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Ernest Hemingway Reading Suggestions: The Old Man and the Sea
Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he
has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too [...].
--Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Both structurally and narratively, The Old Man and the Sea is the most simple piece of
fiction Ernest Hemingway ever created. Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, completes his
eighty-fourth day without a catch. Among the superstitious folk of the fishing village, only
Manolin, a young boy and Santiago's one-time apprentice, remains friends with the old man
during the time of his bad luck, takes care of him, and brings the old man food to eat at
night. But after forty days without a catch, Manolin's parents tell him to join with one of
the larger, more successful boats. But even though he no longer fishes with the old man,
Manolin's friendship with Santiago never fails.
The following morning, Santiago takes his small boat past the coastal waters, avoiding the
commercial boats. He hooks a tremendous marlin, and when Santiago tries to bring him in, he
finds that the fish is too big, has too much life in him. Instead of making his catch,
Santiago is towed out to sea by the marlin.
Santiago's struggle is not confined to a battle with the fish. Minutes and hours pass,
lengthen into days. Because of the marlin's size, Santiago cannot simply tie off the line--the
fish would snap through the line's straight tension. Thus, through the strain of thirst and
hunger and the ceaseless heat of the sun, Santiago's old arms bear the burden of the fight
across the entirety of three days. As exhaustion and dehydration continue to eat away at the
old man, Santiago learns so deep a respect for this fish that he thinks, "there is no one
worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity."
At last, on the third day the fish begins to tire, and the delirious old man is able to turn,
then pierce the marlin with his harpoon, and bring the long siege of his catchless, luckless
days to an end.
But the old man's trial has not ended. Only one hour passes before the first shark finds the
marlin's scent in the water, and other sharks follow the first. Santiago fights off each shark,
killing many, first with his harpoon until it is lost, then his knife, then with the rudder of
his own boat. Each shark attack costs him part of his fish. He knows he will lose his fish,
and still he fights with all the strength he still commands. Against all odds, he battles his
way through the sharks and his own delirium, and eventually he drags his boat to shore. But
only the naked skeleton of his marlin remains.
In 1928, Ernest Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida. He loved the Gulf and the Sea, and
immediately took to the fishing, learned to catch the great fish that lived in the Gulf
Stream.
Hemingway spent intermittent years in Key West during the 1930's, also spending time hunting
big game in Africa. In 1937, he went to Spain to report the Spanish Civil War for the North
American Newspaper Alliance.
When Hemingway returned from Spain, he moved to Havana, Cuba, where he began For Whom the Bell Tolls (see
discussion). For Whom the Bell Tolls was widely acclaimed by writers, readers,
critics, and even by the same Pulitzer Prize committee who refused to issue Hemingway their
Prize for political reasons (damn conservatives) as an instant classic--far and away the the
best piece of literature produced in 1940.
But after the publication and success of For Whom the Bell
Tolls, Ernest Hemingway was unable to produce any successful, lengthy work, and in 1950,
when he finally published Across the River and Into the Trees, criticssoundly and
thoroughly criticized Hemingway's writing and structural integrity--even to the extent of
believing him finished as a writer.
In 1952, however, Ernest Hemingway published his novella, The Old Man and the Sea, which
instantly resurrected his status among the literary elite: For The Old Man and the Sea,
Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953; and then, in 1954, the masterpiece
led to the ultimate prize: the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ernest Hemingway Reading Suggestions: The Old Man and the Sea
The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The
shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What
goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
--Selected Letters, taken from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
(Spoiler Warning)
A community dismisses a man in his time of bad luck and old age. His bad luck confirms his old
age--perhaps, even if his catchless streak were to end, then he would still be
dismissed--because he is old. Everyone dies, but the mark is visible on Santiago's face and
therefore his defeat is a public fact.
Santiago knows he is old, and he knows that soon he will die. This is the primary condition in
which the story takes place. His one remaining friend, Manolin, a young boy, is no longer
permitted to fish with the old man. He is alone with his age, his bad luck, and the fact of
his death.
