams, a central character in “Indian Camp.” In that story, the doctor’s son, Nick, was a boy, and after his father successfully delivered a baby with makeshift surgical implements. In this story, Nick is still a young boy and still idolizes his father. However, we see a far different Dr. Adams than Nick does. To Nick, his father can do no wrong; readers observe Dr. Adams being a hypocritical coward. Dr. Adams may have performed heroically at the American Indian camp, but not here. Here, he’s clearly a man who “can’t stand it” when he’s confronted with the truth about his unethical behavior.

Three Ojibway Indians have come to cut several beached logs that broke loose from the White and McNally log shipments that were being towed to the mill located down the lake from the Adams property. Doctor Adams plans to use the logs for wood for his fireplace. However, when Dick Boulton, one of the Ojibway Indians, jokes about the logs being stolen, Adams is angrily embarrassed and shamed by Boulton’s knowing that Adams is fully aware that the logs rightly belong to White and McNally; he orders them off his property.

Dick has bested the doctor. He’s proud that although he’s ready to cut up the logs willingly for the doctor, he’s not hypocritical enough—as the doctor is—to pretend that the logs don’t belong to White and McNally. As a measure of his contempt for the doctor’s hypocrisy, he exits by the back gate and leaves it open.

The doctor’s wife is still in bed and cautions her husband with platitudes about self-control and the dangers of an unruly temper. She questions him about the Dick Boulton incident and expresses disbelief in her husband’s lies about Boulton’s alleged intention to not pay for the doctor’s saving his wife from dying from pneumonia.

Discovering Nick reading a book under a tree, Dr. Adams tells his son that his mother wants to see him, but Nick, still obviously very much in awe of his father, the miracle-working doctor, dismisses his mother’s request. He wants to go hiking with his father. Dr. Adams is grateful for his son’s company; he is eager to escape—escape to anywhere, anywhere where there aren’t men like Dick Boulton. Earlier, he spent a long time cleaning his gun; clearly, he’d like to shoot Boulton. Now, though, his temper somewhat in check, he’s willing to go anywhere with Nick—even to the nebulous place where “there’s black squirrels.”

Characters

Dr. Henry Adams

A proud doctor who is ashamed and angry that he is teased by American Indians hired to cut up logs that broke loose from a White and McNally shipment to a sawmill downstream.

Mrs. Adams

The doctor’s ailing Christian Scientist wife; she nags her husband with whining platitudes and biblical admonitions.

Nick

The son of Dr. and Mrs. Adams, Nick blindly hero-worships his father.

Dick Boulton

A mixed-blood American Indian who is hired to cut logs for Dr. Adams.

Eddy Boulton

Dick’s son; he carries the long crosscut saw for cutting the logs.

Billy Tabeshaw

Dick’s friend; he comes along to help cut logs.

The end of somethingSummary

A teenager now, Nick Adams has been dating Marjorie, a girl who has been working during the summer at a resort on Hortons Bay. This evening, the two of them row to a beach on the bay. After a picnic supper, Nick tells Marjorie that he wants to break off their relationship; being with Marjorie, he says, is no longer fun. After she leaves, Nick feels bad about having to sever his friendship with Marjorie; however, he tells his friend Bill that the breakup wasn’t too

difficult. The setting is the north Michigan woods, familiar territory in Hemingway’s early fiction. Nick Adams is now a young man, dating a girl named Marjorie. The story concerns not only the “end of something,” but the end of three things: the end of the heydays of logging, the end of the mill town on Hortons Bay, and the end of a romance between Nick and Marjorie.

Hortons Bay is no longer a lively, fun place; its great saws, rollers, belts, and pulleys have been removed. What remains barely resembles the once-bustling, full-of-life mill town. There is nothing to remind a stranger what it used to be. Marjorie points out the ruin of the mill, romantically likening it to a castle. Nick doesn’t comment on the romantic parallel that Marjorie points out.

The setting that Hemingway describes is proof that when Hortons Bay ended its noisy, financially booming years, the finale was indeed an end—and a time to move on—because the way of life that the town’s inhabitants had taken for granted had vanished. This shocking revelation must have been momentous.

Nick’s decision to end his romantic relationship with Marjorie will also be the “end of something,” but, to Nick, it’s not the end of something momentous. It’s simply the end of a relationship that’s gone stale, that’s no longer fun.

The story is closely autobiographical. In the summer of 1919, 20 year-old Hemingway was dating 17 year-old Marjorie Bump, a waitress in a resort town. Marjorie often fixed picnic meals for them that they would eat beside evening campfires. When Marjorie’s summer job ended after Labor Day, Hemingway began dating someone else. The fictional “Bill” in the story is no doubt based on Bill Smith, a good friend of Hemingway’s who spent time with Hemingway that summer.

What’s surprising about this very brief sketch is the amount of suppressed emotion. In 1919, the fictional (and the real) Marjorie would have typically been dating Nick Adams with marriage in mind. When Nick breaks off the relationship with only the weak explanation that being with Marjorie is no longer “fun,” his remark is uncommonly cruel. In “The Three-Day Blow,” we’ll see that Nick prides himself on being articulate and learned. He is neither in “The End of Something.” Marjorie’s reaction is stoic; she doesn’t even accept his offer to help push off her boat. She leaves him beside the campfire and paddles back across the bay alone.

Nick acknowledges to Bill that the breakup went “all right.” There “wasn’t any scene.” Obviously, he and Bill had discussed what Nick had planned to do when he and Marjorie set out at the beginning of the story, rowing along the store, trolling for rainbow trout. The breakup was not spur-of-the-moment. Nick even initiated a quarrel to strengthen his revolve to break off the relationship with Marjorie.

Afterward, Nick feels bad about having to sever the friendship, but clearly, he is not looking for someone to take care of him, someone to be a domestic anchor. He has done what he had to: He has followed his instincts and made sure that he would be free to explore the world in search of fun and adventure.

Characters

Nick Adams

In his late teens, Nick is living in the Michigan north woods.

Marjorie

Nick’s summertime romantic interest; Marjorie is stoic and leaves after Nick breaks off their relationship.

Bill

Nick’s friend; he is more instrumental in Nick’s breaking up with Marjorie than Nick himself is.

The three-day below

Summary

One rainy autumn afternoon, Nick hikes up in the north Michigan woods to a cabin to meet his friend Bill. Talking and drinking, they finally discuss Nick’s breaking off his romantic relationship with Marjorie. Bill dogmatically insists that Nick did the right thing. A woman, he insists, will ruin a man; a married man is “done for.” Nick listens but realizes that he is still free to flirt with the idea of finding the right woman to marry eventually. He is far from being converted to Bill’s almost misogynistic view of women. This story is the sequel, or follow up, to “The End of Something.” Bill, who emerged only briefly in the earlier story, plays a major role here. The setting is a cabin in the north Michigan woods that belongs to Bill’s father and sits high above the lake with a good view of the woods. The time is fall, just before the first big autumn storm blows in.

As Nick hikes upward, approaching the cabin, Hemingway precisely places him in the narrative, and his sharp attention to details is characteristic of Hemingway’s early prose as well as his later, long narratives. Nick picks up a “Wagner apple.” He puts it in the pocket of his “Mackinaw coat.”

Almost immediately, Bill offers Nick a drink—and from this point onward, we watch and listen as the two young men get increasingly drunk. Bill is clearly in charge. Because of the cold, rainy autumn weather, he chides Nick for not wearing any socks and goes upstairs to get him some. He also cautions Nick about denting the fireplace screen with his feet (biographers have often noted Hemingway’s big feet. Knowing his fondness for inserting autobiographical material, this small, telling detail very likely happened).

Besides the reference to big feet, Bill calls Nick “Wemedge,” a nickname Hemingway chose for himself. The two guys settle into a not-quite-comfortable camaraderie, joshing about baseball. Bill is careful to keep their talk light, for the moment.

The tension between the two young men, however, is unrelieved by liquor or by the talk of baseball; the two begin discussing books. Biographers have noted that when Hemingway wrote this short story, he and his friend Bill Smith were reading the same books that Hemingway mentions here in the story. Again, Bill must take charge, controlling the flow of conversation. Frustrated by the small talk, Bill suggests getting drunk.

When Nick insists that he’s already a little drunk, Bill is direct: “You aren’t drunk.” Clearly, he wants to get them both drunk enough to talk about what’s really on both of their minds.

Finally, Bill shifts to the real subject: Nick’s breaking off with Marjorie. We see now that it was Bill who talked Nick into breaking up with her. Bill begins railing against the whole notion of marriage. Women, he contends, ruin a man; a married man is “done for.” Sitting quietly, Nick realizes how much he lost when he broke off with Marjorie. His guilt is keen. Bill feels no guilt for his part in the breaking-up. “So long as it’s over that’s all that matters,” he pronounces. Further, Bill cautions Nick to watch himself and not succumb to temptation again.

Nick, however, realizes that all is not over. The notion of there being danger in falling for Marjorie, or any other woman, is still possible. He hasn’t cut himself off from the possibility of romance. The danger intrigues him; he’s thrilled with the concept that danger isn’t a bad thing.

Marjorie threatened Bill’s friendship with Nick, which Bill admits: Had Nick not broken off with Marjorie, he’d already be living in Charlevoix to be near her. Hunting, fishing, and drinking, according to Bill, are more important than getting married. Nick, however, felt anchored somehow with Marjorie, as if life had a purpose and a pattern. At the end of the story, he’s doubly exhilarated: He’s happy to be hunting with Bill, and he’s excited that a relationship with a woman, even if it might seem to trap him, is always waiting for him. The emotional high he feels because of this new insight is bracing.

Characters

Nick Adams (“Wemedge”)

A young man about eighteen years old who has just broken off a relationship with Marjorie, a girl whom he has been dating.

Bill

Nick’s friend; he is jealous of the time that Nick spends with Marjorie and has urged Nick to stop dating her.

The killers

Summary“The Killers” was first published at the height of the Prohibition Era in 1927, a time when criminal activity was rampant throughout the United States, most notably in and around Chicago. Like many of Hemingway’s short stories of the 1920s, it features the character of Nick Adams playing a passive, but nonetheless central, role as a reactor to the plot’s events. It begins when two men (Al and Max) enter a diner in a small town near Chicago and order dinner. When the counterman George says that they must wait until six o’clock for dinner, they order ham and eggs and then scan the scene. They see that young Nick is the only other customer there, order him to go around the counter with George, and then call the cook, Sam, from the kitchen.

It becomes plain that Al and Max are professional killers or hit-men. One of them takes Nick and Sam back to the kitchen where he first ties them up and then gags them. He then takes a shotgun from under his long coat and sticks it through the service slot between the kitchen and the counter. The other guards George and openly reveals that they are here to kill Ole Anderson, a regular customer at the diner and former prize-fighter who has apparently crossed the mob. Although Ole usually eats his supper there at 6 o’clock, on this night the “Swede” does not appear at his regular time. After waiting an hour, Al and Max simply leave.

George unties Nick and Sam, and he tells Nick that he must warn Ole that mobsters have come to kill him. Nick goes to the boarding house where Ole lives and finds him lying in bed. He tells the ex-boxer what has happened and offers to go to the police. But Ole says that this would not do any good and appears to be resigned to his fate. Nick then goes back to the diner and to George’s speculation that the Swede must have angered some Chicago crime boss. Nick, for his part, is so disturbed by the appearance of the killers and by Ole’s odd response to the news that he plans to leave town altogether. George agrees with this decision, and advises him not to think about Ole’s impending murder.

AnalysisAlthough the targeted victim seems to accept that his pursuers have good cause to kill him, the reader is never apprised of the reason that the two gangsters have been dispatched to murder Ole. What makes their appearance so frightening is the casual, matter-of-fact way in which they go about their business: they have come to this small town to carry out a murder without any trace of passion or concern. They do not fear detection, and they leave the diner’s bystanders unharmed even though they are aware of the killers’ intentions. When Nick says that he will leave town and thereby escape the evil that has spilled over from Chicago, the reader senses that there is no place that is truly safe: killing in these times is nothing extraordinary but just a minor departure from the daily routine.

Themes

MasculinityHemingway, known for his representations of manly men who live by a code of honor, parodies his own image of masculinity by making the hit men, Al and Max, clownish figures. The men look the part of stereotypical gangsters, wearing derby hats and tight overcoats and keeping their gloves on when they eat. They also talk tough, announcing their plans to kill Ole, using slang, answering questions with questions, and mocking the masculinity of George, Sam, and Nick. For example, Max comments about George: ‘‘Bright boy can do anything. . . . He can cook and everything. You’d make some girl a nice wife, bright boy.’’ Al describes Sam and Nick, gagged and bound in the kitchen, as ‘‘a couple of girl friends in the convent.’’ Al and Max are counterpoints to Nick Adams, an innocent, who believes he can do something to change the situation by telling Ole about the men. This story marks Nick’s initiation into the world of men and its attendant violence, chaos, and strategies for survival.

CrimeSocieties have laws to ensure a safe environment for their citizens, to maintain order, and to instill a sense of justice in

the populace. The blatant flouting of laws, as in Hemingway’s story, suggests not only that society has deteriorated but also that there is nothing to be done about it. Al and Max do not fear being caught and, indeed, claim to have no stake in killing Andreson, saying they are doing it ‘‘to oblige a friend.’’ Sam’s response to the events, to have nothing to do with any of it, underscores the sense of resignation informing the story. George’s response is that addressing crime is someone else’s responsibility and tells Nick to visit Ole. Nick’s response is one of disillusionment and shock and a desire to run away from the town rather than accept its random dangers. These reactions represent a range of responses that Chicagoans had towards criminal activities in the 1920s. The sense of resignation, in large part, stems not only from Hemingway’s own dark view of human nature but from the knowledge that many of the Chicago crime bosses had bought off the police, ensuring that law and order became a privilege for the few rather than a right of the many.

ChaosHemingway’s plot is laden with irony and with characters misreading one another, suggesting that the world is not as it seems. For example, although Max and Al come to town to kill Ole Andreson and know that he eats at Henry’s at six o’clock, they ask George the name of the town, and then when George tells them, Max says he never heard of it. Henry’s, though referred to as a ‘‘lunchroom,’’ is actually a made-over saloon. A similar confusion of identity occurs when Nick addresses Mrs. Bell as Mrs. Hirsch because he assumes that she is the owner of the rooming house. The men come to a town called ‘‘Summit’’ to kill on a ‘‘nice fall day,’’ compounding the irony. These glaring differences between the world as it is and the world as it seems affect Nick the most, whose own world up until that point more or less conformed to his expectations as an orderly place.

Style

DialogueDialogue, the conversation between two or more characters, is a primary tool of characterization. Writers create characters through shaping their speech in ways that reflect their desires and motivations. In addition to physically describing Max and Al as stereotypical gangsters, Hemingway has them talk like gangsters as well. Their speech is peppered with insults, wisecracks, and slang, and they never answer a question directly. They speak like characters out of a Dashiell Hammett novel, in terse bursts. Hammett was popular for his detective stories and his character, Sam Spade, a wisecracking antihero. Dialogue also characterizes the other players in the story as well. For example, when Sam speaks, he makes it clear that he does not want to be involved in any way, and when Nick speaks, he expresses his youth and innocence through his incredulity.

PlotPlot refers to the arrangement of events in a story. Hemingway tells the story largely through dialogue, as if it were a play. He uses description sparsely, to create atmosphere or to signal a change in scenes. When he describes Max, for example, he writes: ‘‘His face was small and white and he had tight lips.’’ When the scene shifts, Hemingway describes the action, using it as a transition: ‘‘The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc light and cross the street.’’

The triviality of the subjects the characters talk about undercuts the insidious nature of the act the killers are about to commit. Hemingway sums up his spare style in his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Many twentieth-century writers adopted Hemingway’s spare elliptical style as their own, including Raymond Carver and Pam Houston.

NarratorThe narrator refers to the speaker through whom the author tells the story. Sometimes it is a character in the story and sometimes it is not. The kind of narrator the author uses is intimately related to the story’s point of view. Hemingway uses an ‘‘effaced’’ narrator in ‘‘The Killers.’’ This means that the narrator is practically invisible. An effaced narrator does not have access to characters’ thinking, which is revealed solely through their dialogue. However, in his essay ‘‘Point of View in the Nick Adams Stories,’’ Carl Ficken points out:

Hemingway is . . . able to place Nick sufficiently forward in the account so that the meaning of the story has to do with Nick’s discovery of what life is like through those killers and Ole Andreson’s reaction to them.

Hemingway popularized this method of narration for short story writers and novelists in the twentieth century.

Characters

Nick AdamsNick Adams is sitting at the lunch counter at Henry’s talking to George when Al and Max walk in. Nick is a teenager, whom Al and Max refer to as ‘‘bright boy.’’ Hemingway readers know Nick from Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time, which introduces Nick as a vulnerable teenager thrust into a world of violence and meanness. Nick is a typical Hemingway hero who is learning ‘‘the code.’’ Hemingway’s ‘‘code hero’’ is someone who is honorable, courageous, and adventurous and who exhibits grace under pressure. He distinguishes himself from others by his ability to endure and to face death with dignity. Such traits define the code hero’s manhood. In short, Nick is learning the code of how to be a man, according to Hemingway’s idea of what constitutes manhood. In their essay on Hemingway’s story, Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren argue, ‘‘it is the tough man . . . the disciplined man, who actually is aware of pathos or tragedy.’’ Such a man, the two argue, ‘‘has learned that the only way to hold on to ‘honor,’ to individuality, to, even, the human order . . . is to live by his code.’’ Nick is still developing the code. His experience with the killers marks his initiation into a world of brutality and random events. Critics often argue over the real protagonist of ‘‘The Killers.’’ In his book Hemingway’s Nick Adams, Joseph Flora claims, ‘‘Hemingway indicates that Nick is to be the central character of the story by making him the only character in the opening scene to be given a whole name.’’ Flora also observes that this story is the last of Hemingway’s stories in which Nick appears as an adolescent, and it is the only one not set in Michigan.

