Katherine Porter utilizes the stream of consciousness through Granny’s strew thinking in her final moments, while Hemingway uses a honed and polished writing style to show a loss of ontological ground by the experimentation of technique to demonstrate the universal feeling hopelessness through multiple perspectives. Upon reading both Porter’s The Jilting of Granny Weatherall and Hemingway’s Of Another Country one can see a significant difference in the style of writing. Hemingway short story is written in simple, direct, unadorned prose, while Porter uses elaborate sentences that encapsulate and sometimes confuse the reader. Katherine Porter uses a technique known as stream of consciousness, which is fairly new at this time period. Said style …show more content…
‘Cornelia tell Hapsy to take off her cap. I can’t see her plain’” (Porter 780). While it is alluded that Hapsy died in childbirth, Granny Weatherall seems to believe that she is still alive and with her, at one point she even thinks Hapsy is giving birth. This hard to follow writing technique is purposely used in order to demonstrate Granny’s loss of faith in a moral center, in other words the squandering of her ontological ground. Prior to her death Porter makes very clear Granny’s tendency to stay organized and and tidy. In the following passage Porter describes Granny’s thinking on organization of the household, "Thank God there was always a little margin for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly” (Porter 777). This is significant because it serves to show that Granny wishes to have the same control over her life as she does in her household. She prides herself on being a strong, matriarchal figure capable of performing feminine and masculine tasks in the absence of her husband. Throughout the story whenever Granny's sense of control over her life or her independence is threatened, she become …show more content…
Hemingway chooses to write in a concise, focused manner, unlike Porter’s use of stream of consciousness. For example, Hemingway writes, “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early” (Hemingway 731). While still effective in its own way, one can see the lack of fluidity of Hemingway when comparing to Porter’s writing, that sounds as if she is writing as Granny Weatherall herself is thinking. However, despite style choices both demonstrate the same overall concept as Porter through the use of the symbol of grammar. Hemingway describes describes how grammar impacts the narrators and the Major’s relationship, he writes, “So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind” (Hemingway 733). Grammar serves to be the a stabilizing entity because it is the only order the Major has left in his life, for this is the reason he is so critical of the narrator’s Italian. Just as Porter displayed in Granny’s realization in her final moments the Major is forced to believe his world no longer any
In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter, we learn of an elderly woman who is lying on her death bed watching her life pass before her eyes. We learn, from these flashbacks, how much she has overcome and endured, and how she's put her whole heart into being a mother and wife up until her last breath, when she blew out the candle and rode with her Father in a cart to heaven. It’s this very reason why Porter, in my opinion, chose Granny as the narrator of this story; so we could see the story through her eyes, being able to relate and appreciate it better.
Similarly, in The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall, Porter discusses the regrets of an old woman revealed by her reactions to her being left at the altar and her slow death sixty years later.
Porter, Katherine Anne. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2000.
In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” the story is read in a lighter fashion. It involves the main character, Granny Weatherall, and her triumph through time and love. Granny fights for love and strength for her kids, despite being “jilted” by George at the alter and the issues and pains that come with that memory. Although Granny married, and had children, she never seemed to live up to the fact of her being “jilted” by George. Death is an idea that both stories start, and end with.
Also, this time around I came to realize that one of Granny's other daughters, Hapsy, who had died at an early age, was being summoned to see her mother before she fell to her fate. Hapsy was her favorite. Although I don't think Granny grasped the concept that Hapsy had passed away a long time ago, she gets the urge to need to see her again when reminiscing of her past. While reminiscing, Granny Weatherall sees a picture of her old fiancé, John, who was supposed to marry her but stood her up at the altar.
In "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," there are two themes. The first is self-pity. The second theme is the acceptance of her death. Both deal with the way people perceive their deaths and mortality in general. Granny Weatherall's behavior is Porter's tool for making these themes visible to the reader. The theme of self-pity is obvious and thoroughly explored early on. As a young lady, Granny Weatherall was left at the altar on her wedding day. As a result, the pathetic woman feels sorry for herself for the rest of her life. She becomes a bitter old woman who is suspicious of everyone around her. This point is shown early in the story when the do Granny Weatherall, the main character in Katherine Anne Porter's The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, is an 80-year-old elderly woman who is at the doorstep of death. There is a sense of disillusionment with Granny that leads readers to develop their own interpretation of her relationship with Cornelia, her daughter As the narrator, Granny unknowingly would paint the picture of Cornelia as nuisance and bothersome. In fact, the reader can rationalize that it is just Cornelia's concern for an ailing mother that creates the situation of her seemingly being there all the time.