But he takes his ragged boat out into the world he knows, the unknowable sea, to face the
elemental, irreversible truths of his existence. And, in fact, he comes face to face with the
greatest fish he's seen in all the years of his fishing experience. His courageous heart
provides the strength Santiago needs to fight the marlin well beyond the scope of his physical
strength--Santiago succeeds when his failure was already a foregone conclusion.
But he cannot win. The sea is too much for an old man, and the sharks strip him of his
victory. But he never quits the fight. He knew he was defeated before he encountered the
marlin, and still he fought, and still he refused to quit. His fight and his persistence are
futile, and he knows it, and still he fights. When he drags his boat at last upon the shore,
and stumbles off to pass out in his lonely home, the villagers marvel at the unparalleled
skeleton of the marlin. The young Manolin sees the skeleton, too, and intuits the story of
what the old man has done. The old man's defeat was certain from the beginning; and his
triumph is inarguable. The effect on Manolin is Truth.
Old Man . . . Not So Simple?
Theme (Spoiler Warning)
Because Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea with a pure, simple language and
structure, each of the story's elements seems to contain a manifest power, some transcendent
meaning beyond the novella's own scope.
The surface story tells of an old man struggling with, in narrative order: age, luck,
loneliness, commercial fishing boats, the marlin, hunger and dehydration and endurance, the
sea, and the sharks.
Do these elements possess a meaning beyond the surface narrative? The critic first considers
theme: is the old man fighting with nature? With the human condition of aging? With life, or
with death? What is the larger story, here? A casual reading tells the critic that the old
man is fighting against fate: against all of his inevitable failures at the hands of nature and
death. However, a closer, more careful reading should show the critic that Santiago's true
fight is not against anything; rather, his fight is to find his place within the inevitable
order.
Imagery
CHRIST IMAGERY
Once the critic feels comfortable with the thematic environment of The Old Man and the
Sea, how Santiago (and therefore every human being) fought to determine his place in the
natural order, the critic turns to the imagery Hemingway chooses to describe the action of his
scenes. Why does Santiago liken his own heart to the beating heart of a butchered turtle?
Why, in his terrible exhaustion after bringing his boat back to shore, does Santiago flop down
on his sleeping pad with his arms extended, palms up, in fact just like Christ upon the
Crucifix? The critic then recalls the wounds his fishing line cut into Santiago's hands, and
Santiago's struggle with the mast of his boat.
And just like that, the critic has uncovered the Christ imagery that Hemingway intended to show
how Santiago courageously accepted his martyrdom, his lot and fate, the sacrifice he made in
order to be reborn in the form of new courage and endurace within Manolin (Manolin, man, son of
man . . .). An important moment to note takes place on the night before Santiago begins his
voyage: we see the old man through Manolin's eyes. The boy loves the old man, but when the old
man claims to have washed before their shared supper, the boy questions the truth of Santiago's
claim. The boy is almost a man, and soon he must decide to either follow in the path of the
commercial fishers, or the path of the old man. This questioning that takes place is rarely
discussed by the critic. Instead, the critic chooses to make the story a universal metaphor:
resurrected from his inevitable death, Santiago will live on as a figurehead, a redeemer, for
those who have faith in his transcendent sacrifice. But though the story focuses on Santiago's
struggle, the real story is the one that will pass on through Manolin's life. How will Manolin
see that story?
"THE OLD MAN WAS DREAMING ABOUT THE LIONS"
Santiago dreams several times throughout The Old Man and the Sea. During three of the
dreams, the old man is dreaming about the lions. Dreaming about the lions--with their strength
and youthful vigor written into their bodies as they play along the beaches--brings Santiago a
deep, potent feeling of peace and order. He loves the dream lions in the same way that he
loves the boy, Manolin, though he never dreams about the boy.