By the end of the story, Nick is a changed person. His discovery of the evil in human beings shocks him, and he announces that he is going to leave town after he returns from seeing Ole. Flora writes, ‘‘Even though the world is a darker place than Nick had before guessed, he is not in Andreson’s frame of mind—merely waiting for the end.’’

AlAl is one of the two hit men who come to Henry’s to kill Ole Andreson. His face is ‘‘small and white and he had tight lips,’’ and like Max, he wears a derby hat and a black overcoat. The narrator describes the two as ‘‘a vaudeville team.’’ And, indeed, they often act like comics performing a routine rather than behaving as hit men. Al forces Sam and Nick to the kitchen where he binds and gags them, holding a shotgun on George. He appears as the leader of the two, telling Max at one point to ‘‘Shut up’’ when Max tells George they are going to kill Ole ‘‘Just to oblige a friend.’’ The narrator describes both Al and Max as ‘‘little.’’

Ole AndresonOle Andreson is a Swede and a former heavyweight boxer who lives in Hirsch’s rooming house. He usually eats at Henry’s lunchroom around six in the evening but does not show up the day Al and Max come to kill him. When Nick visits him to warn him about the men, Ole is lying on his bed facing the wall. Ole thanks Nick for telling him but is resigned to his fate. He tells Nick that he has not been able to get out of bed and go outside and that he is ‘‘through with all that running around.’’ Mrs. Bell, the house manager, calls him ‘‘a very nice man.’’ Nick and George speculate that Ole ‘‘got mixed up with something in Chicago’’ and that Al and Max had come to settle a score. Martin sees an irony in Ole’s largeness, when compared to Al and Max’s small stature. Martin writes that Ole, unlike Nick, knows that telling the police about the men will do no good. Martin argues, ‘‘Ole knows better; he knows that his mass is relative to other things such as guns and the mob.’’

Mrs. BellMrs. Bell runs Hirsch’s rooming-house and takes Nick to Ole Andreson’s room. Nick mistakes her for Mrs. Hirsch when he leaves, and she corrects him, saying that she just ‘‘looks after’’ the place for her. She tells Nick that Ole is ‘‘a very nice man.’’

GeorgeGeorge is the counter man at Henry’s lunchroom, who waits on customers. It is unclear whether or not he is also the owner. Max keeps an eye on him as Al ties up Nick and Sam in the kitchen. George is matter-of-fact in his responses to the men and does not appear cowed by their machismo. When Max tells him they are there to kill Ole, George asks,

‘‘What are you going to kill Ole Andreson for? What did he ever do to you?’’ As Al and Max leave the restaurant, readers see them ‘‘pass under the arc-light and cross the street’’ through George’s eyes. George convinces Nick to warn Ole, and when Nick returns and reports that his visit was useless, George speculates that Ole is probably a target of Chicago mobsters. Nick wonders what Ole did to deserve being killed, and George answers, ‘‘Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.’’ When Nick says, ‘‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful,’’ George responds, saying, ‘‘you better not think of it.’’

MaxMax is Al’s partner and is dressed identically to him. He waits at the counter for two hours while Al guards Sam and Nick in the kitchen, taunting George, calling him ‘‘bright boy,’’ and saying he ‘‘would make some girl a nice wife.’’ Many critics claim Al and Max perform a kind of vaudeville routine and are little more than caricatures of gangsters. A typical exchange between the two occurs after Max tells George they are killing Ole for a friend in Chicago:

‘You talk too damn much,’ Al said.

‘The nigger and my bright boy are amused by themselves. I got them tied up like a couple of girl friends in a convent.’

‘I suppose you were in a convent?’

‘You never know.’

‘You were in a kosher convent. That’s where you were.’

SamSam is the black cook at Henry’s and, along with Nick, is tied up and gagged by Al, one of the hit men. Al and Max refer to him as ‘‘the nigger.’’ Sam is obedient, never responding to Max or Al except in the affirmative. He also wants nothing to do with warning Ole. When Nick says he is going to warn the boxer, Sam replies, ‘‘Little boys always know what they want to do,’’ underscoring the fact that he, Sam, sees himself as a man who has learned through experience not to become involved in other people’s business, especially if it is dangerous.

Historical context

1920sWhen Hemingway wrote ‘‘The Killers’’ in 1926, the United States was at the height of the Prohibition era, and criminal activity, particularly in Chicago, was rampant, with gangsters such as Al Capone and Dutch Schultz controlling the bootlegging industry and a good part of the police force as well. In 1919, Capone had come to Chicago from New York City, where he had worked for crime boss Frankie Yale. In Chicago, he worked for Yale’s old mentor, John Torrio. Capone took control of Torrio’s saloons, gambling houses, racetracks, and brothels when Torrio was shot by rival gang members and left Chicago. Historians estimate the income from Capone’s interests from illegal activities at $100,000,000 a year between 1925 and 1930. This is the image readers had in mind in 1927 when they read that Ole Andreson ‘‘got mixed up in something in Chicago.’’

However, Hemingway wrote the story in Madrid, Spain. Like many American writers and artists, Hemingway became disillusioned with the values of post-World War I America and relocated to Europe. Writers such as John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Paris, as did Hemingway for a time, and led bohemian lives, drinking heavily, having affairs, and experimenting with new subject material and style. Gertrude Stein, a controversial writer and a wealthy art collector, held salons at her house at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where many artists and writers met to drink, discuss their work, and receive advice from Stein. It was Stein who coined the term ‘‘a lost generation’’ to refer to Hemingway and his contemporaries, describing their spiritual isolation, cynicism, and amorality. It was at one of Stein’s salons in the early 1920s that she met Hemingway, who presented her with a letter of introduction from American writer Sherwood Anderson. Stein urged Hemingway to quit journalism and become a full-time writer. Other writers associated with the ‘‘lost generation’’ include expatriates such as Malcolm Cowley, Ezra Pound, and Archibald MacLeish.

As a result of World War I, in which Hemingway served as an ambulance driver, and the catastrophic loss of human life (tens of millions killed and wounded), many people lost faith in God, ideas of nationhood, even reality itself. Theories by intellectuals and scientists such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Sir James George Frazer, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein presented the world as a place of uncertainty and chaos in which appearances are not what they seem. In his essay on ‘‘The Killers’’ for The Explicator, Quentin E. Martin argues that these new theories are useful in understanding Hemingway’s story. Citing character confusion in the story, Martin claims, ‘‘‘The Killers’ can be seen as a concise and dramatic representation of certain aspects of Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy (or uncertainty).’’ Other writers consciously applied these theories to their work as well, helping to shape literary modernism. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland (1922), for example, deploys allusion, symbol, and fragments to describe a world that had literally fallen to pieces. In her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative to prioritize subjective experience over the depiction of an objective world, drawing from ideas popularized by philosopher Bergson.

Expatriates in Europe were not the only ones producing lasting literature during the time between the world wars. In America, writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke wrote about the African-American experience, giving white America a glimpse into the lives and cultures of a historically oppressed people. Harlem, in uptown New York City, became a magnet for African-American poets, artists, writers, musicians, and playwrights. Representative literary works of the Harlem Renaissance include Johnson’s 1927 poetry collection God’s Trombone: Seven Negro Folk Sermons, one of the more popular works of the era which used the speech patterns of an old black preacher to capture the heart of the black idiom; Claude McKay’s novel of working-class blacks, Home to Harlem (1927); and Jean Toomer’s story of poor southern blacks, Cane (1923).

A way you’ll never be

Summary

Nick Adams has been wounded in Italy during World War I and is suffering from shell-shock, or post-traumatic stress syndrome. He is plagued by nightmares, in which he sees the eyes of the Austrian soldier who shot him. Nick’s friend, the Italian Captain Paravicini, believes that Nick’s head wound should have been treated differently; he worries about Nick’s bouts of “craziness.”

One hot summer day, Nick bicycles from the village of Fornaci to Captain Paravicini’s encampment. On the way, he witnesses the miles of bloated corpses and the hundreds of blowing pieces of military papers.

When Nick reaches camp, an Italian second lieutenant questions Nick’s identification papers before Paravicini intervenes and coaxes Nick to lie down and rest before he returns to Fornaci; he fears for Nick’s sanity and safety despite the young American’s valiant attempt to deal with his war-torn memories. Here, Hemingway has written what is essentially an account—sometimes realistic, sometimes impressionistic, and sometimes plainly confusing—of Nick Adams’ coping with post-traumatic trauma and possibly a concussion suffered in battle during World War I.

As he is riding his bicycle along the Austro-Italian front in northern Italy, Nick sees scattered evidence of the ravages of war, described in a surrealistic manner: Pornographic cards are scattered among the dead bodies of Italian soldiers that have never been buried. The heat-swollen, rotting bodies have been stripped of anything of value, as have the corpses of the Austrian soldiers.

This setting—the Austro-Italian border—is an area that Hemingway knew well. As a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver, he was often bored because there were no battles in which he could prove his heroism. As a result, he volunteered to help staff one of several supply centers, from which he’d take chocolate, cigarettes, and postcards to men on the front lines.

When Nick arrives at the encampment, he tells the battalion commander that he “should have a musette of chocolate . . . [but] there weren’t any cigarettes and postcards and no chocolate.” Nick’s role here is clearly autobiographical. What is not autobiographical, however, is Nick’s head injury and his mental anguish. Hemingway suffered severe leg and thigh wounds on just such an errand as Nick is doing.

Nick also suffers from the severe heat. Early in the story, he notes how the heat has humped and swollen the bodies of the dead soldiers. The sun causes “heat-waves in the air above the leaves where [it] hit . . . guns hidden in mulberry hedges.” When Nick readies himself to return to the supply center camp, Captain Paravicini cautions him that “it is still hot to ride.”

One of the keys to understanding this confusing, short sketch is Hemingway’s focus on Nick’s identity. Nick is officially questioned when he reaches the battalion of Italian soldiers camped along the Piave River. The soldier who reads Nick’s identification card is clearly not convinced that Nick is a bona fide soldier despite the fact that Nick says that he knows the Italian soldier’s captain. Nick does indeed know Captain Paravicini—for the same reason that Hemingway took pleasure in making friends with high-ranking Italian officers: American Red Cross volunteers were free to fraternize with Italian officers.

Although glad to talk to the captain about the success of the last attack, Nick is self-conscious and restless. He’s aware that the captain knows that Nick’s head wound and battle trauma have changed him, and thus he uses humor to keep their talk from centering too keenly on himself.

The captain, however, sees through the ruse and joshes Nick about his preposterous tale that he is a decoy, dressed—albeit a bit flawed—like an American so that the Austrians will conclude that at any moment, millions of American soldiers—brave and clean—will suddenly burst onto the battlefield and decimate the Austrians.

The muddled stream-of-consciousness technique that Hemingway uses to describe Nick’s dream is a rare instance of his using this particular narrative technique. His writing style is usually characterized by short, crisp declarative sentences. The technique here is remarkably different.

According to Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway, the title of this short story comes from a situation in Cuba; the heat was intense, and Hemingway remarked that it reminded him of the way it was on the lower Piave in the summer

of 1918, while he was watching “a hell of a nice girl going crazy from day to day.” Hemingway borrowed pieces of this girl’s madness for Nick’s confused behavior; for example, as Nick is leaving the captain, he feels another attack of confusion coming on: “He felt it coming on again. . . . He was trying to hold it in. . . . He knew he could not stop it now.”

Many of Hemingway’s novels and writings would focus on physical wounds and on the death and blood in this story. However, Hemingway also focuses on wounds unseen—the psychological results of war and the effect of a head wound on Nick Adams, a subject that he would return to in “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Characters

Nick Adams (“Nicolo”)

An American soldier who fades in and out of what he calls “craziness” after he is wounded in Italy during World War I.

Italian Second Lieutenant

He is reluctant to allow Nick to talk to the captain of the Italian military unit.

Captain Paravicini

He realizes the seriousness of Nick’s wound and urges him not to bicycle back in the fierce afternoon heat.

In another country

Summary

‘‘In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.’’ So begins Ernest Hemingway’s short story, ‘‘In Another Country.’’ The war he refers to is World War I; the setting is Milan, away from the scene of the fighting. The narrator describes the city he passes on his way to the hospital to receive physical rehabilitation for the leg wounds he received while at the front. Though the narrator remains unnamed, scholars generally agree the young man is Hemingway’s alter ego, Nick Adams.

At the hospital, the narrator, a young man, sits at a machine designed to aid his damaged knee. Next to him is an Italian major, a champion fencer before the war, whose hand has been wounded. The doctor shows the major a photograph of a hand that has been restored by the machine the major is using. The photo, however, does not increase the major’s confidence in the machine.

Three Milanese soldiers, the same age as the narrator, are then introduced. The four boys hang out together at a place called Cafe Cova following their therapy. As they walk through the city’s Communist quarter, they are criticized for being officers with medals. A fifth boy, who lost his nose an hour after his first battle, sometimes joins them. He wears a black handkerchief strategically placed across his face and has no medals.

One of the boys who has three medals has

lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town, walking in the dark, with the light singing coming out of wineshops, and sometimes having to walk into the street where the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand. (Excerpt from ‘‘In Another Country’’)

Having all faced death and survived, the boys are linked in a way that the outsiders cannot understand. This special bond exists between them even though the narrator as an American, is otherwise more of an outsider to the soldiers

than the unwounded Italians on the street who despise them. They feel particularly connected at the Cova, where they drink and carouse with local girls.

The Italian soldiers change their manner toward the narrator when they realize he received some of his medals for being an American, and not for bravery, as they had. Though the narrator likes to imagine he would have been as brave as they had, he knows this is not true because he is indeed afraid to die. Despite their initial common bond, the Italian soldiers drift from the narrator due to this difference. Only the undecorated boy, without the nose, remains his close friend. This boy will not return to the war, so will never get the chance to find out if he also is afraid of death.

The major, the great fencer, is cynical about bravery, and so the narrator then feels a bond with him. As they sit at their respective physical therapy machines, the major helps the narrator improve his Italian.

One day when the narrator feels as hopeless about his machine as the major does about his, the major, usually poised and soldier-like, suddenly calls the narrator ‘‘a stupid impossible disgrace,’’ who he had been ‘‘a fool to have bothered with.’’ Standing upright to calm himself, the major asks the narrator if he is married. He answers, ‘‘No, but I hope to be.’’ The major bitterly tells him, ‘‘A man must not marry,’’ explaining that a man ‘‘should not place himself in a position to lose [everything] . . . He should find things he cannot lose.’’ When the narrator counters this statement, the major angrily exclaims, ‘‘He’ll lose it. Don’t argue with me!,’’ then demands his machine be turned off.

The major goes into another room for a massage, then asks for a phone, shutting the door for privacy. A short time later the major returns, composed. He apologizes to the narrator, then announces his wife has just died. The narrator feels sick for him, but the major remains controlled, saying, ‘‘It is difficult. I cannot resign myself.’’ He then begins to cry. Quickly, however, the major stands erect, like a soldier, and fighting back his tears, exits.

The doctor says that the major’s wife, a young, healthy woman, had died unexpectedly of pneumonia. The major returns three days later, wearing a black band on his sleeve to signify mourning, a symbol which further separates him from the narrator. Large framed photographs of healed hands have been hung to offer the major hope. However, the major ignores them; instead, he just stares out the window, knowing the machines cannot cure him of this different kind of injury.

Themes

‘‘In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.’’ So begins Ernest Hemingway’s short story, ‘‘In Another Country.’’ The war he refers to is World War I; the setting is Milan, away from the scene of the fighting. The narrator is a young American man who is in the hospital to receive physical rehabilitation for the leg wounds he received while at the front. Sitting next to him is an Italian major, a champion fencer before the war, whose hand has been wounded and with whom the narrator speaks about life. At the story’s end, having learned of his wife’s death of pneumonia, the major must face the future knowing the machines cannot cure him of this different kind of injury.

Dignity and the Human ConditionIn the story, the young narrator has faced death and survived. This is also true of the Italian officers who, like the narrator, come to the hospital each day to receive therapy for the wounds they have received while at the front. The narrator learns about dignity and the human condition primarily through his interaction with an Italian major. While the young narrator is fearful of dying on the battlefield, the major seems to have made peace with this possibility. He knows he must do his duty in the dignified manner consistent with being a professional soldier and, more specifically, an officer. He is uninterested in the bravado expressed by the young decorated officers. Bravery requires acting on impulse, making snap decisions based on one’s emotions. The major instead depends on control and precision. One day, however, the major breaks his composure; while sitting at the machine intended to heal his injured hand, he becomes angry with the narrator’s hope to marry in the future, irately adding that the young American ‘‘should not place himself in a position to lose [everything]. . . . He should find things he cannot lose.’’ The major then does the previously unthinkable; he breaks into tears. The narrator soon learns from a doctor that the major’s young and, presumably, healthy wife has suddenly died from pneumonia. When the major returns to the hospital, three days later—his first break in his regime of daily visits—he is a more openly vulnerable man. He sits dutifully at his machine, stands in an erect, soldierly manner, but now his dignified stance is more hard won. He has learned that life cannot be controlled, that it is filled with arbitrary tragedies, even off the battlefield, for which one may be unprepared. The

major may have been prepared for his own death, like any good soldier, but his wife’s sudden passing leads him to confront life’s meaninglessness, an aspect of the human condition he, who has survived, must now struggle to face with dignity.

Courage and CowardiceNot unconnected is the theme of courage and cowardice. While many heroes, particularly in American fiction, especially American films, are portrayed as stoic and unafraid, ‘‘In Another Country’’ depicts a more complex and humanistic type of courage. Following the unexpected loss of his wife, the major’s return to the hospital signifies his willingness to survive, even with his new awareness of chaos in the world and his inability to prevent being touched by it. His willingness to face life with this new and painful understanding can be seen as a definition of genuine courage, the kind of courage befitting a real hero. This truer, more human heroism even requires the initial shedding of tears, an act that is seen in some circumstances as a sign of cowardice.

