Hemingway is a renowned American author of the Twentieth century who centers his novels on
personal experiences and affections. He is one of the authors named "The Lost Generation." He could
not cope with post-war America, and therefore he introduced a new type of character in writing called
the "code hero". Hemingway is known to focus his novels around code heroes who struggle with the
mixture of their tragic faults and the surrounding environment. Traits of a typical Hemingway Code
Hero are a love of good times, stimulating surroundings, and strict moral rules, including honesty. The
Code Hero always exhibits some form of a physical wound that serves as his tragic flaw and the
weakness of his character.
Pyramid Style of Hemingway
At the end of the sixteenth chapter of Death in the Afternoon the author approaches a definition of the
"hard-boiled" style:
"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."
Ezra Pound taught him "to distrust adjectives" (A Moveable Feast). That meant creating a style in
accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of
universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective.
That is because of Hemingway’s awareness of the relation between the truth of facts and events and his
conviction that they produce corresponding emotions.
"Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down
making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling as you had."
That was the essence of his style, to focus on facts. Hemingway aimed at "the real thing, the sequence of
motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with
luck and if you stated it purely enough, always" (Death in the Afternoon). In Hemingway, we see a
reaction against Romantic turgidity and vagueness: back to basics, to the essentials. Thus his new
realism in a new key resembles the old Puritan simplicity and discipline; both of them refrained from
exhibiting the sentimental, the relative.
Characteristics of Hemingway's Code Hero:
Hemingway believed that a man should fear death because itis the end of everything. Since nothing
exists after death, he should make the most of life and avoid death at all costs. Hemingway defined the
Code Hero as
"a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in
a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful."
The Code Hero measures himself by how well they handle the difficult situations that life throws at him.
In the end the Code Hero will lose because we are all mortal, but the true measure is how a person faces
death.
The Code believes in "Nada," a Spanish word meaning nothing. Along with this, there is no after life.
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The Code Hero is typically an individualist and free-willed. Although he believes in the ideals of
courage and honor he has his own set of morals and principles based on his beliefs in honor, courage and
endurance. A code hero never shows emotions; showing emotions and having a commitment to women
shows weakness. Qualities such as bravery, adventuresome and travel also define the Code Hero.
A final trait of the Code Hero is his dislike of the dark. It symbolizes death and is a source of fear for
him. The rite of manhood for the Code Hero is facing death. However, once he faces death bravely and
becomes a man he must continue the struggle and constantly prove himself to retain his manhood
Hemingway does not give way to lengthy geographical and psychological description. His style has
been said to lack substance because he avoids direct statements and descriptions of emotion. Basically
his style is simple, direct and somewhat plain. He developed a forceful prose style characterized by
simple sentences and few adverbs or adjectives. He wrote concise, vivid dialogue and exact description
of places and thingsowever, when Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, he used several different
narrative techniques. He employed the use of internal monologues(where the reader is in the “mind” of a
particular character), objective descriptions, rapid shifts of point of view, and in general a looser
structure than in his earlier works. Hemingway believed that “a writer’s style should be direct and
personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous.
Hard-boiled style
The slang word "hard-boiled", used to describe characters and works of art, was a product of twentieth
century warfare. To be "hard-boiled" meant to be unfeeling, callous, coldhearted, cynical, rough,
obdurate, unemotional, without sentiment. Later to become a literary term, the word originated in
American Army World War I training camps, and has been in common, colloquial usage since about
1930.
Contemporary literary criticism regarded Ernest Hemingway’s works as marked by his use of this style,
which was typical of the era. Indeed, in many respects they were regarded as the embodiment and
symbol of hard-boiled literature.
However, neither Hemingway the man nor Hemingway the writer should be labeled "hard-boiled" - his
style is the only aspect that deserves this epithet, and even that is ambiguous. Let us get down to basics,
concentrate on one main feature in his literary style, and then turn to the alleged hard-boiled mind
behind it, and his macho style of living and speaking.
Language
The "Hard-boiled" Style
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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-article.html
To explain Hemingway’s style in a few paragraphs in such a manner as to satisfy those who have read
his articles and books is almost impossible. It is a simple style, straight forward and modest.
Hemingway’s prose is unadorned as a result of his abstaining from using adjectives as much as possible.
He relates a story in the form of straight journalism, but because he is a master of transmitting emotion
with out embellishing it, the product is even more enjoyable.
Hemingway and Writing
Hemingway redefined 20th century literature from the time his pen touched the paper, and his influence is
nearly the standard today. From his work at the Kansas City Star, he learned to “Use Short Sentences. Use
short paragraphs,” thus putting an emphasis on compression, simplicity, and clarity. Certainly, he used these
ideas from that day forth, as he was later quoted in saying, “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the
business of writing. I've never forgotten them." As illustrated in all of his works, Hemingway tossed aside the
19th century Victorian prose and reshaped it into a clear, clean, and straight-to-the-point prose which
focuses on action rather than emotion. (from
http://www.umich.edu/~eng217/student_projects/nobel%20prize%20winners/hemingway.htm
A limited word-palette. Hemingway was fluent in three romance languages: French, Spanish, and
Italian. Each of these has a much smaller vocabulary than English, and yet each manages to be richly
expressive. Talking about Brett and Mike’s speech, Jake Barnes tells us that “The English spoken
language—the upper classes, anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. . . . The English talked
with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. . . . I liked the way they talked.” Hemingway
may have been inspired by the ways in which these European cultures, all of which he admired,
managed to communicate effectively, even poetically, using so few words.
* Frequent repetition of the same words and phrases. This is a technique he learned from Stein.
(The best-known sentences she ever wrote were “A rose is a rose is a rose” and “When you get there,
there’s no there there.”)
* Short sentences (“It was a fine morning.”) or long sentences consisting of short phrases and
clauses connected by conjunctions. Here’s an example of the latter: “After a while we came out of the
mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and
the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a
hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and
shifting in the wind”
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The iceberg concept
If a writer of prose knows enough of 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 ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits
things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon 4
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory
(From “Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21” by George Plimpton, first published in The Paris
Review - Issue 18, Spring 1958.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no21-ernest-hemingway )
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