Ernest Miller Hemingway works

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

In this blog I am going to write about two novels by Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and The Sea and A Farewell to Arms. The American author Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Old Man and The Sea

A Farewell to Arms

Language Style

Hemingway’s use of Language 

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

English sprinkled with Spanish words and phrases. Many sections, especially dialogue and interior monologue, are written as though they have been translated word-for-word from Spanish to English and retain the structure and cadence of the Spanish language.

The Old Man and the Sea:-

2.1 Analyses of the Language Style

Among all Hemingway’s works, The Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Its language is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway always manages to choose words concrete, specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and conversational. He seldom uses adjectives and abstract nouns, and avoids complicated syntax. Hemingway’s strength lies in his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are powerfully loaded with the tension, which he sees in life. Where he does not use a simple and short sentence, he connects the various parts of the sentence in a straightforward and sequential way, often linked by “and”. In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue as an effective device. Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea:

“What do you have to eat?” the boy asked. 

“No, I will eat at home; do you want me to make the fire?” 

“No, I will make it later on, or I may eat the rice cold.” 

Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative. But it is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows.

2.2 The Forming of the Language Style 

How Hemingway has formed such a writing style? The reason is related to his own experiences. “His use of short sentences and paragraphs and vigorous and positive language, and the deliberate avoidance of gorgeous adjectives are some of the traces of his early journalistic practices.” After leaving school, he went to the Kansas City Star, which was one of the best newspapers in America at that time. He served as its eager and energetic reporter. As a journalist, 

Hemingway trained himself in the economy of expression. He once said that, during his working in Star, he had to learn to use simple sentences, which is very useful to him; and that th experience of working as a journalist would not do harm to a young writer, instead it is very helpful if he could cast it off timely. He laid stress on “speaking” with facts and objected groundless concoction in writing. His descriptions of details are full of factuality, and are as precise as news reports.

2.3 The Influence of the Language Style 

The influence of Hemingway’s language style is great. In the latter part of his life, Hemingway was known as “Papa Hemingway”. It refers mainly to his contribution to the development of a new writing style in America—the colloquial style. A critic named Storm Jameson discussing “The Craft of the Novelist” in the January 1934 issue of The English Review, she advanced an explanation of Hemingway’s popularity: It is this simplicity, this appeal to out crudest interested, which explains Hemingway’s success…In English at least his success has been largely with the intellectuals. They have praised his simplicity, his directness…And Hemingway’s influence as a stylist was “neatly expressed in the praise of the Noble Prize Committee about ‘his powerful style—forming mastery of the art’ of writing modern fiction.”

 "A Farewell to Arms":-

Ernest Hemingway's prose style is often considered straightforward. He avoided what is called "purple prose," giving the reader only as much description as needed and keeping dialogue tight and natural. This style was the result of training as a journalist, in which overt poetic technique is generally shunned in favor of sparse, tight writing.

While such a style would seem antithetical to interesting and absorbing drama, it works in Hemingway's favor. In A Farewell to Arms, the prose style would appear to be at odds with what is often a highly emotional story, but the lack of flowery description or melodramatic dialogue helps sell the realism. It prevents the love story between Frederic and Catherine from sliding into melodrama or sentimentality since everything is presented so plainly to the reader.

Even more emotionally charged moments, such as when Frederic prays for God to save Catherine from dying after she starts to hemorrhage in child-bed, are depicted in this way:

The Writing Techniques—the Way to Use Facts

The Old Man and the Sea:-

3.1 The Facts Are Selected 

Apart from the language style, which The Old Man and the Sea is famous for, the writing techniques in this novel are also worth paying close attention to. A very important one is the way to use facts. The main events of the story seem to be based on a real incident, which is described by Hemingway in an article about fishing in the Gulf Stream in Esquire for April 1936. So the novel is full of facts, such as the habit of fish, the technique of the novel lies in the way to use these facts. 

Firstly the facts are selected. “Hemingway’s old man, boy, sea, fish, and sharks are not so much built up in our minds, detail by detail, facts by facts, as drive into our mind by the force and the sympathy with which the author himself shares in their imaginary existence.” Like any realist, he relies on selection. When the giant marlin finally surfaces, his tail “was higher than a big scythe blade and very pale lavender above the dark blue water.” Sargasso weed is bleached and yellow by day; Tuna are silver when they jump out of the water, but blue-backed and fold-sides when swimming. 