This definition of heroism contrasts with the more traditional kind of heroics, the kind that wins medals, displayed by the brash young Italian officers. These men are seemingly proud of their naive bravado; however, because they have not dealt with the emotional consequences of the violence they have faced, they have become ‘‘a little detached’’ and withdrawn.

Alienation and LonelinessThis theme is expressed initially in the story’s title, ‘‘In Another Country,’’ which refers to being or feeling alienated from the comfort of the familiar, a circumstance which often leads to loneliness. In this story, the narrator is literally in another country, Italy, an ocean apart from his home, the United States; however, he is also apart in other ways. When he walks in the streets of Milan alongside the young Italian officers he is first accepted by, he knows the civilians who verbally abuse them do not understand what they, the officers, have faced. Though the officers and these native Milanese share the same streets, they are in ‘‘another country’’ from each other, separated by their differing life experiences. Once inside the warmth of the cafe, the narrator feels the loneliness this alienation causes disappear. Later, these same officers drift from him because they discover that some of his medals are for being an American, while theirs are for feats of bravery, acts the narrator knows his own fear of death would probably not permit him to perform. This leads to his being separate, in ‘‘another country,’’ from his former friends. Out of loneliness, the narrator maintains a friendship with the only member of the group who has not received a medal and, since he is too injured to return to battle, never will. The narrator likes to pretend this friend would be like him in battle, cautious and a little afraid. The narrator insists on imagining he and this young man are connected in this way to alleviate the loneliness he feels now that he has become alienated from the others. At the end of the story, the narrator becomes alienated from his new friend, the major, after the major experiences a loss that the narrator has not, the death of a wife to pneumonia. The major’s resulting understanding of life’s cruel lack of meaning puts him in ‘‘another country’’ from the younger, still somewhat idealistic narrator. The mind set of the major is both alien to him and lonely, yet it is inevitable to all human beings. After all, the story suggests, attempts to avoid loss are only temporary.

Style

Point of ViewAll of the events that occur in ‘‘In Another Country’’ are told from the point of view of the story’s unnamed narrator, an American officer receiving physical therapy in a Milan hospital on his leg, which has been wounded at the front during World War I. The narrator is a young man, presumably about 19, the same age as the author when he also spent time in a Milan hospital, recovering from leg injuries received while working as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. The events are filtered through the narrator’s perspective, therefore the first person ‘‘T’’ is used throughout. How these events affect the narrator, particularly those which are written about in the greatest detail, like the major’s disillusionment following the death of his wife, is not directly revealed. However, it is apparent that what he has witnessed has made a strong impact on him because he has chosen to recount the story so vividly. Readers may assume it is an older narrator who is telling the story, as it is written in the past tense.

ObjectivityOne of the most distinctive aspects of this story, and most of Hemingway’s literature, particularly his many stories about this same narrator—unnamed here, but known as Nick Adams elsewhere—is its objective tone. Though the story is told from the narrator’s perspective, how they affect him is never made explicit. Instead, each of the events is

described almost in the way a journalist reports a newspaper story, with as little subjectivity, or personal interjection, as possible. One way this is achieved is by using very few adjectives. This is done to avoid manipulating the reader’s imagination. The specific details of each event are recorded in an objective way, leaving the readers to put the pieces together; this way readers can discover their own interpretation of what the events mean. This distinctive style, perfected by Hemingway, has been widely imitated and greatly praised, though it has its share of detractors as well.

ExistentialismExistentialism is a philosophy concerned with the meaning of existence. One of the aspects of this philosophy is the isolation of the individual, a condition all human beings must face at some time. The Italian major comprehends this after the unexpected death of his wife to pneumonia. When he returns to the hospital to continue the machine treatments on his hand soon after her passing, the narrator observes the major struggle to maintain his previous soldierly posture as he stares out the window. It has been implied by scholars that, having lost his innocent belief that loss can be minimized through discipline and precision, what the major sees out that window is life’s vast emptiness. He is coming to terms with the fact that all connections are eventually lost, especially through death, and that life carries with it a sense of its own meaninglessness. This knowledge is one of the cornerstones of the existentialist philosophy, and it can be found in much of Hemingway’s literature.

SymbolismThere are several examples of symbolism throughout the story. One such symbol is the window the major looks out of following the death of his wife. Previously, he looked at a wall while receiving his machine therapy. But, after his wife’s death, he stares out the window instead. The major, at this point, is no longer emotionally walled in; he is open, vulnerable. The window symbolizes this opening inside him. The machines also have symbolic significance. Though utilized by the patients, the men know that they are probably ineffective; yet, they still return to them day after day, following the regime their use requires. Humans each follow their own daily regimes, hoping that they, too, are useful, purposeful. However, the story suggests, this is unlikely. The machines are an external symbol of life’s probable futility, a condition which becomes apparent to the major after his tragic loss.

IronyIrony occurs when the outcome of an event contrasts the intention of what has come before it. A particularly strong example of this can be seen with the Italian major. He has lived his life carefully, following a strict military code which has helped him maintain emotional control even while having to confront death, his own and that of others, nearly every day while at war. He depends on this, believes it will save him from being unprepared for great loss. Ironically, this man who believes he is in control of his life, soon learns, via the death of his wife, that his composure, his military precision worn like armor, cannot protect him from personal tragedy. This irony changes his life, and brings out many of the story’s major themes.

Characters

American SoldierSee Narrator

Italian MajorThe Italian major, a former fencing champion, is in the Milan hospital because his hand has been mangled in battle. A controlled military man, he is cynical about the machines that are used to rehabilitate his wounded extremity, and about the tales of bravery and heroism he hears from the young Italian officers. He befriends the narrator, who is also injured, and tutors him in Italian. The Italian major has recently married a young woman, something he would not do until he was injured—and therefore would not be sent into battle again. However, when his wife dies unexpectedly from pneumonia, the major loses his soldier-like composure, and weeps, not just for her death, but also, according to Earl Rovitt in his essay, ‘‘Of Human Dignity: ‘In Another Country,’’’ for his understanding that he must now confront the meaninglessness of life, one that has shown him that his strict military code could not protect him from life’s vulnerabilities.

MajorSee Italian Major

Major’s WifeThough the major’s wife never appears in the story (she is mentioned only in the second-to-last paragraph of the story), she plays a major role. A young, healthy woman, her sudden death from pneumonia leads the Italian major, her husband, to learn he cannot control life, a lesson which is also observed by the story’s young narrator.

NarratorThe narrator is a young American in Italy during World War I. Though unnamed, the narrator’s identity is assumed to be Nick Adams, an alter-ego for many of Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical short stories. The narrator is in an Italian hospital receiving therapy for his injured leg. He befriends several other officers with whom he shares the experience of facing death and surviving, and of getting decorated for their efforts. When the other soldiers learn that the narrator’s other medals are merely for his being an American, and not for acts of heroism or bravery, he becomes an outsider to their circle. Realizing that his fear of death would make him an unlikely member of their group in the future, the narrator befriends an Italian major whose hand is wounded, a man whose cynicism toward bravery does not alienate the narrator from him. The narrator senses their connection is lost, however, when the major unexpectedly loses his young wife to pneumonia. According to Laurence W. Mazzeo in his ‘‘Critical Survey of Short Fiction,’’ Nick comes to realize that ‘‘nothing of value can last in this world.’’

Signor MaggioreSee Italian Major

Historical context

Ernest Hemingway’s story ‘‘In Another Country’’ takes place in a war hospital in Milan during World War I. The war began in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a member of the Hapsburg family, the rulers of what was then known as the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated while on an official state visit to the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia. His killer was a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, a member of a secret underground organization who protested the Austro-Hungarian empire’s claim over their country. When the Austro-Hungarians demanded entrance to Bosnia so they could find and then bring to trial Ferdinand’s assassin, the Bosnian government refused, insisting they would conduct their own investigation. The Austro-Hungarians then declared war on Bosnia. Quickly, Germany allied with the Austro-Hungarian empire, while Russia, France and Great Britain allied with Bosnia, with Italy soon to follow.

The United States joined World War I at the end of 1917. A German submarine had torpedoed a British passenger ship, the Lusitania, claiming it secretly carried American munitions aboard. The United States denied this, but joined the fray when the British and French requested their assistance. Most American soldiers were initially stationed on the Western Front, in France. Believing the American army to be inexperienced and, according to Hemingway, ‘‘overfed and under trained,’’ the Germans immediately attacked. To much of the world’s surprise, the Americans, despite being outnumbered and lacking experience, fought off the German army, solidifying their reputation as a world military power. The United States and its allies won the war in 1918. About 118,000 American soldiers were killed in action, more than double the 55,000 lost in World War II, a generation later.

Hemingway wrote ‘‘In Another Country’’ while residing in Paris in 1926. There he lived among a circle of writers and poets, many of whom would go on to be among the most prominent literary figures of the century. Expatriates like himself, these authors included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Hart Crane, along with Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, whose salon was a common meeting ground for the group. Coined ‘‘The Lost Generation’’ by Stein, these writers came to Paris in search of inspiration and a new understanding of the boundaries and purpose of art. Malcolm Cowley, one of their clique, wrote about this period in his book Exile’s Return. A collection of Hemingway’s anecdotes of this experience was published posthumously under the title A Moveable Feast in 1964.

Critical overview

Hemingway’s spare, objective style has been widely imitated and adapted by many other writers. His choice of material, and his stoic, masculine way of dealing with issues of life, death, and love in a troubled, often violent world has made him a controversial figure. Though many admire his sparse prose, suggesting it reveals the inner workings of his macho male heroes, a share of scholars, feminists in particular, have criticized his work, arguing that rather than

illuminating and critiquing the he-men behavior of his characters, he is, instead, embracing, even sentimentalizing it. They also complain that his female characters have less dimension than his male characters, and that they generally fall into two stereotypical categories, the saintly and the whorish, showing an underlying dislike of women in general. Hemingway supporters counter that he adores the women he writes about, almost to the point of idealization.

His short story, ‘‘In Another Country’’ is one of his most popular; it is also one of his most anthologized. Like much of Hemingway’s work, it has been written about at great length. Forrest Robinson in his article ‘‘Hemingway’s Invisible Hero,’’ published on Essays in Literature argues against the notion that the story’s narrator is not ‘‘merely passive in his painful acceptance of his lack of bravery, and is respectful in his observance of the [Italian] major’s resignation to despair.’’ He goes on to say that the narrator is not really the story’s protagonist, which many assume, but that the Italian major is.

‘‘In Another Country’’ is widely considered to be one of Hemingway’s serial, semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories. In fact, when all the stories featuring Nick were published together as The Nick Adams Stories in 1972, ‘‘In Another Country’’ was included in the book. However, James Steinke, in his article ‘‘Hemingway’s ‘In Another Country’ and ‘Now I Lay Me,’’’ published in The Hemingway Review in 1985, argues that the story has been ‘‘mistakenly seen as one more contribution to composite of ‘Nick Adams.’’’ He also writes that the Nick Adams stories are not ‘‘fictionalized personal history,’’ as others claim. He uses a quote by the author himself to support his point: ‘‘When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.’’

In addition to having his work labeled fictionalized autobiography, Hemingway’s work has also led to the author being called such ‘‘critical classifying terms as Disillusioned Idealist, Realist, Naturalist, Existentialist and even—after Old Man and the Sea—Christian,’’ according to Richard Irwin in his essay, ‘‘Of War, Wounds, and Silly Machines: An Examination of Hemingway’s ‘In Another Country.’’’ Irwin goes on to say that the author may be a Naturalist, but that he is not a true Naturalist. He feels Hemingway is a Naturalist ‘‘in the sense that for him human destiny is largely controlled by factors which lie beyond the individual will and choice, and those factors do not operate at the behest of an ultimately beneficent divine being.’’ However, he feels that Hemingway can not be called solely a Naturalist because his work does not ‘‘reveal . . . sentimentality toward the hard aspects of the human condition . . . a belief in a benign, responsible creator [or] a keen awareness of the ‘forces’ which operate independently of man’s conscious will.’’ He also comments that Hemingway’s writing does not ‘‘assume a universe indifferent to the suffering of human beings,’’ and so does not fulfill the definition required to be considered a Naturalist.

Despite the vast array of opinions surrounding the work of Ernest Hemingway, his popularity and influence are still felt 35 years after his death. His position as one of the most distinctive and lauded writers of this century is assured, a title supported by a long list of devoted readers, the inclusion of his work in dozens of anthologies, and several of the most prestigious honors a writer can receive.

Big two hearted river- part 1

Summary

Emotionally wounded and disillusioned by World War I, Nick Adams returns to his home and leaves for the north Michigan woods on a camping trip. He leaves by himself, hoping that the routine of selecting a good place to camp, setting up a tent, fixing meals, and preparing for fishing will restore peace and a sense of balance to his traumatized soul.

On the way to the woods, Nick passes the ruined, gutted, burned-to-the-ground town of Seney. The first half of this solitary sojourn focuses on passing through Seney and setting up camp, which comprises Part I.

According to Hemingway biographer James R. Mellon, Hemingway regarded “Big Two-Hearted River” as the “climactic story in [his short story collection] In Our Time and the culminating episode in the Nick Adams adventures that he included in the book.”

That comment ought to spark the curiosity of readers of this story, for, on the surface, very little happens in the story. Seemingly, it goes nowhere. If, however, one has read Thoreau’s Walden, it is relatively easy to see that Hemingway is portraying Nick Adams’ attempt to achieve a bonding with nature that Thoreau, in 1845, was seeking when he decided to live a simple, semi-solitary life at Walden Pond. In Walden, Thoreau says: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . . and see if I could learn what it had to teach. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

This “living deliberately” is the key to what Nick is seeking through the restorative and recuperative powers of nature. He has seen first-hand the horrors of war (World War I), was seriously injured himself and suffered a mental breakdown. He is searching for some way to put the horrors of these experiences behind him and restore himself to a healthy emotional life. To do so, he feels that he must isolate himself from the rest of humanity until he regains his own sense of sanity and humanity.

Interestingly, trout fishing plays an important role for many of Hemingway’s male characters. For example, in The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake Barnes, who, like Nick, was seriously wounded in the war, goes with his best friend to the Spanish Mountains for some trout fishing, especially when he is about to lose control of his life. Ultimately, the traditional Christian symbols of fishing and water become symbolic of Nick’s being rebaptized into life. However, even though two prominent Western world symbols have been mentioned thus far, this is not a story whose meaning relies on symbols. Instead, it is a realistic account of a fishing trip during which Nick regains control of his life.

Two major, over-arching themes can be seen in each part: recovery in Part I and recollection in Part II.

Part I Commentary

Nick’s recovery begins here as Nick goes alone to a deserted area along the fictional Two-Hearted River (Michigan’s Fox River) in the upper peninsula of northern Michigan, where he can see Lake Superior from a hilltop, where “there was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. . . . It was all that was left of the town of Seney.” The symbolism here is fairly obvious: Nick is leaving the burned, destroyed portions of his life behind, hoping and searching for renewal on the rich, green, and fertile river bank of the big Two-Hearted River. Nick, however, does not go immediately to the river; instead, he gets off the train and pauses on a bridge, watching trout that are far below him in the stream. It is important to note here that Nick is looking down onto the river and the trout, which will both be living, breathing symbols that are essential to Nick’s healing later. The trout are all steadily floating in deep, fast-moving water. Hemingway uses another important symbol here: the kingfisher, a brightly-colored bird that dives just under the water’s surface for fish. This is most definitely a metaphor for the facile, healthy spiritual state that Nick is seeking on this solitary camping trip. The bird’s ability to fly is a traditional symbol for spiritual ascension and the ability to transgress beyond worldly cares, and the bird’s ability to go underneath the surface and pluck things out of the river and digest them is a metaphor for what Nick needs to do to transmutate his unpleasant memories. He follows the river from a distance, for some time, delaying gratification before deciding on a place for his camp. He wants to begin his healing in the woods deliberately and with discipline. Throughout the story, he will be isolated from other people. He will not see or communicate with anyone.

When he sees the trout moving about in the pools of the river, he feels an elation that he has not felt for a long time. Nick saw trout in the stream below the bridge; his “heart tightened as the trout moved.” Then, leaving the burned town behind him, Nick “felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.” These key ideas, then, are the essence of this story: Nick has escaped into his own world where the mere sight of trout influences his responses. He is at one with this world: “He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.”

As Nick walks through Seney, he notices that even the surface of the ground has been burned. The black, sooty ruin of Seney represents the atrocities of war and its devastating effect on Nick’s psycho-emotional well being. Here, he walks through it and notices that even the grasshoppers are covered with soot, much the same way that Nick himself is still covered with “soot” from the war.

However, note that Nick does not go to the river immediately. He wants to get as far upstream as he can in one day’s walking. Even though he stops and instinctively knows that the river cannot be more than a mile north of where he is, being tired, he takes off his backpack and sleeps on the ground until the sun is almost down.

The description of Nick’s putting up the tent, smoothing the ground, chopping stakes, pulling the tent taut, hanging cheesecloth over the front—all of these components coalesce and make Nick feel happy: “He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp.”

Hemingway is famous for avoiding three-syllable, high-flown adjectives; instead, he uses simple adjectives such as “good.” Here, this was a “good place” to camp.

Afterward, Nick makes his supper—a can of pork and beans mixed with a can of spaghetti. As the two ingredients cook together, Nick inhales a “good” smell—not a “superb aroma”—just simply a “good” smell.

Nick is trying to return to basics, to regain a sense of the simplicity of life; thus Hemingway presents his camping trip in its simplest terms. Even though Nick eats plain, canned food, he describes it lovingly: “ . . . he had been that hungry before, but had not been able to satisfy it.” His hunger is satisfied both literally and metaphorically. And again, he pronounces his camp “good.” Later, Nick again asserts that there “were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good.”

