Ernest Hemingway

The great realist of the 20th century in American fiction and perhaps the best
representative of the so called lost generation. Was born on Chicago Illinois 1899.
After he graduated from high school he enlisted as a honorary lad in the Red Cross in
Italy and I 1918 he was severely wounded on the Italian front. He returned to the U.S. and
soon went to Canada where he wrote for a while for the Toronto Star. Finding himself
unhappy with America he took off for Paris as a foreign correspondent from now on
Hemingway divided his time between France , Spain, (where he took part in the Civil war and
also took part in the famous Fiestas) America, Africa, and Cuba. He also took part in WWII,
he spent the last years of life in U.S. . He was by now a very sick man because he was injured
everywhere he went and he ended his life by committing suicide at Sun Valley Idaho in 1961.
Hemingways first book In Our Time is a collection of short stories, Nick Adams the
central figure appears in 7 of the stories and is a sort of alter-ego for the young Hemingway.
This honest , sensitive boy is brought into contact with scenes of void, pain and evil which are
forever registered in his memory and shape his future physiognomy.
While in the war Nick also gets physically wounded, a fact that culminates the forms
the psyhical ones. It is the same crippled wound that Nicks duplicates get.
Jake in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farwell to Arms, Cantuill in Across the
river and into the trees and which will make the Hemingway protagonist break with a society
that has caused him suffering.
What is important to understand is that Nick though through other names and different
books undergoes the same experience and is known as the Hemingway hero, a consistent
character which exemplifies certain principles of honor, courage, and endurance which enable
him to conduct himself well in the battle of life.
Two years after the publication of the first book Hemingway issued his first important
novel The Sun Also Rises. The action of which is set in a period of postwar isolation and
moral confusion.
His next novel A Farwell to Arms is a novel based on his service in Italy. It describes the
whole panorama of civilization disjointed by war and has often been spoken about as a
romantic alliby for the lost generation which had fought in WWI and which at the end of
the war found themselves in a world in which the old ideas were no longer reliable and one
could find nothing to replace them with.
Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not says at the end of the novel that alone a man
aint got no bloody chance these words mark the end of a phase in the evolution of the
Hemingway hero, the end of his loneliness.
Hemingways best and longest novel For Whom the Bells Fall is based on an incident in
the Spanish civil war. Robert Jordan knows that if he wants to survive he must live among
people and for people, once again the Hemingway hero dies in this novel but this time he
knows that he will continue to live in the memory of his comrades and in the love of Maria,
the young Spanish girl whom he met in the mountains.
The old man and the sea- after a decades silence was acclaimed as Hemingways
literary triumph. It is the tragic tale of an aged Cuban fish mans battle with a Marlene which
through the extended metaphor of mans struggle with the natural world is a parabola of

