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Joshua Barber
Dr. Zimmerman
ENGL151C-08
17 March, 2010
Research Paper
The Impact of Ernest Hemingway
Over the past few centuries, the authors of one time period have influenced those of
future generations. For example, one author whose writing style has influenced the authors of
today is Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s work not only clearly tells us a story, but at the same
time provides us with insight to the life of a literary legend. Aspects of Hemingway’s life, and
life experiences, can be shown through various parts of his short stories and novels, including
“Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” and especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber.” In general, the settings used in most of Hemingway’s stories are related to the
places, or events, in which Hemingway had personally experienced within his own life. Aside
from showing life experiences of the author, these stories also provide insight in how
Hemingway helped shape the dialogue of modern literature. Within the dialogue, Hemingway
creates a literary style of his own that has inspired other great authors. Hemingway managed to
combine personal experiences with unique dialogue that essentially impacted the writers of
future generations.
In order to fully understand the works of a legend, one must first understand the legend.
Ernest Hemingway started his career as a reporter for the Star, a newspaper in Kansas City.
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Eventually he would enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross,
where he was seriously injured on the Austro-Italian front, at Fossalta di Piave. While
hospitalized in Milan he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse who eventually declined to marry
him. Throughout his life, Hemingway struggled to maintain a strong relationship with a woman.
In fact, he was married a total of four times in his life. Hemingway’s relationships with women
over his lifetime are seen in his writing since a large majority of the female characters who he
does write about can be considered one-dimensional and are not central characters (Bauer). Most
of Hemingway’s postwar years consisted of writing, but he traveled widely to enjoy events such
as skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and big game hunting. Hemingway’s love of adventure took him
to many ends of the Earth, including Paris, Key West, the Caribbean, Cuba, Spain, Africa, and
many other places.
Ernest Hemingway has used his love of various activities such as big game hunting and
deep sea fishing, combined with his time spent in countries such as Africa and Spain, to create
some of his finest stories. One of his most popular stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber,” is a story that combines Hemingway’s journey to Africa along with his fascination
of big game hunting. One of Hemingway’s most impressive books, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
showed Hemingway’s knowledge and experience of the war and peace in Spain. Also, For
Whom the Bell Tolls focused on the comradeship received through war, while another
Hemingway classic, A Farewell to Arms, focuses on the pointlessness of war. However,
Hemingway’s first solid success was from the novel The Sun Also Rises, which focuses on a
group of aimless expatriates. Perhaps Hemingway’s most enthusiastically praised book is The
Old Man and the Sea, which shows Hemingway’s love for deep sea fishing. This novel earned
Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize and even helped him gain the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
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One view that people have of Ernest Hemingway, which was reflected in his life and
work, is that he had a reputation to be a misogynist. For example, in his personal life,
Hemingway had a total of four wives, and probably a few lovers in between. According to
Margaret Bauer, “Hemingway had a reputation for writing about bitchy women and heroic men
who behave gracefully under pressure” (Bauer). Margot, from Hemingway’s short story “The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” was characterized in this way. In relation, the men in
Hemingway’s stories are often shown overcoming some obstacle in a heroic way. Instead of
assuming that Hemingway is a misogynist, we should live up to the advice of Margaret Bauer,
who states that students, “should not make assumptions about a writer’s work based on some
vague impression they have of the author’s character” (Bauer).
Ernest Hemingway’s use of theme from story to story is rather interesting and viewpoints
related to the theme vary from person to person. In the classic, “Hills Like White Elephants,”
Hemingway tells the story of a couple talking about whether or not to go through with an
abortion. In reference to the abortion the man says things like, “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig.