Hemingway presents a moving picture of Nick making camp with meticulous, detailed descriptions that add a methodical, ritualized dimension. It is this solitary, repetitive, methodical action of making camp that frees Nick’s mind from stress, bad memories, and the cares of the world. It is a moving meditation unto itself, providing Nick with a mind-numbing and pain-relieving sense of calm and relaxation. Nick’s own moving meditation here in the woods is no different from the traditional Eastern image of the spiritual seeker who sits on a mountaintop, chanting “om” and other mantras while in deep meditation.

Thought and grief are inexorably linked in Nick’s mind now, and this moving meditation heals him.

Nick then turns his focus on making camp coffee; he remembers a guy named Hopkins, who considered himself an expert on making camp coffee. We know no more about this person than is presented in this single paragraph, but the mood of the paragraph invokes a sense of “long ago,” in stark contrast to the very vivid “now” that Nick is creating for himself. Then, long ago, Nick and Bill and Hopkins were young and joyous, carefree, and dreamily optimistic. Their youthful days of irresponsibility were broken, however, when Hopkins received a telegram informing him that he was suddenly very rich; back in Texas, his first big oil well had hit pay dirt. Hopkins immediately promised his two buddies that he’d take them sailing on the yacht that he was going to buy. Nick never heard from Hopkins again.

The implication is that Hopkins was swallowed by the world of money and materialism and forgot about such basic values as friendship. Similarly, Nick once believed in the glory of war and was almost killed by the machines of war, yet he survived and has come “home” to nature to restore his physical and mental health.

The dinner and the ritualistic way Nick drinks his coffee in the “Hopkins” manner put Nick back in touch with past friends and associations that bring back some good memories.

The last two paragraphs of Part I conclude with Nick’s preparation for sleep, as he crawls into his tent and feels sleep coming. This concludes the first of two major, over-arching themes in the story: the period of recollection for Nick, as it encompasses the war, good memories prior to the war, and connects Nick to Nature itself. Nature is a living, breathing, presence that Nick merges with to move beyond stress and ill health back to good health and creativity. It is a quiet and peaceful break that firmly cements the first theme before Nick enters into the world of the river and fishing in Part II.

The northern peninsula of Michigan is the setting for many of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories: “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” and Parts I and II of “Big Two-Hearted River.” This country was intensely familiar to Hemingway; he grew up fishing, hunting, hiking, and camping along the rivers and in the woods and hills of this region.

Horton Bay, in “The End of Something,” is referred to as Hortons Bay; today, the once-burned-out town of Seney has been rebuilt. In “The Three-Day Blow,” Bill tells Nick Adams that had Nick continued dating Marjorie, he would not be drinking scotch with Bill in the cabin; he’d be living a boring, middle-class life with Marjorie in Charlevoix; Nick reluctantly agrees.

After Nick is wounded, physically and psychologically, during his stint as a soldier in Italy during World War I, he returns to the woods of northern Michigan and camps along the Two-Hearted River, fishing for trout and slowly restoring serenity and peace to his broken mind and emotions.

Hemingway’s father had a summer cabin, Windemere, here in the northern peninsula; it was along the streams and rivers, where they fished and camped, that Dr. Hemingway taught his son the skills and codes of life—especially living outdoors, independently, on one’s own.

Characters

Nick Adams

A young man who was wounded in World War I and has now returned to the woods of northern Michigan to fish and to heal himself of battle trauma.

Big two hearted river part 2

Summary

Hemingway recounts in precise detail Nick’s rituals of preparation for fishing before he wades into the river. He successfully catches two trout and begins to gather sufficient courage so that in the days ahead, he can easily fish across the river, in the dark swamp, a symbol of Nick’s fears and uncertainties. Clearly, Nick’s recovery from the trauma of war has already begun, and readers finish this story with a sense of hope. This section presents Nick’s preparations for fishing and his actual wading into the river to fish for trout and examines his accompanying emotions and reactions. Every detail, every action, is understated. Hemingway describes no grandiose epiphanies. The river is the central element in this section, as Nick is constantly in the river, following the river, and looking to the swamp at the end of the river. The river is a consistent thread here that parallels Nick’s subconscious and the memories contained therein.

First, Nick must have some bait. He is surrounded by grasshoppers, and luckily, they are sluggish this early in the morning because of the heavy dew. Nick gets an empty bottle and collects enough bait for the entire day; he knows that he can get all the “hoppers” he needs each morning of each day for the rest of his stay in the woods. It is important here to note the contrast between the grasshoppers in Part I, which were black and covered with soot, and these grasshoppers, which are nestled in the grass amongst the drops of dew, waiting for the sun. If the river is Nick’s subconscious, then the grasshoppers represent the mundane, methodical camping tasks that are calming to Nick and enable him to dip into his subconscious without fear, much like the kingfisher in Part I.

Nick retrieves his fishing rod from the leather rod case and prepares the leader line, the gut line, and the hook, and tests them: “It was a good feeling.”

All preparations completed, Nick is ready to enter the water. As he leaves camp, he feels “awkward” but “professionally happy” with all of his paraphernalia hanging from him: His sandwiches are in his two front pockets; his bottle of grasshoppers is hanging around his neck; his landing net is hanging from a hook in his belt; a long flour sack is tied round his shoulder (this will hold the trout that he catches); his “fly book” is in one of his pockets; and he is carrying his fly rod.

Nick’s first catch is too small, so he removes the hook and throws it back. Note that before he touches the trout, he wets his hand because he knows that “if a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot.” This kind of knowledge emphasizes again that Nick is an expert in this type of fishing; readers respect him. However, it also indicates something deeper: Nick has a specific code of fishing that separates him from other

fishermen. It places Nick into a select, morally “higher” group that respects the fish and Nature. This totally integrates Nick with the fish and Nature itself.

Nick then rebaits his hook and, this time, spits on it for good luck, a typical thing for an experienced fisherman to do. This time, and it does not take long, he hooks an enormous trout: When it leaps high out of the water, Nick is overcome because he has never seen such a large trout, but then “tragedy” strikes: The leader line breaks, and the trout escapes.

Nick’s hand is shaking. He slowly reels in his empty hook. He vaguely feels a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.

These details illustrate Hemingway’s belief that if people—men, in particular—give in to their emotions, they are in danger of losing everything. For Nick, the thrill of hooking this large trout is overwhelming. Some may also surmise that the trout represent happy memories, and that this big trophy trout that gets away is a symbol for a memory that made Nick very happy but didn’t come to fruition for whatever reason. The emotional investment in something that makes him happy that he ultimately can’t connect with again at this point in his recovery is a sickening disappointment to him, especially because it’s his fault. However, after the jarring experience of war, Nick must expect to “lose a few” at first during his journey into his own river of recovery.

After he rests and smokes, Nick rebaits, and this time, upon reentering the river, he works his rod carefully. He catches a good-sized trout, and note that he says that it was “good” to hold—he had “one good trout.” Nick catches another, but for the second time, the trout gets away, although this time, it isn’t Nick’s fault. The fish dives into heavy underbrush.

Almost immediately, Nick has another strike, and after some struggling, he brings this trout into his net. Nick then spreads the “mouth of the sack and [looks] down at the two big trout alive in the water.” He concludes that they are good trout.

After Nick eats his sandwiches, he sits and watches the river; then he kills and dresses the two trout. Both are males because each is exuding “milt,” a substance found only in male fish. Nick returns to camp completely satisfied and looks forward to the days to come when he will fish the swampy areas, as he steadily moved downstream into deeper water today.

Nick’s steady progress downstream into deeper water leads him to reach a point in the river that intersects the present moment: His wish for something to read. This return to thinking and cerebral pursuits indicates a mental rejuvenation. It isn’t a total rejuvenation, because Nick has yet to fish in the swamp, but it is a rejuvenation that indicates to the reader that Nick’s recovery is well underway.

Another signpost of Nick’s progress in recovery is his emotional reaction to swamp fishing. The swamp is a deep, dark place at the end of the river covered by cedar branches. It is a dangerous place to fish because of the muck on the bottom and the fast, deep water that sometimes has whirlpools that take anything in the water down with it. It is here that the really big trout seek the shade and cool water, and it is here that Nick reacts to it: first, by concluding that he won’t do it just yet, and second, that it is “tragic,” which is an emotionally charged description. The swamp can be seen as the dark, sooty place in Nick’s subconscious where the war and all of the bad memories from it reside. For Nick, this swamp (and swamp fishing) is the final frontier of healing and transmutating the war experience. It is no surprise that he concludes that he will try it another time, without any reference to a timetable or a goal for doing it. He is satisfied with his present progress, and he’ll simply do it when it occurs to him that he is ready.

After having followed Nick through his two days in the woods by the river, readers are filled with confidence that Nick is a survivor and that he will be able to put all of the horrors of the war behind and find a suitable niche in life.

The short happy life of Francis Macomber

Introduction

Ernest Hemingway first published “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” in the September, 1936, issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. Later, it was among the stories collected in Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. The reception of Hemingway’s fiction has always been intertwined with the understanding of Hemingway as a figure. Hemingway was the consummate sportsman; few others in American history, with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt, have come to symbolize with such consistency the spirit of the outdoorsman. Yet Hemingway’s characters add an interesting and telling dimension to this myth. Their solitude is almost always interrupted, and their ruggedness almost always complemented by sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility. Because “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” does not represent this Hemingway norm, it stands apart from the author’s other short fiction. Its hero, Francis Macomber, is anything but the consummate sportsman. He is inept and somewhat cowardly, but Hemingway portrays him with sympathy, revealing the anxiety and tragedy that such narrow definitions of manhood can produce. The juxtaposition of Francis Macomber and his nemesis, Robert Wilson, clearly underscores this tension, as does Macomber’s struggle to win the favor of his perpetually jaded wife, Margot. Margot’s final act has been the source of great debate among critics for decades, and it is difficult, upon reading and rereading the story, to determine any one simple explanation for her actions. The story is based upon an actual scandal that had taken place in Kenya involving a wife, a love affair, and the wife’s implication in the death of her husband, which was suppressed in the media and covered up by the British government.

Summary

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” opens with Francis Macomber, his wife, Margaret (known as Margot), and Robert Wilson preparing for lunch at their camp in Africa. The Macombers are a wealthy and socially prominent American couple in Africa on a safari. Wilson is a professional hunter, paid to guide their adventures. The three begin discussing the morning’s hunt. This topic appears to cause them some discomfort, and soon the source of their discomfort is revealed: while stalking a lion, Francis Macomber panicked and ran. He is embarrassed about it, and Wilson tries to reassure him. Wilson actually has little respect for Macomber, but hides this fact. Margot, however, makes several sarcastic references to the incident.

Later that afternoon Francis and Wilson go hunting again, and Francis shows skill in shooting an impala. He is still ashamed of having shown cowardice when confronting the lion, though. That night he lies on his cot remembering the lion hunt, and the story’s action flashes back to that morning. Francis had been bothered by the lion’s roar the night before, and at breakfast he confesses that he is nervous. The trio set out in their car and stop when they spot a lion. Macomber gets out of the car, still frightened, but he fires three shots, two of which find their mark. The lion bounds away, and Macomber and Wilson follow him, although Macomber is reluctant to kill the beast. Wilson volunteers to take the lead. As they draw near to the lion, the animal charges and Macomber runs in terror. Wilson shoots and kills the lion. After the men return to the car, Margot kisses Wilson. Macomber perceives that his wife has lost all respect for him. This signals new trouble in their marriage; they have known trouble previously, but their marriage has endured for eleven years despite their problems. “They had a sound basis of union,” Hemingway writes. “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.”

Macomber finally falls asleep. When he awakens from a nightmare about the lion, he realizes that Margot’s cot is empty. She returns after a couple of hours, and it is apparent that Margot, who has a history of infidelity, has been with Wilson. At breakfast it is equally obvious to Wilson that Macomber knows this. Wilson feels no remorse, however; he believes Macomber has driven Margot to him.

After breakfast the Macombers and Wilson set out to hunt buffalo. Francis Macomber’s anger at Wilson blots out any fear he might have felt, and Macomber goes after the buffalo enthusiastically. He kills the biggest of the three that the hunters encounter, and finishes off another one that Wilson has wounded. The experience thrills Macomber and instills a new confidence in him. Margot points out, however, that the hunters have pursued the buffalo from their car, something that is not only unsportsmanlike but illegal. Her remarks fail to dampen her husband’s spirits, though. Wilson admires Macomber’s new strength and guesses that he will no longer tolerate Margot’s infidelity. Margot appears to feel threatened by the change in her husband.

Before they have much time for contemplation, they must go after the third buffalo, which has been wounded. Wilson outlines for Macomber the best shot with which to kill the buffalo. The animal comes charging out of the bush and Macomber stands firm, shooting, until the buffalo is nearly upon him. At that instant Macomber is shot in the head by his wife and killed instantly. According to the narrator, she “shot at the buffalo . . . as it seemed about to gore

Macomber and had hit her husband.” Wilson thinks, though, that Macomber was Margot’s target all along. The story ends with Margot sobbing as Wilson assures her the outside world will believe her husband’s death was an accident, but he lets her know that he believes it was murder.

Themes

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” explores a number of important themes. Francis Macomber and his wife are on a hunting expedition in Africa. Their guide is Robert Wilson. Macomber is eager to impress his wife, whom he sees as attracted to Wilson. However, Macomber is not the same kind of man Wilson is. He is not a hunter by trade or by nature, and his struggle to overcome this difference results in his death.

Courage and CowardiceIt is perhaps misleading to characterize two of the important themes of this work as “courage” and “cowardice.” Certainly, these are both major themes of the story, but Hemingway invites the reader to consider whether courage is confused with bravado, and reasonable fear with cowardice. Depending upon one’s point of view, Francis Macomber’s fear of the lion makes him a coward or it makes him a reasonable man. The story inspires an examination of whether it takes more courage to face down the lion or to walk away.

Fate and ChanceIf Margot Macomber’s shooting of her husband is an accident, then a central theme of the work becomes fate or chance. The question becomes one of how accidental an accident of this kind can be. In other words, the story asks whether it is really fate or chance—considering that Margot Macomber is inexperienced with a gun and an unskilled shot.

Guilt and InnocenceIntimately connected with the theme of fate and chance is guilt and innocence. The reader must decide if Margaret Macomber shot her husband on purpose or if it was indeed an accident. If she has not shot him on purpose, then the act becomes a matter of chance or fate. If her action was intentional, however, then she is guilty of murder. The end of the story dramatizes this ambiguity; Wilson teases her about the “accident,” implying that, though she protests her innocence, he himself does not believe her.

Survival in the WildernessA lesser theme in the work is that of survival in the wilderness. The Macombers, wealthy urban people, would not be able to survive alone in the wilderness, so they hire a guide to help them with their hunt. Ironically, the presence of a guide does not protect Francis Macomber but compels him to assume a persona of bravado that leads him to his death. Macomber struggles with his position within the wilderness, wondering if it is more honorable to be like Wilson or to heed his instinct for self-preservation by fleeing from wounded animals.

Gender RolesLinked to Macomber’s idea of survival is the notion of manhood. What kind of men are Macomber and Wilson, and why does one survive while the other dies? The story examines whether masculinity is a function of courage or of appearance. If Margot favors Wilson, does that make him more masculine than Macomber? Complicating this question is the fact that Margot becomes uneasy when her husband becomes aggressive during the hunt. Macomber’s assertion of traditional bravado on the safari does not result in Margot’s increased admiration for him, though she is attracted to Wilson’s show of courage. Something else, then, must influence masculinity if Margot’s interest is seen as a barometer for that trait. Margot herself represents some conflicting ideas about femininity. Though she is described in typically feminine terms, the act of violence she commits which ends her husband’s life can be construed as a “masculine” trait.

ConflictIn the characters of Robert Wilson and Francis Macomber, Hemingway presents two different versions of the conflict of man against nature. Wilson has learned to live with and even conquer nature, while Macomber has difficulty doing either and is, in the end, conquered by nature in the form of a charging buffalo whose ferocity provokes Margot’s fatal gunshot. This difference leads to another conflict, that of man against man, or Macomber versus Wilson. Macomber wants to be more like Wilson to gain Margot’s respect and admiration. Wilson, though he is hired by Macomber, is Macomber’s antagonist, ready and willing to use his virility to entice Macomber’s wife into bed. Another essential

conflict in this story is exemplified by the imperfect marriage of the Macombers, in which Margot seems perpetually dissatisfied and Francis unable to live up to her expectations of him.

Style

"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is set in the African savanna, to which Mr. and Mrs. Macomber have come on a hunting expedition, led by Robert Wilson. The hunting expedition ends in tragedy when Mr. Macomber stands his ground before a charging buffalo and is shot by his wife.

SymbolismA great deal of symbolism contributes to the meaning of this story. The dichotomy of camp and savanna serves as a symbol of the differences that exist between Macomber and Robert Wilson. To leave the camp is to leave the world of comfort and luxury that the Macombers normally enjoy. The savanna represents Wilson's world, the wild, savage force of nature. The lion and the buffalo, representations of nature itself in all its brutal force, also come to symbolize the differences in courage and manhood that exist between Macomber and Wilson. Similarly, the guns themselves operate as symbols of manhood.

Point of ViewThe story is told in third-person point of view, meaning that it is related by a narrator who is not a part of the action of the story. This point of view allows the author to describe events in an objective manner. For example, Hemingway can simultaneously present Margot's insistence on her innocence and Wilson's belief that she is not innocent. It is the author's third-person narrative point of view, where the narrator does not always know what is going on in the minds of the characters he presents, that allows this ambiguity. No one but Margot Macomber can be certain of her guilt or innocence, and the narrator, who does not have access to this information, does not settle the debate.