LIONS AND SHARKS
The critic notes that lions are predators, kings among beasts, and the contentedness that
Santiago experiences in the wake of dreaming about such predators must signify the lasting
truth of Santiago's own meritorious triumph. But why does the critic forget to compare the
lions to those predators Santiago encounters while awake? The critic has plenty to say about
these kings of the sea, these sharks who assure Santiago's eventual failure. Sharks are
mindless mouths, says the critic, untempered forces of decay and destruction. It means nothing
if Santiago kills two or three of them because sharks are inevitable. Killing a shark has no
value, the critic says. Killing a lion, notes the critic who has also read Hemingway's
biography, is a proud, courageous accomplishment. Hemingway loves the safari; therefore, he
can respect, then kill, a lion. But sharks are unworthy of their own status as predators.
But the sharks aren't mindless, nor does Santiago feel any lack of respect for sharks, as a
whole. "The [shark] is cruel and able and strong," Santiago thinks. Later, he compares
himself to that first, Mako shark: "He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger
nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of
anything." However, when the galanos come, the shovel-nosed sharks that arrive in
packs, Santiago thinks of these as bad-smelling scavengers.
The lions are different, though, and it has nothing to do with sharks living as scavengers or
mindless mouths. In this respect, sharks are no different than people. They try to live and
then they die. Some make their lives respectable before death takes them; others are like pigs
slobbering at the trough.
The difference is this: sharks, like people, are made for death. So? says the critic. Lions,
too, are made for death. This is true, but when the critic makes symbols and imagery from
sharks, he loses sight of Santiago. Santiago dreams of the lions on beaches he remembers from
his own childhood. He loves the lions the way he loves Manolin. Lions are young, playful, and
strong. They are not made for death, though they will eventually die. They are, within
Santiago's ordering of nature, the pinnacle--the highest attainable goal. They are young,
strong, and without fear. They cannot be questioned. Santiago fights against his own age, his
waning strength, and his fear of inevitable failure. Because failure, death, is inevitable.
But pride in those things that you have--courage, a heart that refuses to quit, and strength
beyond the toll that time takes--earns you the dream about the lions.
Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it
that he did at the end did him no harm. I could not believe this and I wanted to
argue him out of it but I needed a novel to back up my faith and to show him and
convince him, and I had not yet written any such novel.
--Hemingway on F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway aficionados have a hard time picking and choosing when it comes to
creating
"essential Hemingway" lists. However, while this particular aficionado believes
Hemingway's genius
shines most truly through some of the other formats in which he chose to write,
I'll also suggest there are three
Hemingway novels that deserve their place as some of the most important works of
American fiction.
Hemingway's whittled, declarative prose makes reading any of his work a compelling,
intuitive
experience. True, the value of his commitment to simple, true sentences and the
recognition of omission
in fiction is found most clearly in his short fiction; and this revolutionary style
dramatically
affected the course of American Literature. Ernest Hemingway's contribution,
however, provides much
more than a stylistic sensibility. Hemingway produced three potent, occasionally
flawed but unwaveringly brilliant
novels that not only demonstrate the concise, focused power of his prose, but also
isolate,
embody, and eventually immortalize the post World War I ex-patriot scene, and what
is now known as
the "Lost Generation."
The Sun Also Rises was first published in
1926, a few months after Hemingway published the parody,
The Torrents of Spring. The Sun Also Rises describes, through action rather than
modifiers, the
post World War I ex-patriot scene. We follow what is essentially the inverted, hopeless post-war
love story
of the injured Jake Barnes. Jake is in love with Brett Ashley, and she, in turn, loves Jake;
however, Jake's
war injury has rendered him impotent. In various ways, everyone in The Sun Also Rises is
impotent with
the exception of Jake's friend, Robert Cohn, a young and eager writer from New York.
The Sun Also Rises gives us the world of the disenchanted, "lost" generation facing life
after hope has died. Those who haven't lost hope are distrusted, even despised, by those like
Jake who have lost their capacity for redemption. The Lost speak a language of petty bigotry and
spite. As Jake learns to live with his despair, he learns to hate those who do not, or will not,
know despair.
