Hemingway Style Analysis
Essay title: Hemingway Style Analysis
Earnest Hemingway is one of Americas foremost authors. His many works, their style, themes and parallels to his actual life have been the focus of millions of people as his writing style set him apart from all other authors. Many conclusions and parallels can be derived from Earnest Hemingways works. In the three stories I review, ?Hills Like White Elephants?, ?Indian Camp? and ?A Clean, Well-lighted Place? we will be covering how Hemingway uses foreigners, the service industry and females as the backbones of these stories. These techniques play such a critical role in the following stories that Hemingway would be unable to move the plot or character development forward without them.
In ?Hills Like White Elephants? Hemingway utilizes the waitress as a method to help develop the character of the lead male. His interaction at the beginning of the story with the waitress in her native language show his intellectual superiority which is also emphasized in the following line, ?The girl looked at the bead curtain. Theyve painted something on it, she said. What does it say?? (Hemingway). This setup is a crucial transition from the blank slate we start at with both characters. The story of course unfolds following what the interaction with the waitress and bar setting created for us. One in which the lead male character is dominant, controlling and a person who provides information and answers not available to the female character. Additionally the male characters treatment of the female waitress creates the building blocks for our understanding of how he interacts with females. He never mentions please or thank you
when ordering or receiving their first drinks and by the second round acts in the follow
way, ?The man called Listen through the curtain.? when addressing the waitress (Hemingway). It is only a few lines later he begins semi-jokingly and in condescending manner scolding his female partner. The condescending remarks start with, ?Just because you say I wouldnt have doesnt prove anything.? the man replies to her assertion that he hasnt seen white elephants (Hashmi). Besides being hot in this story, the males only burden is that he is trying to persuade his female partner to his views as he tries to coach her through the remaining portion of the dialog manipulative lines such as, ?Well, the man said, if you dont want to you dont have to. I wouldnt have you do it if you didnt want to. But I know its perfectly simple.?(Strychacz).
In ?Indian Camp? the roles we see in ?Hills Like White Elephants? are reversed. The primary characters are now those in the service sector with the Indians filling the rest of Hemingways equation as the foreigners. As the father figure tries to gently bring his son up properly his moral lessons and further introduction to reality are solely facilitated through their traumatic experience in the service industry dealing with a female who is a foreigner just like as in ?Hills Like White Elephants?. Except here it isnt explicitly stated that the Indians speak a native language, English, another language or a combination as the waitress in the previous story. Its through the apathetic treatment of his patient that Nicks father first develops a new depth to his character. In telling statement to the son when he begs the father to do something about the Indian womans
screams, “But her screams are not important. I dont hear them because they are not important? (Hemingway). As in the above story the female comes in as the main point of distress. In the obvious sense given the story line of the laboring Indian they must service in the early morning ours but also in a secondary sense when the Indian woman bites George and he proclaims, “Damn squaw bitch!? (Hemingway).
In looking at the story ?A Clean Well Lit Place? it almost appears as if the qualities of the foreigner and the female are lacking. However further investigation shows the same mechanism take place just in a subdued and alter fashion. Like ?Indian Camp? our vantage point in this story is from the service sector by way of our waiters conversations. Initially the old man appears to be the point of contention in this story but half way through we being to develop all the characters on a deeper level with, “Hes lonely. Im not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.” to which the older waiter replies, “He had a wife once too.”(Hemingway) Its in this repeated mention of the wives we can see there must be significance to the female aspect of this story when Hemingway writes,