Hemingway never describes them excessively, but chooses some effective ones. He uses them with a sense of how colors shift and change in their relationship. Without selection, there can be no intensity, and compression.

3.2 The Facts Are Used as a Device to Make the Fictional World Accepted 

Secondly, the facts are used as a device to make the fictional word accepted. The novel is not simple a manual for us to study the technique to catch a fish or how to survive in a boat. The author tries to implicate people’s imagination in what is happening by appealing to our love practical knowledge. This shows “the facts are fundamentally a device, a technique of reassuring our sense of everyday values.” So they can help to make us accept more readily what the author has invented and made more dramatic than in everyday life. Still take the use of color as example: “The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray-blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.” These facts show readers the process of fishing, which mostly comes from the author’s own experience. From these facts, which are vivid, precise and terse, readers can learn a lot about how to catch a fish and can also feel as if they themselves were catching a fish. Then they will have the sense that what the author describes is real and believable. Therefore, as Kenneth Graham has said many facts in the novel about fishing and about the sea have a double function: They satisfy people’s sense of the real world. And this is what underlies Hemingway’s famous statement that his intention was always to convey to the reader “the way it was.”

 A Farewell to Arms:-

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Hemingway’s Characterization

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

➡️Physical Appearance

Physical appearances often give us an immediate clue to "what lies beneath" in this book. When we meet Pablo, for example, we learn from the description that he's grizzled, scarred, a bit oddly shaped, with close-set narrow eyes, and has a somewhat hostile look on his face. A shady, unpleasant character.

Pilar is monumentally large, strong and thick, with a warm brown face that looks like a "model for a granite monument." Her looks reflect her courage, strength, good humor, and larger-than life vitality.

Robert Jordan has a physique which suits his restraint, his toughness, and his weathering by the war: he's tall, lean and muscular – presumably rather chiseled – with rough, sun-streaked hair and skin burnt by the sun and wind. Plus those sharpened, clear eyes.

Maria's eyes, on the other hand, are "hungry, young, and wanting." A head of cropped hair, which people seem to agree mars her beauty, testifies to the horrible events of her past which still haunts her.

➡️Direct Characterization

Through Robert Jordan's reactions and the commentary of other members of the band about each other, we get plenty of direct information. Robert Jordan thinks Pablo is a bad egg the moment he sees him, and tells us so, and every other character basically says the same. Anselmo, on the other hand, is always a "very good man" (at one point even the narrator just straight up says it), and El Sordo's a courageous, trustworthy, and all around capital guy. By the end of the second chapter, we know from other characters that Pilar is brave, barbarous, and at times very gentle. About Robert Jordan himself, the narrator does give us some important direct descriptions, telling us right at the outset, for example, that he doesn't really value his own life and that his devotion to his cause is strong.

➡️Speech and Dialogue

"That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?" (3: 127) Thanks for that, Agustín – can we even call that a sentence? There are several potty-mouths in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a lot of interesting cusses, though Hemingway never writes them out: he always replaces them with "obscenity" or "unnameable" or whatnot (a few times, he does let very foul words in untranslated Spanish).

Swearing is one of the major ways in which characters are given color, and personality. It defines Pilar and Agustín, and the more cynical way Robert Jordan swears also contrasts him with his more exuberantly obscene Spanish friends. Love of cursing in general is meant to be characteristically Spanish.

Hemingway also lends that "Spanish-ness" to his characters' language by using really awkward straight translations into English: lots of thee's and thou's, and words which mean something different in normal English than Spanish (for example, "molest," which means bother in Spanish and is a much more everyday word). Every so often, a character will also break into a regional dialect, as Anselmo does when he curses Pablo out at the very beginning of the book.

➡️Actions

If somebody steals your detonators and runs away with them, thereby screwing your mission over and dooming you and your friends to die, chances are he's a jerk. If, even after he returns, he kills the people he's recruited to help him, he's still a jerk, though he's a jerk on your side.

