Hemingway's Achievement of Stream of Consciousness

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Hemingway's Achievement of Stream of Consciousness

In Hemingway's In Our Time, the author refers to clean water in the form of lakes, rivers, and streams in almost all of his short stories, while he makes direct reference to water in his chapters only when that water is stagnant or contaminated. Perhaps this collection of Hemingway's is representative of the conscious mind through his stories, and the subconscious through his chapters. Read as such, water can be seen as a central element in consciousness for Hemingway. Perhaps this was an attempt to use "stream of consciousness" style, made popular by Virginia Woolf, in a very different way--with the stream as a concrete piece of the writing. Water, then, can be interpreted in the work as the difference between what is real and what is dreamt.

Because "On The Quai at Smyrna" appears in the book as a story and did not appear at all in the original printing of in our time, as well as the fact that it is much longer than other chapters, I will deal with it here as a story, though I know some scholars disagree. It contains reference to water in the title and also with mention of "the harbor" (p.12), unlike most of the chapters in the book. The narrator mentions the harbor again on page 13, noting, "There were many nice things floating around in it." While the narrator never specifically names those "things," I read the "nice" as sarcasm, because he goes on to mention women having dead babies, and while he does not say specifically these babies were put into the water, the reader assumes this. The action of the dumping of dead bodies into the harbor signifies the water's status as changing from clean to dirty. Hemingway does specifically mention beasts of bur...

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...n of consciousness and subconscious action in his collection, In Our Time, by utilizing water elements to distinguish dreams from reality. Perhaps at the same time, Hemingway is suggesting that the stories have a continuation as does life, by providing for the characters he writes into them water as a means of "transportation" into something else, or at least the possibility for further development, as water is essential for the continuation of human life. The idea of water's presence in the chapters as being non-existent, or stagnant at best, reflects the notion that the action in them is only a dream, and it will go nowhere save the subconscious of the narrator(s). The dreams have no means of continuation in the form of water to carry them onward, and they do not contain water that is clean or drinkable, therefore, water that cannot sustain life, or consciousness.

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