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mans life.All Santiago knows that man can be destroyed but not defeated. In the end the
Hemingway hero finds the answer to a fundamental question, his faith after death, he
understands that as long as he is alone he dies with his death, when he lives among men he
will continue to live after his death in the memory and affection of those around him. This is
expressed by the motto put by Hemingway to the novel Foe Whom the Bell Tolls: no man is
an iland entire of itself: every man is a peace of continent , a part of the Maine (John Donne)
A farwell to arms is considered to be the best novel by an American about the First
World War. 4 years before the publication of The sun H had already begun writing a story
about a young American ambulance driver on the Italian Austria front during the WWI but the
suitcase in which H wife Pauline Piffer carried the manuscript and the type scripts of several
other early stories was stolen in the Gare the Lyon in Paris. H did not start working at a story
again until 1908 nearly ten years after the events after the event son which it is based had
actually taken place 2 other incidents influenced the writing of the story and increased the
pain and sorrow which spring from it. When not yet 19 H joined the Red cross ambulance
grouped in N Italy after about a month during which he carried wounded men to base
hospitals he volunteered to go across the Piave Front close to the front line where he was
severely wounded in the legs the second incident was alive affair with an American red cross
nurse in Milan where H was brought after being wounded Agnes von Curofschi was young
and pretty and became H first adult love affair but she was older a dedicated nurse who didn't
want to become another American house wife H received her conclusions soon after he got
home and this was a serious blow to his pride though he subsequently married 4 times he
could never forget her and kept her letter all his life. The novel in not merely fictionalized
biography H inventiveness plays a major part in it the time span covered by the novel is much
larger then he himself spent in the war and he never actually participated at the retreat from
Caporetto. The figure of Catheline Barkley and some of the events connected to her are to a
great degree influenced by H first 2 wifes and the skiing trips he made with Pauline as well
as her difficulties in giving birth to their son . H real artistic triumph in the novel is the way in
which he developed natural symbolism to sustain and enrich the story through the novel
symbolic effects are achieved through reiterated suggestions the most successful ones are
related to the weather the emblematic people and the landscapes. H slowly built up in the
readers a mental association btw rain and disaster he himself has always complained about
rain and damped weather which induced gloom in his spirit near the end the weather warms
and the rains arrive. For a whole miraculous winter the lover had glorified in their isolation
living happily in the high mountain surrounded by clean air and snow. Now as Catherines
time for delivery approaches the rains come some great changes lurks beyond the lovers
limited horizon and the reader begins to understand that she is in mortal danger. A second
aspect of the symbolism is the way in which H endows 2 of lieutenant Henrys friends with
special moral attribute one of them is the young Italian surgeon Renaldi the merry comrades
and the capable enthusiastic doctor who likes boasting about his attainments at the operating
table and who is delighted to be of serve ice to humanity But the saddens and fatigue of the
war soon affect him he becomes the homeless man driven to desperate experience in order to
keep his sanity in the vast and. gloomy theater of the war . Trying to relax from the rigors of
his duties he contracts syphilis in an army brothel. The man of science is eventually
victimized by the filth and disease which surround him. The second close friend is a nameless

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It priest a gentle little men who seeked to exemplify the Christian virtues in a situation where
almost everything seems to conspire against them. Its he who tries to persuade Henry to visit
the Abruzi during one of his military leaves. The pries paints an idyllic picture of the
mountainous region whit its peasant population living simply and amicably w as they have
done for a thousand years. After the first half of the novel RENALDI AND THE PRIEST
DISAPARE FROM THE SCENE BUTTHEQUALITIES THEY STAND FOR CONTINUE
TO AFFECT THE ACTION OF THE STORY when Henry and Catherine reach Switzerland
and begin the only approximately of married life that they will ever know it is the spirit of the
priest that dominates their lifes. When on the other hand they are compelled to leave their
lofty station and descend to Lausanne where Catherine will die we are forcibly reminded of
the world of Renaldi the world of doctors hospitals and imminent death. The third
manipulation of symbolic intent in the novel is the subtle way in which the author plays of
two levels of landscape against each other. Without following it slavelishly he carefully
establishes a pattern in which pains and low lands are associated in the readers mind with war
death pain sadness and gloom while the high mountain regions where in the Abruzzi where
the pries originated or high above Lausanne where the lover establish their temporary
heartland are just as carefully associated with pleasure and good life joy and health this poetic
association of the heights with pleasure and the depth with pain is H s version of the
moralized landscape which he was teaching himself to use as a backdrop for his narratives of
action. It has been said that H spent considerable effort on writing the conclusion of the novel
and that the final version familiar to reader s since 1929 is almost infinitely superior to the
penultimate version which has only recently come to life in the accepted version H s hero
stays with Catherine until her death then he goes out to speak to the surgeon then opens the
door to the room where Catherine lies he gets the nurses out and then discovers that it is in
any good it is like saying good bye to a statue . After a while he goes out and leaves the
hospital and walk back to the hotel alone in the falling rain this justly famous and tight lipped
conclusion seemed to may to represent a tragic loss from a generation which suffered
thousands of similar depravations during the WWI it was seen as the epitome of stoic
acceptance of the inevitable and thesis was precise the effect H sought to achieve during all
his rewrote of the conclusion. The penultimate version contains 3 quite different paragraphs
Henry talks about the difficulty of making funeral arrangement in a foreign country then of
the opost war destinies of the pries and Renaldi and one or two more and finally of the return
to the hotel where he falls asleep to awake in the morning to his sense of loss. The problem of
this ending is that it drowns the reader with words and self pity it has been said that the more
objective stoicism of the final version was a mask hiding H s still wounded filings anyway to
this stoic code and standard of behavior he required his entire later hero to conform.

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