IronyIrony is an essential element of this story. The most obvious and striking example of irony is the title itself. Certainly, Macomber's life is "short," but is it' 'happy'' ? It is also ironic that his wife, the very person who should protect him, is the cause of his death. Furthermore, the fact that it may have been her impulse to protect Macomber which destroys him makes the climax of the story ironic. Hemingway uses irony to provide enough ambiguity in the narrative for the outcome of the story to be unclear.

Characters

Francis MacomberFrancis Macomber is a man of enough wealth that he can afford a private, guided hunting trip in Africa. He is a man of questionable courage who is more comfortable shooting from the car than stalking his prey on foot. His humiliation at being cuckolded prompts him to an act of foolish bravery that reveals in its outcome his wife’s lack of faith in him. His marriage to Margot is not a happy one, but Hemingway tells us that “Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.” After he flees from a lion that he has wounded, his wife sleeps with their guide, Robert Wilson. Hemingway’s statement that Macomber “was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new” illustrates the essential difference between these two men. Wilson is what Macomber pretends to be—a hunter and, at least in the eyes of Margot Macomber, a man. Macomber tries to rectify this by standing his ground before a charging buffalo. Just as he takes aim, however, he is felled by a gunshot from his wife.

Margaret MacomberMargaret Macomber’s love for her husband is debatable at best. She seems much more interested in flirting with their guide, Robert Wilson, than in encouraging her husband. In fact, she is brazen and unabashed about her sexual dalliance with Wilson and taunts her husband with it. Hemingway writes that she is “an extremely handsome and well-kept woman.” The phrase “well-kept” is particularly revealing in its multiple meanings. On one hand, Margot is fashionable and presents herself well. Furthermore, she is “kept” by her husband in a state of luxurious affluence. Ironically, she is not “well-kept” by her husband at all, as she freely and unapologetically commits adultery. Her marriage to Francis Macomber is obviously not a happy one, but, as Hemingway writes, “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her.” She is critical, abrasive and petulant. She shoots and kills her husband just as he is standing his ground in a moment of danger, but the reader is left to consider whether this final act is one of concern

that arises from love or pity, or of convenience that arises from hate and disdain. That Margot is spoiled is certain. Whether she is a cold-blooded murderer has been the subject of critical debate for decades.

MargotSee Margaret Macomber

Robert WilsonRobert Wilson is the Macombers’ guide during their hunting expedition, a man Hemingway refers to as “the white hunter.” His two most striking character traits are symbolized by his “very red face and extremely cold blue eyes.” His red face indicates that he is sanguine and bold, his skin sunburned by his constant exposure to the elements of nature. He is also focused, cool, and analytical, even while facing the extreme danger of the hunt. When Macomber wounds a lion but does not kill it, Wilson insists that they go into the brush to find and kill it, in spite of the dangers presented by tracking a wounded, and therefore crazed, lion. He is the epitome of a manhood that Francis Macomber lacks but Margaret Macomber desires. After Wilson sleeps with her and realizes that Mr. Macomber is aware of this transgression, he thinks to himself, “Let him keep her where she belongs. It’s his own fault.” His contempt for his employer does not keep him from accepting his money, however. His purpose is to provide Macomber with the illusion of being a great sportsman himself, a master over nature like Wilson. Nevertheless, it is Wilson who remains in control of the hunt, a fact demonstrated when it is revealed that Wilson is the only one who can speak to the Macombers in their own language.

Historical context

Stereotypes of the 1930sThough Hemingway does not specify when “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” takes place, it can be assumed to be contemporary of the era in which the story was written, the mid-1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, the fact that the Macombers can afford to take a luxury vacation takes on great significance. It hints that they are far removed from the realities of their day, which include poverty, economic instability, and general misery. In a time in which one quarter of all men were unemployed, gender roles took on great significance. A man without a job often questioned his masculinity, particularly if he was not able to care for his wife and children. Though the Macombers are childless and need not worry about where their next meal is coming from, this fixation on masculinity is still evident in Macomber’s character. In an era before modern feminism took hold, the ideas of what constituted a real man or a real woman were often those based on tradition. Men were brave, couragous, and chivalric. Women, in turn, were feminine, refined, and deferential to men.

One notable exception to this stereotype of feminity in the 1930s is the idea of the “femme fatale,” a woman who schemes her way to riches and fame no matter what it takes. Her dangerousness stems from the fact that though her appearance is outwardly feminine, her instincts are often very masculine. Often romanticized, this woman can be found in many books and films of the era, especially the pulp fiction novels of Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, whose detective novels often featured beautiful and conniving women who tempted the likes of detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlow. Writing more mainstream literature, Hemingway also utilized this feminine stereotype, particularly in the character of Margot Macomber. She does not love her husband and has been unfaithful. Nevertheless, he is too rich for her to leave him. One then can interpret her scheme to kill him, becoming a rich widow in the process, as the action of a femme fatale. Hemingway, whose works frequently comment on the notion of masculinity, saw himself as a paragon of manliness through his propensity for hunting, fishing, and bull fighting. By creating characters in this image, Hemingway transfers to the page his own gender stereotypes, which many have come to view in recent years as archetypal and not very realistic.

Hills like white elephant

Introduction

First published in transition in August of 1927, “Hills Like White Elephants” became an important piece in Hemingway's second collection of short stories, Men Without Women. Hemingway wrote the story soon after the publication of his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, while living in Paris. Men Without Women was well-received, as were Hemingway’s other early works. He was embraced by the expatriate literary community in Paris and received strong reviews on his work in the United States and abroad. Although he continued to write novels and stories

throughout his career, the early short stories are often considered to be among his finest works. ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants,’’ a widely-anthologized and much-discussed story, offers a glimpse at the spare prose and understated dialogue that represents Hemingway’s mastery of style.

The story, told nearly in its entirety through dialogue, is a conversation between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that the man wants her to have an abortion. Through their tight, brittle conversation, much is revealed about their personalities. At the same time, much about their relationship remains hidden. At the end of the story it is still unclear as to what decision has or has not been made, or what will happen to these two characters waiting for a train on a platform in Spain.

Summary

The story opens with the description of distant hills across a river in Spain. An American and his girlfriend sit outside a train station in the heat. No other details about their relationship are provided at the beginning of the story. They decide to order beer, and the woman who works at the bar brings the drinks to their table. The girl remarks that the distant hills look like white elephants, but the man discounts her remark.

The story continues to unfold through dialogue, and it becomes clear that the girl, Jig, does not understand Spanish while the American does. In addition, it begins to become apparent that the two are having some sort of disagreement. The subject of the disagreement, however, is hidden, until the man says, “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig. . . . It’s not really an operation at all.” When Jig fails to respond, the man tries several more times to tell her that the “operation” is all ‘‘perfectly natural.’’ His description of the operation implies that Jig is pregnant and he is trying to talk her into having an abortion.

Jig wants reassurance that if she has the operation the American will still love her and that life will go back to the way it was before the pregnancy. However, even as she asks for reassurance, it becomes clear that she does not want to have the abortion. Further, it also becomes clear that she understands that nothing will ever be the same again.

Although the man continues to assert that he does not want her to have the abortion unless she wants to, he obviously does not mean this. Jig stands, and looks out across the valley. She seems to contemplate what is at stake in their relationship and in her life. When she says that they “could have everything,” the man agrees. For Jig, “everything” seems to include the baby. For the American, it means carefree life without the baby. Jig finally becomes frustrated with the conversation and asks the man to be quiet. Rather than listen to her, he continues to tell her how she ought to feel, and what she ought to realize. In addition, he continues to tell her that he knows exactly what the operation will be like. Finally, she quietly explodes: “Will you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

The man tries once more, but Jig tells him she will scream. He takes the bags to the other side of the station and quickly has a drink at the bar as he passes through. He observes that many people are “reasonably” waiting for the train, supposedly in contrast to what he sees as unreasonable behavior from Jig. He returns to the table and Jig smiles at him. He asks if she is better, and she replies that she feels fine. The story ends before the train arrives and with little indication of what the final decision will be or what the state of the relationship will be in the future.

Themes

Choices and Consequences“Hills Like White Elephants” presents a couple in the midst of a crisis. Although unmarried, the girl is pregnant and the man who has made her pregnant wants her to have an abortion. His belief is that the choice for abortion will free them to return to the lives they had lived before the pregnancy. He does not want to share the girl with anyone, particularly not a baby. He believes that the consequences of having the baby will lead to the breakup of the relationship.

Jig, however, seems to have a more realistic assessment of the choices and consequences in front of her. She knows that she is the one who must make the choice about the child she carries. Although she asks for reassurance, and wants the man’s love, she also knows that the chances of them finding long term happiness are remote, regardless of the decision she makes. For her, the choice to abort or not to abort will, in all likelihood, render the same consequences: life without the American.

Doubt and AmbiguityThe story of Jig and the American is a story of doubt and ambiguity for the American, for Jig, and for the reader. While the American speaks in the language of certainty, he may or may not mean what he says. In addition, he can have little knowledge of what it would mean to the girl to have the abortion he so desperately wants her to have.

Although she seems unconvinced that the abortion is the best plan, Jig nonetheless wants reassurance from the man that she is with that he will stay with her. ‘‘And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?’’ she asks the man. His reassurances seem to fall flat, however. For Jig, the path ahead is unclear. If she chooses to have the abortion, she may be unhappy with the loss. The American may leave her anyway. She may not survive the operation, in spite of the American’s reassurances that it is ‘‘perfectly simple.’’ If she chooses not to have the abortion, she may be left alone in Spain, without support, in a country where she does not even speak the language.

Even at the very end of the story, there seems to be no resolution. What does Jig decide? Does she get on the train or not? Does the couple stay together or separate? The clues in the story are sparse, and can be read either way. Thus, the doubt and ambiguity facing the characters are mirrored by the story itself.

Men and WomenIn ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants,’’ Hemingway explores the way that men and women relate to each other. Hemingway’s stories are often heavily masculine, and his protagonists are often patriarchal and sexist. As Peter Messent argues, however, in this story, Hemingway ‘‘foregrounds a woman’s point of view.’’ The more the American speaks, the more ridiculous he becomes. For example, he tells Jig, ‘‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig. . . . It’s not really an operation at all.’’ Jig does not respond to this statement for several reasons. First, she knows what an abortion is and how it will be performed. It is, after all, her body. In addition, it is not simple: abortions are not legal at this time and place (abortion was not legalized in Spain until 1985), and sometimes women die. Jig knows this, and the man’s denial of the complexity of what he is asking the woman to do only serves to highlight his own selfishness.

In addition, throughout the opening part of the story, the American tries to talk Jig into the abortion by telling her how simple it is. He claims superior knowledge and wants her to acquiesce. The moment, however, that she says she will have the abortion because he wants her to have it, the man says, ‘‘I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’’ The use of ‘‘it’’ in this line is revealing: it refers not only to the abortion, but to the baby as well. And although the American wants Jig to have the abortion, he does not want to assume the responsibility for it. Not only must she have the abortion to keep him, she must also agree to the abortion on his terms, as something she wants. In this story, Hemingway suggests that sometimes a man wants to control not only the situation he finds himself in, but also the reactions a woman has to the situation as well.

Style

SettingIn ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ the setting serves both to locate the story in space and time and to function as an important symbol. The story is set in Spain, in the valley of the Ebro River. More immediately, the setting is a railway station ‘‘between two lines of rails in the sun.’’ The American and the girl sit at a table. On one side of the station, the land is parched and desolate. A number of critics have noted the similarity between this landscape and that of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. On the other side of the station, there are trees and grain. By dividing the setting in half, with one side sterile and the other fertile, Hemingway uses the setting to reinforce the division between the couple. They can choose sterility through the abortion, or fertility through the pregnancy. The landscape outside the couple’s conversation reflects the inner landscapes of the relationship.

DialogueThe most striking feature of this story is that it is constructed almost entirely of dialogue. There are only seven short descriptive paragraphs that are not part of the dialogue itself. Further, there is very little action in the story: the girl walks from one side of the station to the other, they drink beer, and the man moves the luggage. By controlling the narrative so tightly, Hemingway forces the reader to participate in the scene almost as an eavesdropper. The reader ‘‘hears’’ the dialogue, but cannot break into the characters’ inner thoughts. With so little else present, the weight and the meaning of the story depend on the reader’'s ability to decipher the cryptic comments the two characters make to each other. Hemingway himself once suggested that a short story is like the tip of an iceberg, the meaning of the story

submerged beneath the written text. Certainly in ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants,’’ only the smallest portion of the story’s subject is apparent, and the reader must guess at the rest.

Lost GenerationThe term ‘‘Lost Generation’’ has come to apply to a group of young writers, most born around 1900, who fought in the First World War. As a group, the Lost Generation found that their understanding of life had been severely affected by their experiences during the war. Many of the Lost Generation lived in Europe, notably in Paris, during the post-War period. The term came from a comment that Gertrude Stein made to Hemingway, ‘‘You are all a lost generation.’’ Hemingway used the comment as a epigraph in his novel, The Sun Also Rises. Other writers included in this group are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Louis Bromfield, and Malcolm Cowley.

The aimlessness of the characters in ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ is one of the characteristics of the fiction of the Lost Generation. Jig and the Americans are expatriates, moving from place to place to ‘‘look at things and try new drinks.’’ They are people who live in hotels, out of luggage, rather than being rooted in one place. The lack of rootedness, then, becomes an important motif in the literature of this generation.

Characters

The AmericanThe American is one of two characters in Hemingway’s story. He sits at a table with a girl at a train station in Spain. Through his conversation, it becomes clear that the girl with him is his lover. Throughout the story, the American tries to convince the girl that she should have an abortion. He tries to make himself sound perfectly reasonable and rational, but as the dialogue continues, it becomes clear that he is both selfish and hypocritical. He says, ‘‘You’ve got to realize . . . that I don’t want you to do it if you don't want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’’ He does not mean, however, that he wants the girl to have the baby, although he says that he’ll ‘‘go through with it.’’ By the end of the story, the American has revealed himself to be self-centered and lacking in feeling for the girl, Jig, despite his protestations of love.

The girlSee Jig

JigThe second character is called ‘‘Jig’’ by the American; however, Hemingway refers to her as ‘‘the girl’’ throughout the story. This is in contrast to Hemingway’s naming of the other character as ‘‘the American’’ or ‘‘the man.’’ Jig is a young woman who finds herself pregnant with her lover’s child. She and her lover have been traveling in Europe; the labels on their suitcases name the hotels where they have spent nights together. At the time of the story, she is sitting at a table with the American, drinking beer and anise liqueur, waiting for a train. It slowly becomes clear that the man is trying to talk her into aborting the child she carries. Although the subject is never mentioned directly, the pregnancy is at the heart of the conversation. It is not clear what decision Jig reaches by the end of the story, or if she has reached any decision at all. It does seem clear, however, that she is unhappy with both choices in front of her: keep the baby and lose the American, or abort the baby and keep the American. She seems unconvinced that either scenario will develop as the American promises it will. As the story closes, Jig asserts that she is ‘‘just fine.’’ Under the circumstances, however, it is clear that this is not the case.

Historical context

Europe Between the WarsHemingway wrote ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ in 1926 while living in Paris. Europe between the First and Second World Wars provided the historical and cultural context for the story. Hemingway was twenty-two, newly married and ready to begin a career as a serious writer when he arrived in Paris in 1921. His experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I continued to affect him, and the sense of alienation and isolation characteristic of modernist writing can be found in the writing he produced during these years.

Europe was in the process of recovering from the war; however, it was a time of political and economic upheaval for most of the nations. Many nations suffered political struggles as right and left wing factions attempted to wrest control of their particular countries. In Italy, for example, strikes, violence, and political unrest led to the 1922 Fascist March on Rome. Mussolini established himself as dictator in that country. In Germany, the heavy reparations called for in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI caused economic chaos. The German mark steadily lost ground as the rate of inflation spiraled upward. Germans would rush to buy goods the moment they received cash because the value of their cash would decrease by the end of the day. The other nations of Europe, their countryside scarred and their young men dead or wounded, reeled under a deep and severe recession.

The Lost GenerationIn the United States, however, the economy boomed. The stock market reached dizzying heights and the dollar enjoyed an extremely favorable rate of exchange with most European currencies. In addition, many young Americans had been in Europe during the War, allowing them to feel more comfortable in the different cultures. Armed with the strong American dollar and the familiarity with the language and culture, many writers found Paris a very attractive milieu—collectively, these writers became known as the ‘‘Lost Generation.’’ According to Michael Reynolds, some six thousand Americans lived in Paris at the end of 1921; by ‘‘September 1924, the city’'s permanent American population was thirty thousand and rising.’’ Hemingway brushed shoulders with many notable writers and literary figures while in Paris, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce, among others.

Hemingway himself popularized the idea of a lost generation through his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. In his later memoir of the Paris years, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes of a conversation he had with the writer Gertrude Stein in which she called all young people who had been in the war ‘‘a lost generation.’’ Subsequently, Hemingway used Stein’s comment as one of two epigraphs that open the book. Hemingway, perhaps better than any other writer of his generation, captured the sense of waste and loss and the resulting aimlessness that the War engendered in the young people of his era.

Social ChangeThe years between the war were ones of rapid social change. In the United States, the economic boom caused by easy credit and technology allowed people to own products as never before. Middle class people were able to own cars, radios, and telephones.

Social change was reflected in other important ways as well. Perhaps most important, women received the right to vote in 1920 and entered the work force in growing numbers. Women bared their legs, lit up cigarettes, and cut their hair. Such expressions of emancipation threatened traditional male values, and the clash between the genders figured in many of the literary works of the day.

Many writers left the United States, preferring the less restrictive morality of Europe. Disillusioned with civilized society, alienated from traditional values, and shell-shocked from a brutal War, these writers experimented with literary form, content, and style.