Critics identify this attitude as Hemingway's own failure--perhaps noting a lack of narrative
distance between author and narrator. In fact, there is plenty of sexism, anti-semetism, and
racism
throughout The Sun Also Rises. While unfriendly critics look to Hemingway for the source,
friendly
critics suggest that Jake (rather than Hemingway) and his ex-patriot community are the wounded,
abandoned source of this bigotry.
One last critical note: Perhaps because of Ernest Hemingway's preoccupation with eliminating
every unnecessary
word from his prose, critics have occasionally taken Hemingway to task for the first chapter of
this
novel. Hemingway devotes the entire chapter to introducing Robert Cohn. The second chapter does
the same, though this time Hemingway grounds the introduction as the temporal beginning of the
story.
Critics argue the following: having two introductory Cohn chapters is nothing more than
redundancy;
the second chapter, grounded in the present-moment of the narrative, brings the reader directly
into
the story's action while providing all the necessary background information of the first chapter;
and
finally, the bulk of the novel's action, while never completely forgetting him, proceeds with
fewer and
fewer Cohn-driven scenes (until the end).
These are reasonable arguments; however, I believe the first chapter supports the novel as a
whole in two
distinct ways that the second chapter, even with some editing, could never achieve on its
own.
Chapter One serves the purpose of a true introduction: this is the only place in the novel that
exists outside of the story's moment, and the only place where Jake Barnes as narrator
separates
himself from Jake Barnes as character. Every other chapter proceeds chronologically, and
if the narrator were to separate himself throughout the novel, then the tension would too easily
flutter and die. In the discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls
I'll explore some fundamental differences between the necessity of narrative distance in
first-person
narratives (in novels such as The Sun Also Rises and
A Farewell to Arms) compared to the narrative distance required by third-person narratives
(in
novels such as For
Whom the Bell Tolls). In this particular novel, the reader needs an orderly progression of
events to
maintain a grasp on the story's sensibilities. Therefore, this first chapter allows the reader
to manage a tantalizing glimpse of where Jake Barnes as narrator is telling the story; in
the end, this chapter allows us to see how fundamentally Jake has changed.
This ties directly into the other significant affect this chapter has on the novel's whole. The
narrative distance we experience only in the first chapter allows the reader to see why Robert
Cohn is so significant to Jake Barnes. The scorn and bigotry Jake uses to describe Robert here
is bitter and resentful--rather than justified. Only through the narrative distance can we
understand the self-judgment this implies: the first chapter, rather than judging Cohn, actually
is an admission of Jake's own terrible limitations.
The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was
good but
dull. The wine was bad but not dull. It took the enamel off your teeth and left it
on the roof
of your mouth.
--A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms was
first published in 1929.
In the discussion of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises,
I referred to a common critical debate concerning the redundancy of that novel's
first chapter.
The first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, however, introduces the reader to
the story with
writing as potent as any other novel within the body of American Literature. By
bringing together
the primal vibrancy of the landscape with the numb, powerless perspective of a
disheartened, ex-soldier,
Hemingway offers the reader a glimpse of the irrevocable wound inflicted on young
men fighting in
wars they couldn't possibly understand.
Unlike the hopeless love story that narrator Jake Barnes tells in The Sun Also
Rises, the narrator of this
novel, Lieutenant Frederic Henry (Signor Tenente), describes the discovery of hope
in his loving of an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.
Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American who was living in Italy when the war
began, and
enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. His friend from the army,
Rinaldi, introduces
Frederic to Catherine, and Frederic responds by waging a steady but aggressive
campaign to bed the nurse.
She demonstrates that she can "play" as well; therefore, initially, Frederic sees
their courtship as a game,
but an injury and a growing uncertainty about the purpose of war
inspires new, unnamed urgency inside him, and he places all of his hopes for
wholeness on his relationship
with Catherine.
After his recovery, the Lieutenant realizes that he has become dependent upon this
shared fantasy
the two of them are developing; but he is abruptly called back to the front, and he
finds himself
mired in the results of the
Battle of Caporetto (Follow link to an Answers.com analysis).
