Ernest Hemingway Research Paper

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer and journalist. Numbered by many, among the greatest American writers, Hemingway is master of the objective prose style which became his trademark. War and athletic competition often make up the subject matter of his works, allowing Hemingway to explore man’s physical and metaphysical strivings. He was confounded by both the idea and the reality of death. (270) His renowned style, for his firmly non-intellectual fiction, is characterized by understatement and tense dialogue. (231)

Ernest Hemingway, above everything else, wanted to write well. The passion of his life was to write “absolutely truly – absolutely with no faking or cheating of any kind. (268) He emphasized this

Hemingway’s novels and short stories have immortalized the topography, the geographical background, and the external details of the places in order to present a convincing account of life and reality. The sense of place is a strong passion with Hemingway. Few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have so carefully chartered out the geographical ground work of their novels while managing to keep background so conspicuously unobtrusive. He has trained himself rigorously to see and retain those aspects of a place that make it “that place”, even though will an odd skill; he manages at the same time to render these aspects generically. Hemingway’s prose is easily recognized. For the most part it is characterized chiefly by a conscientious simplicity of diction and sentence structure. The words are normally short and common ones and there is a severe economy, and also a curious freshness in their use. The typical sentence is a simple declarative one, or a couple of these joined by a conjunction. The opening passage of A Farewell to Arms can be cited as an example: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and the boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house

It is a story of one man’s withdrawal from the war into love, a love which ends in futility. Frederic Henry, an American Lieutenant in the medical section of the Italian Army is the hero of the novel, and as the novel proceeds we find him in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Then Henry is wounded and sent back to a hospital where he is nursed by Catherine, and there begins an intimate sexual relationship. After his recovery, Henry returns to the battle front, but gets involved in a disorderly retreat, is arrested and about to be shot by military police, but frees himself and makes his way to the town where Catherine is living and escapes with her down the lake to neutral Switzerland. Here, away from the war and in outwardly idyllic circumstances, the whole series of events reach its accidental conclusion with Catherine’s death at the maternity