It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in,” while Jig, the girl, remains quiet, which could
mean that she is in doubt over the idea. Through the story the couple has different views on this
issue. The man continuously tries to convince the woman to go through with the abortion, while
the woman has other thoughts. In relation to the scenario within the story, Margaret Bauer once
said, “The woman perceives the seriousness of the "choice" the man wishes her to make, while
the man is either oblivious to its magnitude or willing to pretend it is simple for his own peace of
mind” (Bauer). The man in the story feels that the decision is rather simple and appears very
oblivious to reality. However, the woman does realize the seriousness of the choice and she is
aware of the effect it could have on her relationship with the man. The whole story seems to
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center around the choice the woman has to make and how it’ll impact her relationship with this
man. In addition, the theme Hemingway is possibly trying to make through this story is how a
simple, yet complex, decision could heavily impact a relationship with a significant other.
In “The Killers,” Hemingway presents an interesting scenario that offers another unique
theme. The basic plot of this story takes place at a diner where two men are eating dinner waiting
for someone to get there so that they could kill him. In the meantime, they tie up all the other
people at the diner in anticipation of the appearance of their target. After the “target” fails to
show, the men untie their hostages and leave. Concerned about the man they were after, one of
the hostages, Nick Adams, goes to check up on the “target” to see whether he was alright. When
he gets there, he learns that the man could care less that people were trying to kill him and wasn’t
going to do anything about it, but wait for them to come. After learning of this, Nick said, “I’m
going to get out of this town. 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.” Despite Nick’s actions, the theme that Hemingway
is showing us through “The Killers” is that people need to be brave and courageous and face the
challenges of life.
After briefly going over two Hemingway short stories, we can connect the themes and
then compare them with a third classic. From reading “The Killers,” one can see the challenge of
bravery presented by Hemingway. In a way, the same challenge was given to the man and
woman in “Hills Like White Elephants.” The man in “Hills Like White Elephants” sees the
challenge and like Nick, backs away from it. This is also very similar to the character of Francis
in, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The only exception is that Francis was
attempting to face his challenge of hunting big game, instead of running away from it. The only
problem was that his attempts were somewhat falling short. In the end, Francis was killed while
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being brave and facing his challenge. The irony of this whole situation is that Francis was not
killed by the big game he was hunting, but by his wife whom he had issues with.
Though the individual themes of these stories are very different, they all have an
underlying meaning that essentially connects them to each other. The underlying meaning does
relate to the bravery it requires in making a decision in life. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” the
decision was whether they had the bravery to go through with the abortion and the two people
differed in thoughts about the matter. In “The Killers,” Nick Adams made the decision to run
away after witnessing something potentially dramatic. In other words, he wasn’t brave enough to
live in that town knowing what might happen. In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,”
Francis chooses to be brave, but in the end his bravery kills him, but ironically it wasn’t by the
challenge presented. Each story had their own way of displaying their own individual themes and
in addition, provided the reader with an underlying theme that carries over from story to story.
An interesting thought one can gather from reading these stories is how the strongest
person in these three stories was the woman in “Hills Like White Elephants.” This viewpoint is
ironic considering what is commonly known about Hemingway. As stated earlier, Hemingway is
known for writing about heroic men who make strong decisions under pressure and writing about
women who can be defined as “bitchy.” What’s interesting about this is that none of the central
male characters in these stories made the brave, courageous decision and succeeded in doing so.
The irony of the situations presented in these stories is that the woman in “Hills Like White
Elephants” was the only person who appeared willing to make the tough, brave, courageous
choice and succeed in doing so.
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Aside from his ability of connecting themes, Ernest Hemingway also was skilled in his
usage of literary devices. Hemingway had a habit of creating a mental display of the setting that
his stories took place in. In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway creates a
vivid mental picture of Africa, and surrounding areas, that made it seem like he was there
himself while writing the story. One example from the story occurs while Macomber and Wilson
are on a hunt, “the car went off through the swale of high grass and curved around through the
trees into the small hills of orchard bush. In the orchard bush they found a herd of impala, and
leaving the car they stalked one old ram with long, wide-spread horns and Macomber killed it
with a very creditable shot that knocked the buck down at a good two hundred yards and sent the
herd off bounding wildly and leaping over one another's backs in long, leg-drawn-up leaps as
unbelievable and as floating as those one makes sometimes in dreams.” Hemingway is able to
create a setting like this because most of the settings he has used are of places that he has
personally visited. The setting for “Hills Like White Elephants” is in Spain, quite possibly in the
post-war era, which Hemingway personally experienced. Hemingway even had personal
experience with the setting described in “The Killers,” since he had firsthand experience with
some petty criminals in Kansas City along with other similar events (Berman). Hemingway made
it a habit of taking a scene he once was in and putting it in a story with words and characters.