Italian losses were disastrous in the Battle of Caporetto:
the Austro-Hungarian military, organized
and supported by German forces, crashed through the Italian front and took
approximately 275,000
prisoners, killed 40,000, and wounded many more. The Italian army was completely
routed, and when the soldiers
fell into a chaotic retreat, the Italian commanders attempted to restore order by
way of severe
punitive measures. Because the bulk of the Italian infantry was comprised of
untrained farmers who
understood very little in the way of military protocol, these punitive measures
resulted in
numerous executions of both grunt soldiers and officers.
The remainder of A Farewell to Arms deals with Lieutenant Henry's reaction
to the Battle on
all levels: his active, physical reaction; his intellectual reaction; his emotional
reaction as
he reconsiders his relationship with Catherine; and, finally, his spiritual
reaction.
A Farewell to Arms fulfills all of the depth and complexity promised by the
paradoxes established in the first chapter: the
unchecked horror of the war within the pastoral beauty of the Italian countryside;
the necessity
of order in any military system conflicting with the spiraling chaos of violence;
the unquenchable
need for love trying to surface from a bottomless need for numbness and emotional
oblivion.
Readers can find hints of the many thematic elements that were later to become
Ernest Hemingway
trademarks within The Sun Also Rises, but here, in A Farewell to Arms
at the age
of thirty, Hemingway demonstrates a marked maturity and depth of thinking through
the extension
of thematic conflict and inevitability.
One such motif is Hemingway's notion of masculinity, and the respect Hemingway pays
to characters who
fulfill certain masculine obligations: virility, assumption of command, competence,
acceptance
of violence's necessity, and a certain level of justice that accompanies the
dictates of loyalty.
In A Farewell to Arms, loyalty takes center stage as Lieutenant Henry
descends into
a world of spiraling horror and chaos, and loyalty as a force of justice is
confronted, then
overwhelmed by the opposing force of abandonment and isolation. If, as a young,
inexperienced
soldier, his sense of morality fell in line with his acceptance of the "masculine
code," then, later,
as a tired, desperate man, he discovers that such sensibilities are only euphemisms
for instinctual,
universal cruelty--results of the universal condition of abandonment.
With this idea, Hemingway brings us back to the necessity of love. Throughout
their courtship,
both Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley acknowledge that their relationship is
like a game, a
diversion from reality--and this idea is the matured, complex development of a
similar concept
found in The Sun Also Rises. At the end of the first, Brett Ashley tells
Jake that they "could
have had such a damned good time together," to which Jake responds, "Isn't it
pretty to think so?" There,
the reader touches the conflict between loveless reality and the human compulsion
to love.
Consider the larger, encompassing scope of the exact same conflict, as the story
develops in
A Farewell to Arms. Frederic Henry's compulsion to love escalates into a
dire need for Catherine Barkley.
As his compulsion escalates, his initial impressions of the nurse--she's unstable,
a woman psychologically lost in the trivialities of mental games and
diversions--experience a radical change. As his perspective changes, the reader
begins to see
the unique, conflicted wholeness of Catherine Barkley's character. Critics often
compare the
fullness of her character to that of another of Hemingway's female characters,
Maria (I examine
this crucial comparison from Maria's angle in the discussion of For Whom the Bell
Tolls).
Unfriendly critics argue that Catherine Barkley represents one of the two female
portraits created by Hemingway throughout the sum of his fiction. The first
portrait includes characters such as Brett Ashley from The Sun Also
Rises: these are aggressive, disconnected women. The second portrait includes
characters such as Maria, from For Whom the Bell
Tolls, and Catherine Barkley: these are simple, submissive stereotypes of women
who can only be completed by men.
Without a doubt, there is a strong structural similarity between Maria and
Catherine: both represent women who suffer as a consequence of men who intrude upon
their lives. Both are Hemingway vehicles for developing lines of thematic tension.