She is worried that the unstoppable persona she has presented to her children will be demolished if they find those letters. This is further proven in the short story when she scorns her daughter, Cornelia, for “thinking she was dumb, deaf, and blind” (454) after she overhears Cornelia telling her husband that Granny Weatherall was acting like a child and they would have to humor her for the time being. She is already beginning to live out her nightmare. Cornelia, Granny’s least favorite child, pities and tries to humor her. It is only logical for someone with as much pride as Granny to try to control the situation. To elaborate, Granny Weatherall is also a control freak. She beats every threat that comes her way into silence and throws it to the farthest corners of her mind. For example, when faced with the thought of her demise, she rationalizes, “thank God there was always a little margin over for peace: then a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly” (453). Though on her deathbed, she assumes she cannot die because she is not prepared for death. Metaphorically, she is telling God that she is in control of her fate. Therefore, she believes she
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
Many important American writers came to prominence during the Jazz Age, but their commonalities often stopped there. From lyrical to sparse, many different styles can be seen among these authors, such as those of Henry James, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. One stylistic technique, stream of consciousness, was most associated with Joyce. Yet, Hemingway also used this technique with regularity and it is an important element in his war novel, A Farewell to Arms. This technique uses the interior monologue of a character to convey information, and thus the reader is allowed a more fluid picture of the true thoughts of the character, in this case, Lieutenant Frederick Henry. Also, the information contained in these stream of consciousness passages would not have been as effectively expressed in traditional prose style.
When a writer picks up their pen and paper, begins one of the most personal and cathartic experiences in their lives, and forms this creation, this seemingly incoherent sets of words and phrases that, read without any critical thinking, any form of analysis or reflexion, can be easily misconstrued as worthless or empty. When one reads an author’s work, in any shape or form, what floats off of the ink of the paper and implants itself in our minds is the author’s personality, their style. Reading any of the greats, many would be able to spot the minute details that separates each author from another; whether it be their use of dialogue, their complex descriptions, their syntax, or their tone. When reading an excerpt of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast one could easily dissect the work, pick apart each significant moment from Hemingway’s life and analyze it in order to form their own idea of the author’s voice, of his identity. Ernest Hemingway’s writing immediately comes across as rather familiar in one sense. His vocabulary is not all that complicated, his layout is rather straightforward, and it is presented in a simplistic form. While he may meander into seemingly unnecessary detail, his work can be easily read. It is when one looks deeper into the work, examines the techniques Hemingway uses to create this comfortable aura surrounding his body of work, that one begins to lift much more complex thoughts and ideas. Hemingway’s tone is stark, unsympathetic, his details are precise and explored in depth, and he organizes his thoughts with clarity and focus. All of this is presented in A Moveable Feast with expertise every writer dreams to achieve. While Hemingway’s style may seem simplistic on the surface, what lies below is a layered...
To start with, Hemingway’s early experience as a journalist greatly influenced his writing techniques in this novel. Throughout the novel, the readers can easily realize that Hemingway enjoys using clear and simple words or sentences. This particular writing technique was developed when he began writing newspapers for The Kansas City Star after graduating from high school (“Earnest Hemingway”). Since then, Hemingway wrote short sentences and paragraphs to make sure his messages were clear to the readers. This technique used by Hemingway is evident in The Old Man and the Sea as when he writes, “He was barefooted” in the middle of the paragraph (Hemingway 19). In addition, Hemingway uses simple verbs and adjectives in a sentence to make his story clear to the readers, as when he writes, “he was happy”, and “the fish moved steadily” (Hemingway 43, 45). Therefore, by looking at some examples from The Old Man and the Sea, it can be concluded that Hemingway’s early experience of working as a journalist led him to write simple and short sentences.
Common among classic literature, the theme of mortality engages readers on a quest of coping with one of the certainties of life. Katherine Anne Porter masterfully embraces the theme of mortality both directly and indirectly in her story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Understanding that all mankind ultimately becomes subject to death unleashes feelings of dread and anxiety in most people; however, Granny Weatherall transitions from rushing to meet her demise in her sixties to completely denying she is on her deathbed when she is eighty. Readers have seen this theme of mortality reverberated over and over in literature, but what makes this story stand the test of time is the author’s complexity. In Katherine Anne Porter’s
Ernest Hemingway has a unique style of writing that appears in all of his works of fiction. The characteristics of Hemingway’s writing appears as a journalistic and straight to the point type of style. He focuses on the most important facts and precise words for his works, leaving out a lot of detail that most authors use to “fluff” and help explain the story. Hemingway’s writing style, generally titled the “Iceberg Theory” gives readers only the most important context, usually seen in the form of dialogue. This writing style is appropriate because it seems Hemingway would rather his audiences focus on the characters in their present state and how the underlying themes affect their current actions and relationships with other characters.
The style of writing Hemingway utilizes is created from the use of voice, sentence fluency, and word choice. These three traits from the six trait writing system give a glimpse into characters' personalities and can thrust the reader deep into the action of the novel. The Sun Also Rises is a great example of how style and its many components can be used to turn a complex story of emotions and yearning minds into a novel full of excitement and romance.
describing these scenes, not only does he do it in an elaborate and detailed way, but he also runs his thoughts and sentences together as if it were all being spoken in one long drawn-out breath. The ordering of detail of this book was in a straight-forward, well-organized way. It was very linear and the story did not jump around between the present and flash-backs to the protagonists past. This kept the story from becoming confusing. Hemingways style is that of a classic