Hemingway’s usage of dialogue and other literary elements has set him apart as one of
the authors who inspired other great authors of our time. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said,
“Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for
his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing” (Lamb).
Robert Paul Lamb once stated that, “Hemingway, with his deceptively simple dialogue, managed
to capture the dynamics of real-life speech” (Lamb). To make the dialogue within a story sound
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like real-life speech is essential to the American reader because it not only helps us understand
better, but it also gives us the feeling as if we are truly witnessing the scene written out before us.
The dialogue from “Hills Like White Elephants” is a fine example of a dialogue that sounds like
real-life speech. A fine example of this is, “I said we could have everything.” “We can have
everything.” “No we can’t.” “We can have the whole world.” The dialogue between the man and
the women quickly goes between the two in a very realistic manner that heavily expresses the
concern they both have over the issue being discussed and the challenges it presents.
One final literary element that is shown throughout Hemingway’s stories is the style he
repeatedly used throughout his works. One element that was essential to his style and really
helped put specific events in focus was his use of repetition. Hemingway’s use of repetition is
widely shown in “The Killers.” Ron Berman once said in an essay related to “The Killers” that,
“Certain phrases in the story become magnified through repetition and allusion: there is a
continual echoing of "what it's all about" and "what's the idea"” (Berman). Examples of this can
be seen in many of Hemingway’s other stories, including “Hills Like White Elephants.” In “Hills
Like White Elephants,” the man is repeatedly asking his companion either the same questions, or
similar questions. Other than that his remarks are all closely related to each other giving the
reader a sense of repetition. In response to these questions the girl repeated, “No, we can’t.” The
use of repetition made the story easier for the reader to follow.
Throughout his career, Ernest Hemingway inspired authors and entertained readers with
his challenging views, exciting settings, and unique dialogues. Hemingway’s use of dialogue was
so unprecedented that Eudora Welty once said, “Hemingway's is an obscuring and at the same
time a revealing way to write dialogue, and only great skill can manage it - and make us aware at
the same time that communication of a limited kind is now going on as best it can” (Lamb). Ilya
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Ehrenburg once said, “As a writer I was astonished by Hemingway's skill. I have never
understood, to this day, how Hemingway achieved his powerful dialogue. What Hemingway
offered was not dialogue overheard, but a concentrate of it, often made up of superficially
insignificant elements - mere fragments of everyday phrases, which always managed to convey
what was most important” (Lamb). From all the remarks made about Hemingway’s usage of
dialogue and his writing style it’s safe to assume that his writing style has inspired many. In
conclusion, Ralph Ellison once said, “While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives,
one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.” Hemingway was an ancestor” (Lamb).
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Works Cited
"Ernest Hemingway Biography." Biography. A&E, 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2010.
<http://www.biography.com/articles/Ernest-Hemingway-9334498>.
Bauer, Margaret D. "Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by
Ernest Hemingway." Editorial. Find Articles. BNET, 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2010.
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200307/ai_n9256332/
?tag=content;col1>.
Lamb, Robert Paul. "Hemingway and the Creation of the Twentieth Century
Dialogue." Editorial. Find Articles. BNET, 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2010.
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n4_v42/ai_20119140/
?tag=content;col1>.
Berman, Ron. "Vaudeville Philosophers: 'The Killers.' - Short Story by Ernest
Hemingway." Editorial. Find Articles. BNET, 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2010.
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_1_45/ai_54895476/
?tag=content;col1>.