However, there is nothing flat or subversive about the way Hemingway portrays
Catherine Barkley. She does develop a fantasy of wholeness, of completion, that
requires Frederic's presence; but this fantasy is not a pathetic, subconscious
diversion for Catherine. She foregrounds the diversion herself, and is thoroughly
complicit in creating the illusion of submission. Her motivation is to create the
diversion.
In fact, by showing how Catherine's wholeness is driven by her need for diversion,
Hemingway
completes the wholeness of A Farewell to Arms. If the dream of love within
the reality of abandonment inspires the hopeless, dreamless world of The Sun
Also Rises, then in A Farewell to Arms that dream, still a fantasy,
becomes a requirement of survival, an obligatory diversion.
In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway expands the game metaphor exponentially to
incorporate
all of humanity's futile motions--such as war and love (you might find this to be
an appropriate time for reflecting on how both motions are intertwined in the
novel's
title). The Lieutenant Frederic Henry, who introduces himself to the reader in the
first chapter
as the experienced, disillusioned, distant narrator of our story, is a man who
devoted himself
to the fantasies forced upon him by the simple fact of his existence. He
is a man who was forced to confront the fleeting, temporary, but equally necessary
nature of
masculinity, loyalty, war, and love. These motions, he now believes, are only
temporary diversions; but they are a requirement of survival.
For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere,
once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere.
--For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls was
first published in 1940, and marks a significant departure from the structure Ernest Hemingway
used in his previous novels. Two important differences are worth noting here.
Unlike first-person narrator Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (see
discussion) and first-person narrator Lieutenant Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (see
discussion), the narrator of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a distant, third-person
observer. While this narrator usually restricts "his" perspective to that of the novel's
protagonist, Robert Jordan, there are several occasions where
the narrator allows himself the license to describe scenes outside the scope of Robert Jordan's
perspective, and as we approach the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the narrative
distance increases. We'll discuss the significance of perspective and distance in a
moment.
The second important structural difference relates to the time line. The Sun Also Rises
covers, accounting for the "present" moment of the story alone, approximately a year's worth of
time. In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway covers the time period between 1916 and
1918. For Whom the Bell Tolls, however, follows a series of events that unfold in three
days.
The American, Robert Jordan, has left the United States to enlist in the Republican (Loyalist)
military during the Spanish Civil War (follow link for an
Answers.com analysis), in May, 1937. Robert Jordan enlists as a demolitions specialist,
and, with the assistance of a group of Spanish Guerilla fighters (guerillos), he must sneak
across
enemy lines into Fascist (Nationalist) territory to destroy a bridge controlled by the
Fascists.
Robert Jordan joins a group of guerillos commanded by a strained, dual
leadership. Pablo is the official leader of the band. Once a fiercely passionate patriot,
Pablo has devolved into a reckless individualist. As the story develops, the reader will note
how
thoroughly the other characters insult Pablo, even physically abusing him, to the point of
psychologically emasculating him. In addition, the narrator saddles Pablo with all sorts of
subhuman imagery, equating him, somewhat paradoxically, with the selfish force of brutal
beasts. This unusual, paradoxical imagery--the emasculated man versus the forceful, stubborn
animal--makes Pablo into perhaps the most complex and intriguing character in any of Ernest
Hemingway's novels.
Pablo's woman, Pilar, the true leader of the band of guerillos, forms an immediate alliance
with Robert Jordan. Pablo establishes his hostility toward Robert Jordan just as quickly.
When Pablo declares that none of his guerillos will help Robert destroy the bridge, Pilar and
the rest of the camp overrule Pablo, and Pablo is forced to consent. Some of the guerillos
urge Robert Jordan to kill Pablo; Pilar says that Pablo is harmless.
The guerillos are caring for Maria, a young woman recently captured and raped by the Fascists.
An intuitive, emotional bond connects Robert Jordan to Maria from the moment of their first
encounter, and even though she has been raped, both Robert Jordan and Maria feel completed in
each other's company. They fall instantly in love, and they immediately consummate their
feelings.
In the discussion
of A Farewell to Arms I referred to a common connection literary critics like to make
between Catherine Barkley and Maria. I previously explored how unfriendly critics liken the
two female characters as falling into a singular portrayal, one of two subsets of women that
Ernest Hemingway created.