A clean, well lighted place

Introduction

Many of the 1933 short stories which make up the collection Winner Take Nothing were published just before the book. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is one of these. Its publication in collected form only succeeded by months its initial publication in Scribner’s Magazine, a magazine, not uncoincidently, belonging to the titular publisher who first printed most of Ernest Hemingway’s major fiction (including this collection).

By 1933, Hemingway was an established writer, and this exceptional minimalist short story was seized upon for its presentation of major authorial concerns in an unprecedentedly concentrated form. These major authorial preoccupations include good conduct and solidarity. The younger waiter must be judged for his refusal to play by (unspoken) rules that say he must be polite and courteous to the old man. The older waiter, in contrast, upholds these standards by being willing to stay as late as the old man wants him to. The exceptionality of the piece made it an

obvious choice for critics. Critics used the story either to laud or condemn Hemingway on the basis of their judgment of these minimalist aesthetics and these ethical concerns.

For supporters of Hemingway’s talent, the story’s emotional and philosophical austerity and bleakness amounts to profound and true tragedy. For detractors of Hemingway, it is Hemingway as a parody of himself, in which a purported thematics of stoic endurance only poorly covers an underlying self-indulgent masochism. This masochism, his detractors argue, blinds Hemingway to the variety and complexity of life. Stories in which little happens but extremes of simplicity interrupted by the highest drama do not resemble life, these critics insist. In defense of Hemingway, admirers argue that his stories are not meant to compete with fiction that presents life just as it is lived. The story’s admirers argue that ‘‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’’ is Hemingway at his most pure because he captures in both form and content an irreducible and tragic essence of life.

Summary

The story begins at a cafe very late at night. Two waiters are watching their last, lingering customer, an old man who is by now very drunk. These are the story’s three major characters. The older of the two waiters informs the young one that the old man tried to commit suicide the previous week. They then watch a couple go by, a soldier and a young woman, and comment on the soldier’s chances of going undetected after curfew.

Next, the young waiter moves into action. When the old man indicates that he wants another drink served, the young waiter mutinies. He decides he wants to go home, regardless of an unspoken rule that dictates he not go until the last customer voluntarily leaves. He pretends not to know what the old man wants. The old man realizes that the younger waiter is being offensive, but ignores him and asks out loud for the drink. When the waiter brings it, he makes it spill deliberately. Moreover, knowing that the old man is deaf, as he walks away he says, “You should have killed yourself last week.” With these actions, the character of the young waiter is established.

The two waiters then have a number of conversations about the old man and his suicide and situation. These talks are interrupted by the younger waiter finally telling the old man to leave, which he does. We learn various facts from these interchanges. For example, the young waiter is “all confidence,” he is married, he has a job, he is content with life and has little pity for those who are not content. He defends his actions (being churlish and making the old man leave): a cafe is not an all-night venue; if the old man were considerate he would let the waiters go home to their beds; there are bars and bodegas for people wanting to stay out late. The older waiter resembles the old man: he is lonely and he lives alone with no wife. He is an insomniac. He insists that special deference is due the old man because of his recent suicide attempt.

Once the cafe is tidied and locked, the two waiters part amicably enough. The reader now finishes out this very short story with the older waiter. He does not go straight home. He thinks how he completely understands the old man’s desire to linger at a cafe, because the ambiance of a cafe is entirely different from that of a bar or bodega. He ends up, however, at a bar. All the cafes are, after all, closed. The old waiter looks at the bar where he stands and points out to the barman that his venue is well-lighted, but not clean: “The light is very pleasant but the bar is unpolished.” The barman ignores the waiter. The waiter does not stay for a second drink. Apparently, he now feels strong enough to go home to his insomnia: “He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he went home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”

Themes

SolidarityOne of the most touching aspects of this short story is the older waiter’s expressed solidarity with the old man. While the young waiter is all “youth” and “confidence,” the old waiter and the old man seem overwhelmingly lonely and tired-out by life. This communality structures the older waiter’s consistent thoughts of solidarity with the old man. He understands and defends him; he too prefers a clean, well-lighted cafe to a bar or bodega; he too seeks out such a

place to forestall his own despair that night. The climax of this theme of solidarity is the climax of the story itself. It comes in its final line: ‘‘He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he went home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.’’ It is the “many” of the final sentence of the story with which the story is concerned. Against the singular and selfish young waiter, the coupled old men signify the group or community that hangs together out of loyalty and a sense of common cause. Hemingway’s fiction around the time of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” frequently thematizes solidarity, undoubtedly because this principle of conduct was highly valued at the time. Much political advance was achieved in the first three decades of the century through the methods of mass demonstrations and movements (e.g., groups of workers and women bonded together for better working conditions and the vote). Solidarity fueled these mass rights’ movements and ensured their success.

Good ConductHemingway is a writer obsessed by ethical conduct. The bulk of his writing is concerned with questions of good versus bad actions. In this fiction, it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about how you play the game. This is true, perhaps, because in Hemingway’'s fictional universe one rarely wins. The title of the collection from which “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’’ comes suggests this complicated stance. It is called Winner Take Nothing. If one has won nothing as a winner, then all one has done is played the game.

The old waiter is the epitome of a someone who plays by the rules. No matter that it is a lone and drunk old man making this waiter stay up all night; the cafe offers a specific service, and is run according to certain rules from which the old waiter will not deviate. He cuts no corners in his social responsibilities.

The centrality and repetitiveness of this theme in this author’s oeuvre costs him popularity in many camps. Hemingway’s heroes consistently detect and perform unspoken ritual, usually in trying conditions so that their upholding of these rules seems all the more admirable. These beset characters are always male, and they are usually proving themselves while pursuing very traditional male pursuits (e.g. while big-game hunting or deep-sea fishing). This self-conscious cultivation of, and propensity for, an agonistic and all-male world is immortalized in a title of another of his short story collections. Appropriately, it is called Men Without Women. This highly gendered world of strenuous physical and moral contest makes Hemingway’s fiction seem dated in many respects.

The Unknowable and Nothingness“Nothing,” or the Spanish equivalent “nada,” is the most important word in this short story—if only by virtue of the high number of times it is repeated in a story so very brief. It is the reason why the old man kills himself, according to the older waiter: “‘Last week he tried to commit suicide,’ one waiter said.”/ “‘Why?’”/ “‘He was in despair.’”/ “‘What about’”/ “‘Nothing.’”/ “‘How do you know it was nothing?’”/ “‘He has plenty of money.’” It is the word which obsesses the old waiter as well. After work, he leans against a bar and recites two prayers to himself substituting “nada” for most of the prayer’s major verbs and nouns. The result is a litany of “nadas.”

This narrative pattern suggests at least two possible explanations. The first follows from considering the character of the older waiter. The waiter is a man of few words, an elemental soul. He is face to face with humanity itself under duress, what he identifies as “despair,” and attributes the cause of this despair to be “nothing.” This paradox of believing in an emotion (despair) with no cause (‘‘Nothing’’) is unraveled if one decides that with “nothing” the waiter refers to intangible yearnings, as opposed to referring to bodily or material yearnings (‘‘He has plenty of money’’). In this case, he exemplifies a stance which does not presume to fathom the mysteries of life (intangible yearnings), but prefers to stand before them mute. “Nothing” has become his way of indicating the mystery of humanity and his own professed conceptual and verbal limitations when faced with it. Thus, this old waiter might be elemental or simple, but it is this simplicity that makes him wise. He is not afraid of admitting that the task of explaining humanity is beyond him, and his manner of speaking indicates this humble stance.

A second explanation follows from taking the old waiter’s answer (“Nothing”) to mean that the old man, at least in his opinion, is in despair over the fact that his life means “nothing.” This can be linked, for example, to the old waiter later thinking, ‘‘It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.’’ In this case, despair follows from a belief in the inherent meaningless or absurdity of life. If one suffers one does so for no reason; it does not matter if one lives or dies. This is why despair is over nothing if one has “plenty of money.” In this world view, there is no meaning beyond the bodily and material; all intangible yearnings are nothing but illusion. If the old man does not sink into nihilism

because of this bleak knowledge, it is because of his ethical bylaws and his ability to revel in the physical present: “It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.’’ In the view above, however, this reveling in ‘‘light . . . [and] a certain cleanness and order” would indicate a certain blind, dumb faith. One’s environment gives one proof of some “order” or meaning, it is simply that this meaning will never be known, expressible, or representable by mere human beings.

Style

MinimalismA short story as glaringly brief and simplified as this one is rightly called “minimalist” in its aesthetics (the word aesthetics refers to how the author tells his or her story). It uses the minimum building blocks necessary to accomplish the job of telling a story. Hemingway uses simple diction, usually monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Latin, origin. Grammatically, he uses simple as opposed to complex sentences. There is little figurative language—no metaphor or simile, for example. Character and plot are minimized. These three characters do not even have names. All that happens is that the two waiters talk, the old man drinks, and then they all go home.

RepetitionIt is very clear to the reader what Hemingway does not do in this minimalist short story, but what does he do? One thing he does beyond the narrative minimum is repeat, or repeat with variation. For example, the story opens with an old man “who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.” A bit further in the story the old man is said to sit “in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind.’’ And a few sentences later the old man is the one who is “sitting in the shadow. . . .’’ This repetition of the same with variation is the barest gesture at the figurative delights art can offer. In repeating, Hemingway seems to acknowledge the beauty of pattern or artifice, but instead of actually providing any he simply gestures at its possibility.

Point of ViewHemingway’s narration seems designed to lessen the effect of a judging presence. His omniscient narrator may see and know all, but precious little is offered for consideration. This is an effaced narrator. Setting and character are barely described. What the cafe might look like, apart from the fact that it is clean and well-lighted, the reader never knows. Neither does the reader know what the waiters look like, what they are wearing, and so forth. More important, this narrator does not describe a character’s psychology, or tell the reader what should be thought about a character or event. Omniscience like this hardly deserves the name. Third person narrators are supposed to know and tell all, but this narrator strives for objectivity. The readers are to judge what the characters say and do for themselves. Of course, the situation or plot is engineered by the author, so this sense of readerly autonomy is artificial. Nevertheless, the point of this style of narration is to cut down on authorial intervention.

Characters

Old ManThe old man is drowning his sorrows in drink, and his sorrows grow out of loneliness, if we are to believe the old waiter (the old man lives alone, his wife now dead). However, lest this turning to drink be interpreted as weakness, the author is careful to depict the old man as being punctiliously neat and controlled in his despair. He does not, after all, spill a drop. Rather, the old man is a heroic drunk, one whose pursuit of oblivion is depicted as a reasonable, even noble course of action in a world which can be too much for certain souls to withstand. Where the younger waiter seems to feel not enough, this man seems to feel too much.

Old WaiterThe older waiter, in contrast to the selfish younger one, is a sympathetic man. He knows the old man’s history and identifies with it. Like the old man, the old waiter is lonely, a little sad, and he takes pleasure in a quiet public place. The old waiter is not, however, as desperate as the old man is. He seems to endure his loneliness with a certain objectivity, realizing that although he is alone, he is not alone in suffering. The older waiter seems wise and resigned.

Young WaiterSet against the two mild and weary older men, the younger waiter’s personality seems acerbic, even cruel. We learn about an unspoken rule of service which dictates that a cafe only close when the last customer leaves voluntarily, and never because of a pre-established closing time. But it is very late and the younger waiter wishes above all else to go

home to bed. Accordingly, he serves the old man in a churlish way, purposefully slopping his drinks, to make the old man feel unwelcome and unwanted. Then, as the two waiters discuss the drunk old man, the younger waiter has only nasty things to say. He is depicted as someone who does not follow the rules of good social conduct, and who considers his own wishes more significant than anybody else’s.

Historical context

Hemingway's FolkMany things account for the rural or small town Spanish characters and scenery of Hemingway’s ‘‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’’ First, as an expatriate artist living on the continent in the 1920s, Hemingway developed a passion for Spain. He was a lifelong fan of Spanish popular traditions. He enjoyed the festivals, and he keenly appreciated the bullfight. He went to Spain often to fish in the countryside, and so he came to know its plainer people.

In addition to this familiarity with Spain’s rural peoples, “plain folk” (e.g. waiters in small towns) provide an escape from the effete, or anything resonant of “civilization” which Hemingway scrupulously wishes to avoid in his art. This is so because the disaster that was WWI was a founding event and trauma in Hemingway’s life. His most admired novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), takes place around a Spanish popular festival and is about a wounded WWI veteran who is terribly in love but who has been made impotent by war injuries. This character’s situation is highly symbolic. He is the sterile scion of a disastrous past, which is like saying that civilization has progressed so far only to have progressed not at all. It is no wonder that Hemingway turns to folk. If civilization and progress has wrought such ugliness and pain, then where better to turn than to those whom progress has seemed to pass by or touched less?

Everybody’s FolkThe folk, as in the peasantry or working class of European cultures, were a population of keen historical import and significance during the teens, 20s and 30s. They were so for various reasons, the most important of which, however, boils down to the reformism of the time. The first three decades of the west are characterized by reformist mass political movements. The excesses of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution were curtailed thanks to workers’ demonstrations fueled by socialist and communist ideologies. This striving for more equal or fair treatment extended to women, who gained the vote at this time. Immediately post-WWI, New York City saw the first twentieth-century race movement, the African-American Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935). Given how rights movements entail the basic argument and principle of each person’s equal worth, regardless of race, status, or gender, the ideal of equality was touted frequently. Everyone, down to the simplest or uneducated man or woman is of equal worth, the argument goes, and in order to prove and support this, fiction writers everywhere turned to the folk for material. The desire to extend democracy and correct persistent social inequalities is mirrored in the aesthetics and subject of Hemingway’s story. Hemingway’s prosaic little story stresses the foundational sameness and dignity of all human beings.

Europe, Theater of War“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” was written at the start of the 1930s, a decade, it turns out, that would be as fraught as the one that preceded it. During the 1920s, most people were trying to come to terms with two major events. First, WWI, which killed and mutilated millions of young men, wiping out an entire male European generation and, second, the first wave of what we now call technology. Telephones and automobiles, for example, were becoming widely used and available. The 1930s, after the post-War trauma of the 1920s, delivered nothing other than the second major European war of the twentieth-century, World War II. This conflict grew out of the rise of European fascism. The fascist troops of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were beaten down during WWII, but fascism triumphed in Hemingway’s beloved Spain in 1939 when Francisco Franco’s rebel forces overcame the government.

The snow of Kilimanjaro

Introduction

n ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’’ Ernest Hemingway presents the story of a writer at the end of his life. While on a safari in Africa, Harry, the protagonist, is scratched on the leg by a thorn, and the infection becomes gangrenous and

eventually kills him. Where most of Hemingway’s stories feature protagonists who speak little and reflect nothing at all about their motivations and inner lives, in this story, the main character ‘‘sees his life flash before his eyes’’ as he realizes that he is dying. Many readers have seen Harry as a self-portrait of Hemingway himself. Reading the story this way, the reader can look into Hemingway’s struggles with himself: his insecurities, his machismo, his need and disdain for women. But it is not necessary to read the story through the lens of Hemingway’s biography. The story is a gripping look at a man who is facing death and regretting many of the choices he has made in his life, as well as being a memorable glimpse inside the head of a writer who is reflecting on his craft and the demands it has made on him.

Summary

‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’ opens on the African savanna where a man and a woman are talking to each other matter-of-factly about the man’s leg, which is rotting away from gangrene. The woman is trying to make him more comfortable and make him believe that he will survive, but he seems to be enjoying the black humor of the vultures who are waiting for him to die. As she speaks to him, his resentment of her money and her upbringing comes out in his comments.

The first of his flashbacks comes at this point. In this flashback, he remembers being in World War I, then thinks about scenes in numerous winters. Details from the war and from various pleasant skiing excursions mingle in his mind. As that flashback finishes, Harry returns to the present and argues with the woman before falling asleep. When he wakes up, the woman has been out to shoot an animal for them to eat and he thinks about her, why he married her, and why he does not like her. We learn that she is a lusty woman who was married before, who had two children and lost one of those children in a plane crash. Before he slips into another flashback, he and the woman have a drink together just as the realization that he is going to die hits him.

In his second flashback, he thinks about his time in Paris and Constantinople, but all of his memories are colored by memories of the war. When he returns to consciousness, she convinces him to drink some broth and he stops thinking so harshly of her before slipping into a third flashback. In this memory, he is in the forest, living in a cabin, and then remembers being in Paris and spending time near the Place Contrescarpe. He briefly returns to the present to ask for another whiskey and soda before flashing back again, this time to the fact that he never took the time to write about many things that he wanted to write about. His flashbacks start to bleed into the real world as he asks the woman to explain why he never wrote the stories he wanted to write. He thinks about why he feels such contempt for the wealthy, a group to which this woman belongs.

In his final flashback, he thinks again about the war, this time about a man he saw die, before waking from his flashback and talking to the woman more. He begins to see Death personified, breathing sourly on him. It is then morning again, and the pilot, Compton, has arrived to take him to the city and to the doctor. Harry gets in the plane and the pilot, instead of taking him to the city, flies him right by the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro and Harry ‘‘knew that there was where he was going.’’ In the final section of text, the woman wakes up because the hyena that has been making noise for hours stopped whimpering and has begun making another sound. As she looks over at Harry, she realizes that he has died.

Themes

DeathAs the story of an imminent death, ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’ is suffused not only with images of death but also with a pervading sense of death’s presence. The story begins with death—‘‘it’s painless,’’ Harry says in the first line, referring to his oncoming demise—and ends with the ironic comparison of the woman’s heart beating loudly and the stillness of Harry’s lifeless body. Death is symbolically figured both as the pristine whiteness of the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and as the creeping, filthy hyena that lurks outside of Harry’s tent.