The actions of characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls reveal a lot about them. As it's a war novel, the most common traits revealed by action are bravery and brutality: Pilar's bravery is evident from her standing up to Pablo and willingness to go ahead with the mission, as well as her military performance, while Pablo's brutality is shockingly clear from her story about the fascist massacre in their town. Resolve is another big one: Anselmo's the guy who stays put in the snowstorm, even when it gets really bad, because he doesn't want to disobey Robert Jordan. If you want courtesy, think of El Sordo's bringing a bottle of whiskey specially for Robert Jordan from La Granja, this in the middle of a war.

The Old Man and and The Sea

➡️Personification

With the old man being alone on the sea and all, a lot of characterization of animals is done, not of people. And a great tool for such characterization is the use of personification. The old man talks about jellyfish, turtles, birds, and, most important, the marlin, as if they were people. He gives them thought processes, even personalities. And all of his comments on the animals tell us more about him, which counts as a characterization tool in its own right, which is kind of nifty.

➡️Direct Characterization

Hemingway doesn’t beat around the bush. How do we know the old man is proud? Because he says that the old man suffered "no loss of true pride." How do we know Manolin loves Santiago? Because he says "the boy loved him."

➡️Physical Characterization

We get some pretty intense descriptions of the old man’s gaunt, emaciated body. Hemingway never lets us forget the one key fact that this guy is old and not in top-notch fish-fighting condition. That, of course, makes him that much more impressive for winning the battle against the marlin. So, oddly enough, the description of the old man’s physical shortcomings serves to highlight his strengths.

➡️Speech and Dialogue

Yes, the old man talks to himself. No, he isn’t crazy. And in case you don’t believe us, he tells you that himself. He just doesn’t have a radio or a newspaper or an iPhone, so he finds companionship in himself and in the creatures around him. This reminds us that the old man is "strange," in the sense of "alienated," and that he is forced to do his battle in isolation from others.

Point of View

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

The novel presents the narrative through an omniscient point of view that continually shifts back and forth between the characters. In this way, Hemingway can effectively chronicle the effect of the war on the men and women involved. The narrator shifts from Anselmo's struggles in the snow during his watch to Pilar's story about Pablo's execution of Fascists and El Sordo's lonely death to help readers more clearly visualize their experiences.

In "Ringing the Changes: Hemingway's 'Bell' Tolls Fifty," Michael Reynolds writes, "Without drawing undue attention to his artistry, Hemingway has written a collection of short stories embedded in a framing novel." Against the backdrop of the group's attempt to blow up the bridge, each character tells his or her own story: Maria tells of her parents' murder and her rape; Jordan shares what he learned about the true politics of war at Gaylord's in Madrid...

"The Old Man and the Sea":-

In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway tells the story of Santiago, an old fisherman who goes out into the ocean and hooks a large marlin. The fish ends up dragging the old man through the ocean for more than two days before he is able to kill it. Hemingway's story is one of determination, pride, and struggle, but how does the choice of narrative point of view impact the reader's experience and interpretation?

As you probably know by now, literary analysis is interested in the strategic use of literary devices, which includes the author's choice of narrative point of view. The point of view employed in The Old Man and the Sea is known as third person perspective; in other words, the narrator is not a character in the story, but rather takes the form of a bystander of sorts, who relates the events to us without always clarifying how they have come to know about them.

 "A Farewell to Arms":-

Point Of View Henry narrates the story in the first person but sometimes switches to the second person during his more philosophical reflections. Henry relates only what he sees and does and only what he could have learned of other characters from his experiences with them.

The novel is written from the third-person point of view of Frederic Henry. Readers get an inside look into the thoughts of Henry as he struggles to make sense of the war and experiences passionate love for Catherine. Oftentimes Henry works through a problem in his head and readers share that journey through the text. Henry is not without fault and often admits in his mind when he is lying or afraid.

The thoughts and personalities of the other characters are described through Henry’s eyes but his observations seem sound and perceptive. Sometimes Henry’s opinion is reflected in the conversations of the others which give his opinions more clout. For example, when he wonders if Catherine is crazy and she later admits that she was a “little crazy” when they first met.