This critical line argues that both women are not really women. They are both stereotypical,
submissive characters--supremely offensive stereotypes--that fully depend on men for
fulfillment of their private motivations. Even more damning, from a literary perspective,
these critics state that these women, in fact, have no motivations. In literature, of course,
even flat stereotypes play significant roles in plot development--as long as each of these flat
characters is neatly packaged with a relevant motivation.
I would suggest that these critics reread A Farewell to Arms. Only a critic with a preconceived
agenda could fail to see Catherine Barkley's motivation. Catherine's motivation, of course, is
the force that changes the direction of Frederic Henry's motivation. She desires a way to
divert her thoughts from the cold truth of abandonment. In despair, she designs a fantasy to
divert her in the same way Henry has diverted himself with war, loyalty, and the code of
masculinity by which he has tried to live. Moreover, Catherine's motivation is in no way
submissive--hers is a dominant motivation that calls Frederic away from war, calls him to play
the foregrounded game of love. She is not incomplete, nor is she a flat character, and she
certainly does not suffer from a lack of motivation.
With that out of the way, I can now join these same critics in denouncing Maria as a flat,
stereotypical, offensively submissive female character without any motivation. While Ernest
Hemingway does a brilliant job of elevating Maria to a symbolic representation of
Spain--specifically, Robert Jordan's love for Spain--Maria remains a static, incomplete
character without any notable motivation. Feminist critics disdain the way the recently raped
Maria finds wholeness in union with Robert Jordan; a wholeness, even, to the extent that the
"earth moves" for her twice in these three days when having sex with Robert Jordan. I fully
agree with these critics. Ernest Hemingway shows a remarkable lack of insight, if he believes
that Maria could have the capacity for such oneness with a man after experiencing rape--and
even if she did have the capacity for such completion, who could believe that she would want
it?
One more or less relevant sidenote to Maria's character--or lack--returns us to her metaphoric
value to For Whom the Bell Tolls as a structurally cohesive unity. Robert Jordan needs
Maria to symbolize the potency of the earth--he needs Maria to reconnect him to life. Robert
Jordan is a uber-rational man; but through his experiences with Maria and with the people of
Spain, he "evolves" into a romantic. This new persona enables him to achieve a positive
resolution to his preoccupation with suicide--a preoccupation that takes center stage at the
conclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The thematic value of victory in defeat plays a
large role in Ernest Hemingway's later works, most significantly in The Old Man and the
Sea.
Finally, we can now return to the narrator of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the
significance, and consequence, of having a third-person observer with varying degrees of
omniscience tell us this story.
Because all the novel's action occurs within the span of three days, we require a wider
narrative lens. In order to see the poignancy of Spain, the potency to which Robert Jordan
eventually surrenders, we must have access to a world that Robert Jordan could not fully
understand through his limited experience. Or, more to the point, the reader could not
possibly understand the beauty and grace of these Spaniards that Robert Jordan loves without
entering their thoughts and experiences.
This need contrasts with that required by either The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to
Arms. In those books, the reader follows the protagonists across longer periods of time.
In addition, neither of those protagonists surrenders himself to a larger purpose--why should a
reader look outside the experiences of either Jake Barnes or Frederic Henry? But For Whom
the Bell Tolls requires a surrender to an omnipotent force, and requires the surrender from
both Robert Jordan and from the reader. For this reason, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a
signficantly more ambitious and successful accomplishment. Of course, this necessary narrative
distance also highlights character flaws--such as the weakness of Maria as a character--because
inevitably the narrator will need to show us why she matters.
But this is one flaw--and all masterpieces, literary or other, contains flaws. For Whom the
Bell Tolls represents one of Ernest Hemingway's greatest accomplishments, both as a writer
and as a human being specifically because it demonstrates his capacity for change. Later,
perhaps, Hemingway would lose this capacity and it would cost him his life.