Harry’s attitude toward his death wavers during the story. At first, he puts up a brave and almost cavalier front, telling his wife that he does not care about his death and is resigned to it. He almost seems to be trying to anger her, knowing that she cares about him and that he can hurt her by seeming not to be bothered by death’s imminence. But in the italicized sections of the story, Harry’s bravado disappears, and he slips into the regret of a man who knows he is dying but who rues the fact that he has not accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. The gangrenous rot that is

taking his leg metamorphoses, in his mind, into the poetry that he never wrote: ‘‘I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.’’

Hemingway brings death into the story largely by the use of symbolism. The woman leaves the camp to go kill an animal, going out of his sight because (the narrator states) she does not want to disturb the wildlife. However, she clearly does not want to kill something in plain sight of her dying husband. The hyena, an animal that feeds on carcasses, skulks around the camp, a prefiguration of the rotting death that Harry fears. Even the relationship between Harry and his wife is a symbol of his imminent end: he says that the quarrelling had ‘‘killed what they had together.’’

But when death comes it is not rotten and lingering and painful. Rather, it is transcendent. Harry slips into a reverie in which he hallucinates that his friend Compton arrives in an airplane to take him to find medical care. As the plane takes off, it passes by the blinding white summit of Kilimanjaro. As Harry passes this image, the reader is reminded of the epigraph of the story, in which Hemingway says that ‘‘close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeing at that altitude.’’ Harry seems to have found something, though: a release from his earthly problems.

Artistic CreationHarry’s failure to achieve the artistic success he sought in his life is one of the main themes of the story, and in this the character of Harry comes very close to being a representation of Hemingway himself. In the italicized flashbacks, we see Harry as he was in his earlier life, especially in Paris, where he lived in bohemian poverty and devoted his energies to writing. But he consistently regrets leaving that behind. He gave up, in a sense, and began spending his time drinking, travelling, hunting, and chasing rich women. He became ‘‘what he despised,’’ as the narrator says.

His perceived failures eat away at him like the gangrene that eats his leg. At one point he explicitly equates them: ‘‘Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.’’ He uses his verbal talents to quarrel with his wife and instead of seeking to heighten his sensations he dulls them with alcohol. In this sense, the hyena that lurks around his tent is not only creeping death but also his pangs of regret at his wasting of his artistic gifts. Ironically, it is in death that he returns to creating. As he slips away, he hallucinates a beautiful scene: his friend Compton comes to him to take him to a hospital, and as they fly away Harry catches a glimpse of the summit of Kilimanjaro, a vision that awes him by its purity. Only here, as he dies, does he take part in the kind of creation and transcendence that he has always sought.

Style

Point of View and NarrationThe type of narration Ernest Hemingway typically uses, the author himself said in an interview with George Plimpton, was fashioned on the ‘‘principle of the iceberg . . . for seven eighths of it is under water for every part that shows.’’ In A Moveable Feast (1964), his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, he expands on this. ‘‘You could omit anything,’’ he writes, ‘‘if the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.’’ Hemingway’s characters usually bury not only their feelings about their pasts but their pasts, as well, and his narrators—usually third-person narrators who see inside the heads of the main character—join along in this act of burial. In most of his best short stories, the protagonists are carrying some deep psychological hurt that they will not even think about to themselves. Their minds are ‘‘icebergs’’ because the reader can see just the hint of these troubles peek forth at times, and must read extremely carefully to try to piece together exactly what is bothering the protagonist.

In this sense, ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’ is a very atypical Hemingway story. In this story, the matters that trouble Harry are made clear to the reader; the narrator, who is inside Harry’s head, speaks of them explicitly. But Hemingway sets these instances of introspection apart, dividing them into sections printed in italics. In all but one of the sections that are in roman type, the narration is typical Hemingway: blunt, unadorned, almost devoid of adjectives, and quite uninformative as to what Harry is feeling. The sentences are short and declarative. But when the narration drifts into the italic sections, the tone changes. The sentences grow longer and almost stream-of-consciousness, with one clause tacked on after another recording the protagonist’s impression of a scene. The narrator describes scenes fondly and vividly, and uses metaphors and figurative language: ‘‘the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting,’’ for instance.

As the story proceeds and Harry’s condition worsens, the switching between unadorned narration and impressionistic, memory-laden narration becomes quicker and more frequent, until the penultimate section. In this section—the section in which Compton arrives and takes Harry away—the reader thinks they are in the ‘‘real world’’ until the end, when they realize that Harry is having another dream sequence. This time, though, the dream—usually delineated by italics—has bled through to the ‘‘real world,’’ and the only clue, before the end of the dream, that it is a dream is the sentence structure. In this section, the sentences are longer, more impressionistic, more descriptive, just as the sentences in the earlier italic dream segments were. The contrast between the ‘‘real world,’’ in which Harry’s gangrene has killed him, and the dream world, in which he is flying toward the ‘‘unbelievably white’’ peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, is accentuated in the final section, in which the narrator returns to his short, declarative sentences.

FlashbackThe flashback is a technique that Hemingway uses extensively in ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’’ The story is divided between present-time sections (set in roman type) and flashbacks (set in italics). In the present-time sections, the protagonist is facing his death stoically, quietly, and with a great deal of machismo. All he needs is whiskey and soda to accept his imminent death. But in the flashback sections, Harry faces his life. His flashbacks show the reader that he has had an exciting and well-travelled life, but that he is also haunted by his memories of World War I. He served in the U.S. Army in that war and saw combat on the Eastern front, in the Balkans, and Austria. The violence and death that he saw there come back to him as his rotting leg tells him that he is about to die.

Harry’s past is not all negative, though. He is a writer, and in his flashbacks he thinks about his vocation and about all of the stories he wanted to write that he never took the time to begin. He has spent time in Paris with the artists and writers who lived there in the 1920s (one name he mentions, Tristan Tzara, is a real poet of the time, and another, ‘‘Julian,’’ is a thinly-disguised portrait of the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald) and is familiar with the Place de la Contrescarpe, a popular bohemian locale of the time. His flashbacks also show that he is an experienced outdoorsman—necessary background to this character, so that readers do not think of him as a greenhorn who is dying out of pure inexperience.

Allusion‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’ alludes subtly to two well-known short stories: one by its structure and technique, the other by its subject matter. The first story is ‘‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’’ (1891), by the American writer Ambrose Bierce. In this story, set during the Civil War, an Alabama man is being hanged on Owl Creek Bridge for espionage. As the story opens, readers see him on the bridge, having the noose put over his head. When the boards under his feet are snatched away, the rope breaks. He is able to use his bound hands to take the rope off his neck and swim away down the river as the Union soldiers’ bullets hit the water by him. After swimming down the river a long way, he gets out and finds his way back home. As he arrives at his house and as his wife stretches her arms to greet him, the noose jerks at his neck and he dies instantly. The whole story has been an imaginary scene that the protagonist has lived through from the time he begins falling to the time that the rope’s slack runs out. Just like in ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’’ the seeming salvation for the hero existed only in the hero’s mind.

Hemingway’s story also alludes to another well-known story, Henry James’ ‘‘The Middle Years’’ (1893). Like Hemingway, James presents a self-portrait of a writer near the end of his life. James’ Dencombe, like Hemingway’s Harry, has an admirer (but in this case the admirer is male, not a wife), and this admirer gives up something important and valuable to be with the writer. Finally, like Harry, Dencombe dies, somewhat unexpectedly and ironically, at the end of the story.

Characters

ComptonCompton flies the plane that is meant to take Harry back to the city to save his life. He is confident and tries to make Harry feel better about his predicament. However, he exists only in Harry’s dream.

HarryHarry is the protagonist of the story. He is a writer and has had many experiences in Europe. He also very much enjoys big-game hunting. When the story begins, Harry is suffering from gangrene in his leg and he is dying in the African backcountry while waiting for a plane to take him to the city.

HelenHarry’s wife Helen, also known as The Wife, remains unnamed until the end of the story, when a delirious Harry finally refers to her by name as he dies. After Harry reaches the summit of Kilimanjaro, the previous narrative voice resumes and again calls her simply ‘‘the woman.’’ Harry does not seem to love her, but he respects her to a certain degree for her skill with a gun. She comes from a wealthy family and Harry has contempt for that. She, on the other hand, cares for him greatly and tries to ease his suffering.

MoloMolo is the African servant who serves Helen and Harry. He does very little in the story apart from bringing Harry whiskey and sodas.

The WifeSee Helen

Historical context

World War I‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’’ takes place in the decades between World Wars I and II. The first World War was a traumatic experience for Europe and America, for although it was fought largely in Europe it involved almost every European nation and, at the time, the European nations controlled vast areas of Africa and Asia. The war was remarkable for the sheer mass of killing it entailed. New technologies of war, including motorized vehicles, airplanes, and poison gas, were used for the first time. Probably most traumatic and senseless was the strategy of trench warfare, utilized largely in France and Belgium, in which each army dug a trench in the ground and attempted to advance to overtake the opposing army’s trench by waves of soldiers going ‘‘over the top.’’ Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in these waves, but trench warfare only brought the war to a bloody standstill.

Hemingway saw action in the war—not in the trenches, though, for he drove an ambulance in Italy—and was wounded. Many of his characters, including Harry in ‘‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’’ carry around painful memories of the war. Some of his characters, such as Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, also carry around their physical wounds and disabilities. The war and its unprecedented gore psychologically maimed countless veterans, and often Hemingway’s characters submerge their pain underneath the immediate world. This submersion provided Hemingway with a real-world correlation for his ‘‘iceberg’’ technique of structure and narration, and often in his stories what is submerged is the protagonist’s memories of the war.

Africa in the 1930sFor the first half of this century, Africa consisted almost exclusively of colonies of European nations. From the 1500s to the 1800s, the main European powers—England, France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany—divided up between themselves control over the African continent for economic reasons. The European countries wished to take advantage of the natural—and, in the case of the slave trade, the human—resources of Africa to enrich themselves. Belgium controlled the country known until recently as Zaire; Germany and Portugal ruled the present nation of Angola; the French had dominion over much of the west coast of Africa, a region that included the current nations of Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Algeria; the Dutch and the English fought over control of South Africa and its vast diamond mines; the English also had power over the large and very wealthy territories of Nigeria and Kenya.

Mount Kilimanjaro, the landmark that dominates Hemingway’s story, is in Kenya, and this territory was a popular destination for European and American adventure tourists such as Harry who wished to hunt exotic game animals on safaris. Beginning with World War II and lasting until the late 1970s, most of the African nations achieved independence: at times independence was granted by the European colonial powers, such as in the case of Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe); at times the African nation fought a war to achieve independence, as in the case of Algeria. By the 1980s, no African nation was a colony of a European power, although each nation maintained a relationship of varying closeness with its one-time colonial ruler.

Paris in the 1920sErnest Hemingway was a member of a group of artistic-minded young Americans who, after World War I, moved to Paris to live and write and paint and sculpt and, in writer Kay Boyle’s words, ‘‘be geniuses together.’’ Some members of this group were the writers Kay Boyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, and Hilda Doolittle. The

writer Gertrude Stein, another American who had been living in Paris for some time, dubbed these Americans the ‘‘lost generation’’ partially because of the aimlessness, dissatisfaction with their home country, and refusal to assimilate into the culture of France.

Hemingway came to Paris in 1921 with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, after having been in Europe during the last year of World War I. During the time he and Hadley lived in Paris, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Also at this time, he lived experiences that have become inextricably linked with Hemingway, such as the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. In 1923 he published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems; in 1924, his first short-story collection, In Our Time, appeared, published by Three Mountains Press. Small presses like Three Mountains were an essential element of Lost Generation life; many members of this crowd either ran such presses or had their work published by them. During the 1920s, Hemingway and the rest of the Lost Generation wrote, wandered around Europe, drank, and just spent time together, as a result producing some of the greatest art and writing of the century.

Character Analyses- Nick Adams

Nick Adams is the name that Hemingway gave to the fictional persona, largely autobiographical, whom he often wrote about. Like Hemingway himself, Nick is the son of a doctor (“The Indian Camp”; “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”); he relishes fishing and hunting in the northern peninsula of Michigan (“Big Two-Hearted River”). He romances a young girl named Marjorie, a summer waitress at a summer resort (“The End of Something”; “The Three-Day Blow”). He goes abroad during World War I and serves as an American Red Cross ambulance driver; he also is a courier, carrying chocolates and cigarettes to Italian soldiers on the Austro-Italian battlefront. And, like Hemingway, Nick suffers a knee wound (“In Another Country”). Unlike Hemingway, however, Nick suffered post-traumatic shock; his mind periodically seems to come unhinged (“A Way You’ll Never Be”).

In all, Hemingway wrote at least a dozen stories that center around Nick Adams, and in 1972, Scribner’s published a volume entitled The Nick Adams Stories.

In each of the Nick Adams stories, Nick witnesses—or is a part of—some traumatic event, and Hemingway reveals Nick’s reaction to that event. For example, in “Indian Camp,” Hemingway focuses on Nick’s reaction to a young American Indian man’s slitting his throat from ear to ear after listening to his young wife scream for two days and then scream even more during Dr. Adams’ cesarean that delivers a baby boy. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Nick’s blind hero-worship of his father is contrasted with our knowledge that Nick’s father has a fraudulent aspect to his character. “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow” revolve around Nick’s breaking off with his girlfriend, Marjorie. Nick is not entirely happy with himself afterward; Nick’s friend Bill prodded him to break up with her, and, finally, Nick secretly rejoices that he need not be as thoroughly against marriage as Bill is: Romance and women can still be tantalizing; they need not be shackles on a man’s future success.

Nick’s stay in Summit, Illinois, in “The Killers” ends when he is forced to witness a former prizefighter calmly await certain death by two hired killers. When Nick was a boy, he vowed never to be afraid of death, never to be like the young American Indian husband who “couldn’t stand” life’s demands. Yet here, Nick leaves Summit. He can’t stand to remain in a town where a man lacks the courage to do battle with death—even certain death.

“Big Two-Hearted River” follows Nick after he returns to Michigan from the Italian front during World War I. He takes a train to the upper peninsula and hikes to a stream where he will camp and fish and be alone, where he will slowly perform the rote motions of self-sustaining chores, peeling away the trauma and the scars from his ragged, wounded spirit and newly empowering himself with the healing powers of nature’s rituals.

The old man and the sea

Summary

Initially appearing in a special November, 1951 issue of Life Magazine, The Old Man and the Sea was published in book form in 1952. It encompasses the exploits of its title character, the old Cuban fisherman Santiago over the course of three days. While Santiago is not the novel’s narrator, the tale is related from his perspective and through his consciousness.

At the novel’s start, we are told that impoverished, aged, but admirable fisherman Santiago’s luck had gone bad, that he had not caught a marlin or even a single fish for eighty-four days. So poorly had he fared that his young protege, the boy Manolin, had been forced to leave his mentor to work on another boat. Nevertheless, Manolin’s affection for the old man was so strong that he would beg or even steal to provide him with good and bait, the boy relishing the old man’s stories of past adventures and his knowledge of American baseball and its primary hero, the great DiMaggio. Long a widower, the old man no longer dreamed of wife but of lions roaming on a beach.

On eighty-fifth day, the old man went out into the Caribbean waters around Cuba alone, and in short order he caught a large marlin. The old man waited for the fish to surface before tiring, but this does not happen, and when night fell his small boat was pulled far out to sea by the fish. On the next morning, the old man saw the marlin jump and realized that landing such enormous fish would mean a protracted struggle. The old man buoyed himself by eating bait and remembering his youth when he wrestled with “giant” men in the taverns of Havana. But with another day’s passage the old man’s energies were virtually exhausted his hands deeply cut from holding the rope attached to the marlin. With his remaining strength, Santiago was about to bring the marlin in, but he found that it was too large to fit in his boat and he was forced to tie his catch to the boat’s side. It was then that the sharks began to appear. First, a large Mako shark ripped a huge chunk flesh from the catch. The old man fended this one off, but the smell of blood in the water drew others, and by nightfall of second day, the sharks had ripped the marlin to pieces. All the old man could do was to steer his boat toward lights of Havana.

Upon reaching the shore, the old man carried his gear forward, falling several times from exhaustion. At the pier, his fellow fishermen marveled at the skeleton of a fish larger than any that they have ever seen. The old man was greeted by Manolin, who urged him to rest and to prepare for another day’s fishing when they would again go out together. The novel ends as the old man falls asleep, with the boy at his side, and again dreams of lions on distant shore.

Themes

The Human ConditionIn his novella about a fisherman who struggles to catch a large marlin only to lose it, Hemingway has stripped down the basic story of human life to its basic elements. A single human being, represented by the fisherman Santiago, is blessed with the intelligence to do big things and to dream of even grander things. Santiago shows great skill in devising ways to tire out the huge fish he has hooked and ways to conserve his strength in order to land it. Yet in the struggle to survive, this human must often suffer and even destroy the very thing he dreams of. Thus Santiago cuts his hands badly and loses the fish to sharks in the process of trying to get his catch back to shore. Yet the struggle to achieve one’s dreams is still worthwhile, for without dreams, a human remains a mere physical presence in the universe, with no creative or spiritual dimension. And so at the end of the story, Santiago, in spite of his great loss, physical pain, and exhaustion, is still “dreaming about the lions”—the same ones he saw in Africa when he was younger and would like to see again.

LoveAgainst the seeming indifference of the universe, love is often the only force that endures. This force is best seen in the relationship of Santiago and Manolin, which has endured since Manolin’s early childhood. Over the years, Santiago has taught Manolin to fish and given him companionship and a sense of self-worth that Manolin failed to get from his own father. Manolin in return shows his love for Santiago by bringing him food and by weeping for him when he sees how much he suffered in fighting the marlin. Manolin also plans to take care of Santiago during the coming winter by bringing him clothing and water for washing.