The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The
shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What
goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
--Selected Letters, taken from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
An Introductory, Critical Look into Hemingway's
Writing
Ernest Hemingway--before the literary world developed its current aesthetic, perhaps moral,
aversion to his profound contributions to the art of fiction--was respected for his spartan,
declarative style. Hemingway's desire to discover the limits of communicating experience
urged him to follow a path--though seemingly intuitive and even cliche according to current
standards--that split fundamentally, and decisively, from literary tradition.
Hemingway believed that communicating experience to another human being is the heart,
even the definition, of fiction. Finding ways to delve into the most basic, root commonalities
of human experience required, he believed, an acceptance of pleibian, universal truths, rather
than a desire for individuality. For artists of all callings, the invisible line between the
individual's self and the universality of humanity is the essential location where all
artistic creation takes place. There can be no true communication without an understanding
of this boundary. If Dickens, Austen, and Tolstoy attempted to mesmerize the reader into
forgetting this boundary--by creating colorful, bustling semblances of reality--then Hemingway
attempted to foreground the boundary. You cannot recreate the world, says Hemingway, because
every individual experiences only an infinitesemal piece of the whole. Instead, fiction has
the unique capacity to whittle down reality, to remove traces of individual experience rather
than to depend upon them. Most significantly in his short stories, this technique allowed
Hemingway to bring moments of precious meaning to the places in his fiction that he
deliberately
omitted. The most famous example of this type of omission is found in "Hills Like White
Elephants" (see discussion)
When considering Hemingway's effect on literature from a critical perspective, we can see how
his attempt to bring forth "common experience" through common language might have, ironically,
alienated a large segment of the common reader population. The assumptions people
make about common experience are the central targets of new criticism, and most notably,
perhaps, postcolonial thinking. These schools of theory argue that assumptions of
common experience are in fact acts of violence.
Many arguments are made, both criticising and defending, Hemingway's depiction of women.
One line of argument, again both criticising and defending, follows a study of the
"roundness" or accuracy of his female characters. Opponents argue that Hemingway's
fiction portrays women by way of a singular mold--a flat, incomplete mold--preventing any
authentic representation of "woman" as a potentially individual human being. If Hemingway
is attempting to describe the common experience of women, then these critics identify the
irony of his effort. Struggling with half-citizen status might be a common experience for
women; fulfillment as a sounding board for male common experience is not.
Proponents, on the other hand, argue that while Hemingway strove to whittle the language
down to these commonalities, he was not proposing universal truth. Hemingway's struggle was
the
struggle of communicating his own experience to an audience. Proponents of Hemingway's
method argue that the hopeless isolation of the individual forms the core of his work, using
whittled-down fiction to communicate through the impenetrable barrier between human beings.
This barrier, the ethereal boundary water identified by all artists, was the fundamental
truth of Hemingway's experience, argue his supporters. This distance becomes the common
narrative perspective that speaks throughout his stories, and the distance allows for a
self-depreciating
irony. The limitations, the sadness, is Hemingway's own--not a fault of his
characters.
As a result of Hemingway's work, nearly an entire generation of young writers attempted to
follow
his example. The sparse, simple voice he used in his writing encouraged students to mimic his
style as if this voice was an answer to the complexity of modern existence. Inevitably, this
movement of imitation could not survive, though its traces are now permanent fixtures within
the
literary canon. This seems obvious to me: the unrelenting perspective of Hemingway's voice
was revolutionary--not for his bluntness, nor his judgments, nor even the simplicity of his
dictionary--because he was able to place his own perspective within the larger perspective of
his
generation. Two hundred years from now, readers will still understand his stories, and the
struggle of his characters within the confines of Hemingway's vision. Critics will continue
to build stronger and stronger cases for his mysogeny, or, as Anthony Burgess once declared
while standing over Hemingway's grave, that Hemingway's writing was filled with overpowering
homosocial tendencies. These cases are, I believe, legitimate, albeit in a limited way--in the
sort of way that criticizes running as bad for the knees. Of course Hemingway's perspective
was
limited. After all, that was his point.