Santiago’s love, of course, extends to other people as well. He loved his wife when they were married, though when she died he had to take down her portrait because it made him feel lonely. Similarly, even in his suffering he thinks of others, remembering his promise to send the fish head to his friend Pederico to use as bait. Santiago’s love also extends to include nature itself, even though he has often suffered at its hands. His love for all living creatures, whether fish, birds, or turtles, is often described, as is his love for the sea, which he sees as a woman who gives or

withholds favors. Some of the younger fishermen, in contrast, often spoke of the sea as a “contestant” or even an “enemy.”

Youth and Old AgeThe comparison and contrast of these two stages of human life runs throughout the story. Although Santiago is obviously an old man, in many ways he retains a youthful perspective on life. For example, he is a keen follower of baseball, and admires players like Joe DiMaggio and Dick Sisler for their youthful skills and abilities. His friendship with Manolin is also based partly on Santiago’s fond recollections of his own youth. For example, he recalls the time he saw the lions on the beach in Africa or when he beat a well-known player in a hand-wrestling match that lasted all day. His repeated wish that the boy were in the boat is not made just because that would make it easier to fight the fish. He also misses the boy as a companion with his own youthful perspective. Yet Santiago does not admire all youth indiscriminately. For example, he contrasts his own attitude toward the sea as a woman with that of “some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats and had motorboats,” who think of the sea as a male enemy who must be defeated. By the same token, Santiago is aware that not everything about old age is attractive to youth. For example, he keeps from Manolin the knowledge that he doesn’t care very much about washing or eating on a regular basis. Santiago is also very aware of the disadvantages of old age. Although he retains much of his youthful strength, for example, he knows that at his age he is no longer able to fight off the sharks that attack his fish. Yet in the end, despite his defeat, Santiago is still able to plan his next fishing expedition and to dream again of the lions who perhaps represent to him the strength and the freedom of youth.

Luck vs. SkillMany people believe in the concept of destiny, a concept in which spiritual forces and luck are combined. When one is lucky, it is considered a sign that one has the spiritual qualities to succeed. By the same token, when one has been unlucky, as Santiago is considered after eighty-four days of not catching any fish, he is dismissed by Manolin’s parents as salao, “which is the worst form of unlucky,” and therefore someone to avoid. Santiago himself believes to some extent in the concept of luck. He senses that his eighty-fifth day of fishing will be a good one and wants to buy that number in the lottery. Later in the story, when his big fish has already been half-eaten by sharks, he says he would pay “what they asked” for some luck “in any form.”

Earlier in the story, however, before he has caught the big fish, Santiago reflects that “It is better to be lucky [than unlucky]. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” In this reformulation of the luck-vs.-skill question, Santiago is clearly favoring skill. This preference is shown by his actions throughout the novel, from the way he gauges the strength of the fish by the pull on the line to the manner in which he calculates and conserves his own strength for the battle he knows lies ahead. After his defeat he says the boy should not fish with him because “I am not lucky anymore.” Yet Santiago quickly changes his mind about going out with Manolin when the boy says that “we will fish together now, for I still have much to learn.” Toward the end, Santiago asks himself “[W]hat beat you” and answers “Nothing. I went out too far.” So in the end, Santiago finds that it is matters of judgment and skill that determine success, not luck.

Style

Point of ViewAll novels use at least one point of view, or angle of vision, from which to tell the story. The point of view may be that of a single character, or of several characters in turn. The Old Man and the Sea uses the omniscient, or “all-knowing,” point of view of the author, who acts as a hidden narrator. The omniscient point of view enables the author to stand outside and above the story itself, and thus to provide a wider perspective from which to present the thoughts of the old man and the other characters. Thus at the beginning of the tale, the omniscient narrator tells us not only what Santiago and the boy said to each other, but what the other fishermen thought of the old man. “The older fishermen . . . looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it. . . .”

SettingThe Old Man and the Sea takes place entirely in a small fishing village near Havana, Cuba, and in the waters of the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water that runs north, then east of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea. Hemingway visited Cuba as early as 1928, and later lived on the coast near Havana for nineteen years, beginning in 1940, so he knew the area very well. The references to Joe Dimaggio and a series of games between the Yankees and the Detroit Tigers in which Dimaggio came back from a slump have enabled scholars to pinpoint the time during which the novel takes

place as mid-September 1950. As Manolin also reminds readers, September is the peak of the blue marlin season. The story takes three days, the length of the battle against the fish, but as Manolin reminds the old man, winter is coming on and he will need a warm coat.

StructureLike the three-day epic struggle itself of Santiago against the fish, Hemingway’s story falls into three main parts. The first section entails getting ready for the fishing trip; then the trip out, including catching the fish and being towed by it, which encompasses all of the first two days and part of the third; and finally the trip back. Another way of dividing and analyzing the story is by using a dramatic structure devised by Aristotle. In the opening part of the story, or rising action, the readers are presented with various complications of the conflict between the other fishermen’s belief that Santiago is permanently unlucky and Santiago and the boy’s belief that the old man will still catch a fish. For example, readers learn that some of the other villagers, like the restaurant owner Pedrico, help Santiago, while others avoid him. The climax of the story, when Santiago kills the fish, marks the point at which the hero’s fortunes begin to take a turn for the worse. This turning point becomes evident when sharks start to attack the fish and leads inevitably to the resolution (or denouement) of the drama, in which Santiago, having no effective weapons left to fight the sharks, must watch helplessly as they strip the carcass of all its remaining meat. Perhaps showing the influence of modern short story writers, however, Hemingway has added to the ending what James Joyce called an epiphany, or revelation of Santiago’s true character. This moment comes when the author implicitly contrasts the tourist’s ignorance of the true identity of the marlin’s skeleton to Santiago’s quiet knowledge of his skill and his hope, reflected in his repeated dreams of the lions on the beach, that he will fish successfully again.

SymbolismA symbol can be defined as a person, place, or thing that represents something more than its literal meaning. Santiago, for example, has often been compared to Christ in the way he suffers. His bleeding hands, the way he carries the boat mast like a cross, and the way he lies on his bed with his arms outstretched, all have clear parallels in the story of Christ’s crucifixion. In this interpretation of the story, Manolin is seen as a disciple who respects and loves Santiago as his teacher. In this context, the sea could be said to represent earthly existence. Humans, as stated in Genesis, have been created by God to have dominion over all other living creatures, including the fish in the sea. Yet humans like Santiago still suffer because of Adam and Eve’s original sin of eating the apple from the tree of knowledge. Santiago, however, says he does not understand the concept of sin. Santiago can also be seen more broadly as a representative of all human beings who must struggle to survive, yet hope and dream of better things to come. Hemingway himself does not seem to mind if his characters, setting, and plot have different meanings to different readers. He once said that he “tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.”

Characters

Character OverviewThe Old Man and the Sea gives a unique opportunity for a detailed study of one character—the old man. He appears in all but two brief scenes in the novel and, for much of the story, is the only human character. His lengthy solitude gives the reader a deep insight into his motivations and inner workings.

We first meet the old man, Santiago, as a seemingly defeated fisherman. He has not caught a fish for eighty-four days and is seen by the other fishermen as unlucky. His apprentice, Manolin, has left him to join a luckier crew (at the behest of his parents), and Santiago relies on Manolin’s charity to get baits for his fishing and food for his table. Yet despite this, his eyes are “cheerful and undefeated.” He continues to put to sea each day and believes he will live to catch more fish. The bulk of the novel follows Santiago’s quest to catch one more big fish and his struggle with the marlin he manages to hook.

Santiago is a complex, multi-faceted character. He is humble and unpretentious. His simple life and recent lack of success mean that he has nothing—he has no food, his sail is patched and he relies on Manolin for bait and other supplies. Yet at the same time he has the courage to continue to dream. He sets off on a quest not just to catch a fish but to catch the biggest fish he has ever caught. To do this, he is willing to go far beyond the limits of younger, more successful fishermen and to test his physical and mental endurance.

Santiago recognizes that his strength lies in his “resolution.” This resolve allows him to keep on fishing, despite his age, despite the loss of his apprentice and despite the fact that he has not caught anything for eighty four days. When he eventually hooks the fish, it is his resolve that keeps him holding on to it, regardless of his fatigue. He is prepared to keep fighting the fish until it kills him.

The old man has a love and respect for the sea not felt by the other fishermen. He calls her “la mar,” a feminine form, full of love, whereas the younger men call her by the masculine “el mar,” seeing her as an opposing force to be conquered. His eyes, his most lively feature, are the same color as the sea. The sea also keeps him company—healing his wounded hands and bringing him safely home. Yet, at the same time, he battles the sea. It provides shelter for his adversary, the fish. To successfully catch the fish and get it home, he must do battle with sea and its inhabitants. In the end it is the creatures of the sea (the sharks) who deprive Santiago of complete victory.

Santiago is one of Hemingway’s “code heroes”—heroes whose courage and dignity in the face of adversity provide an ideal for mankind. Santiago is, however, different from earlier code heroes in that he is the first to be shown as an old man. This is possibly a reflection of the stage of Hemngway’s life and career—The Old Man was his last major work and written following a period in which he had written little that was well received. Many critics have suggested that Santiago’s struggle mirrors Hemingway’s own—that the writer’s dry spell was the equivalent of the fisherman’s eighty four days.

The close of the novel sees Santiago seemingly defeated—he is suffering exhaustion, his hands and back are injured and his great fish is just a skeleton, ravaged by sharks and left to be taken out to sea by the tide. Yet he has gained—he has proven he is still able to catch a fish and has gained the respect of the other fishermen. They are awed not just by the size of the fish, the biggest they have ever seen, but that Santiago has managed to land it unaided. He has also gained companionship. As Manolin tends to him, he notes how nice it is to have human company, instead of talking to the sea as he has done for the past three days. The boy promises to fish with him again and is keen to learn all he knows. Of course underneath this victory is the unspoken awareness of both men that this may not happen. As Manolin leaves the shack he is crying, aware that the old man may never regain his strength.

Although appearing only in the opening and closing pages of the novel, Manolin is also an important character. He is Santiago’s apprentice and disciple. He has been trained by Santiago since the age of five and sees him as a father figure. Although he no longer fishes with the old man, he still has a respect for his abilities which the other fishermen do not have. Manolin’s most important attribute is his loyalty. He stands by Santiago despite the jeers of the other fishermen and helps him with both his fishing equipment and with staples such as food and clothing. Manolin’s loyalty to Santiago is also a reflection of Santiago’s character—he has instilled in Manolin some of the qualities we admire in him, notably courage.

A final significant character un the novel is the marlin. This fish fights determinedly to avoid capture, towing the boat and struggling for two days before Santiago lands him. His struggle is paralleled by Santiago’s struggle and, in the end, so too is his defeat. While Santiago succeeds in capturing him, he then loses the fish to the sharks. In the end of the novel, both the skeleton of the fish and the old man, nearly reduced to a skeleton himself, are objects of admiration for the other fishermen.

Manolin is a young man, based on someone Hemingway knew in Cuba who was then in his twenties. In the story, however, Manolin is referred to as “the boy.” Like Santiago, Manolin comes from a family of fishermen and has long admired Santiago as a masterful practitioner of his trade. Although Manolin’s father has forbidden him to go fishing with Santiago because of the old man’s bad luck, Manolin nevertheless continues to visit Santiago and to help him in whatever ways he can. Manolin shows great concern for Santiago’s health, especially after he sees how Santiago has suffered in catching the big marlin. As a mark of his friendship and respect for Manolin, Santiago has given him certain responsibilities from an early age, such as fetching bait and carrying the lines. By contrast, Manolin’s own father only belittles his son’s relationship with Santiago.

Even though Manolin appears only at the beginning and the end of the story, he is an important character. Manolin’s conversations with Santiago, and Santiago’s longing for the boy’s company when he is alone, reveal the character of both men. Santiago is seen as a loving, patient, and brave man, both proud and humble, who accepts and appreciates life, despite all its hardships. Manolin is shown to be someone who loves and respects Santiago, and who realizes that he can learn things from the old man that he cannot learn at home.

Manolin undergoes an important change between the beginning and end of the story. At the beginning he still defers to the wishes of his parents that he not accompany Santiago fishing since the old man’s luck has turned bad. By the end of the story, however, Manolin has resolved to go with the old man, lucky or not, in spite of his parents’ wishes.

Santiago is an old fisherman of undetermined age. As a young man he traveled widely by ship and fondly remembers seeing lions on the beaches of East Africa. His wife died, and he has taken her picture down because it makes him sad to see it. Now he lives alone in a shack on the beach. Every day he sets forth alone in his boat to make a living.

When the story opens, Santiago has gone eighty-four days without catching a single fish. As a result, he is pitied and regarded by the other fishermen as unlucky. Santiago is still respected by some, however, because of his age and his perseverance. He is a very experienced fisherman who knows well the tricks of his trade, including which fish to use as bait.

Santiago also loves baseball and occasionally gambles. He identifies with Joe DiMaggio, the great center fielder for the Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s. Santiago admires how DiMaggio, whose father was a fisherman, plays in spite of bone spurs in his feet that cause him pain whenever he runs. As an old man, Santiago must also cope with the physical demands of his job in the face of the infirmities of his aging body. Yet he suffers without complaining, and it is this stoic attitude that has won him much respect in the community.

Santiago is not a religious person, but he does think about the meaning of life, and his religious references show that he is very familiar with Roman Catholic saints and prayers. Through the author’s revelation of Santiago’s own thoughts, and the conversations between Santiago and his relatively young companion, Manolin, readers come to sense that despite his setbacks and shortcomings, Santiago remains proud of himself, and this makes his humility both touching and real. Though he strives to attain the most he can for himself, Santiago also accepts what life has given him without complaint.

This largeness of vision also allows Santiago to appreciate and respect nature and all living creatures, even though he must kill some of these creatures in order to live. For example, the old man recalls how he once hooked, brought in, and finally clubbed to death a female marlin, while her faithful mate never left her side once during the ordeal. “That was the saddest thing I ever saw,” the old man comments. “The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.”

Hemingway first wrote about the true incident upon which his story is based in an article entitled “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter” for the April 1936 issue of Esquire magazine. The actual incident took only two days; the fisherman, “half crazy” and crying, was picked up by others after fighting the sharks; and half the carcass was still left at the end. Hemingway’s intentions in creating the character of Santiago may perhaps best be seen in examining how the author altered the true events to shape his telling of The Old Man and the Sea.

In Hemingway’s later version, Santiago’s hooking the fish, hauling it to the boat, fighting the sharks, and then bringing it home takes three days and is completed in heroic fashion with no outside help. Nothing remains of the fish at the end except its skeleton. No mention is made of the fisherman’s state of mind other than that he wants to fish again as soon as he can.

Hemingway’s changes clearly make Santiago more of a single heroic and tragic figure who fights alone, loses almost everything, and yet still is ready to meet life again. Thus, after a night’s sleep and a promise from Manolin that from now on they will fish together, Santiago is making plans not just to resume his life but to strive even harder next time. Similarly, Hemingway turned an anecdote about a piteous, helpless fisherman into a parable of man’s tragic but heroic struggle not merely to survive but, as fellow Nobelist William Faulkner expressed it, to endure.

Historical context

Cuba and the United States in the Early 1950sRelations between Cuba and the United States were generally friendly during most of the 1950s, as they had been

since 1934. That year marked the end of the Platt Amendment, which had given the United States the right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs. United States’ ownership of many Cuban sugar mills, however, was a continuing source of dispute. In 1952, President Prio Socarras was overthrown in a military coup by General Fulgencio Batista y Zalvidar. Batista had previously ruled as dictator from 1933 to 1940, and would rule again until 1959, when he was overthrown by Fidel Castro. Despite Hemingway’s move to Ketchum, Idaho, soon after Castro and his supporters overthrew the Batista regime, Hemingway had supported both the overthrow and what he called the “historical necessity” of the Castro revolution.

Cuban CultureCuban culture during the first half of the twentieth century was marked perhaps foremost by an ambivalent view toward the Catholic Church. Unlike other Latin American countries, church and state in Cuba were constitutionally separate during this period. Because of its long Spanish heritage, however, Cuba was still dominated by Catholic cultural influences. The result was a contradictory situation in which 85 percent of the population called itself Catholic, but only 10 percent actually practiced the faith. The effect of these circumstances are seen many times in The Old Man and the Sea. For example, when Santiago battles the marlin, he says, “I am not religious, but I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish, and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre if I catch him.” Later after he has killed the fish, Santiago wonders if it is a sin to hope that he will make it back to shore with the fish’s meat intact, but he quickly dismisses the thought. “Do not think about sin,” he thought. “There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”

Cubans, like other Latin Americans, place a high value on the innate worth of the individual. Success in life is defined under the code of personalismo as the achievement of one’s spiritual potential or personal destiny rather than one’s financial or career status. Thus Santiago is respected as a skilled and unique individual even though he has not caught a fish in three months. As seen through the eyes of Manolin and the omniscient narrator, Santiago is a heroic and majestic figure who, like Odysseus or Christ, has undergone a great ordeal and provides a model to emulate.

Machismo, or maleness, is an important male goal in traditional Latin American society. Machismo is ideally developed in several ways, including military, athletic, and intellectual exercises, and sexual prowess. Most men are not expected to live up to the machismo ideal in practice. Yet by cultivating these powers, one can approach being the ideal man. Santiago, for example, is admired because of his physical power of endurance. He takes great pride in having in his youth defeated a powerful Negro in an all-day hand-wrestling contest in Casablanca. Santiago also places a high value on mental qualities like his self-confidence and his vast knowledge of the “tricks” of fishing. Santiago is so confident of these qualities that he can bet “everything [the fish] has against only my will and my intelligence.” It has often been noted that in his own life, Hemingway also strove to challenge himself intellectually through his friendships and writing, as well as physically, through boxing, war service, hunting, fishing, and bullfighting. Although Hemingway is sometimes criticized for what is interpreted as an attraction to violence for its own sake, it is not hard to understand why the Latin American belief in machismo appealed to the author.