Necessity Of Hunger In Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

Janessa McLane

200344259

ENGL 110-397

Prof. Craig Melhoff

October 13, 2015

The Necessity of Hunger in A Moveable Feast

Published three years after his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast illuminates the author’s time spent as an expatriate in 1920s Paris. Though the chronicle was written in a time of great turmoil for Hemingway, (divorces, poor health, paranoia, and alcoholism plagued him for many years), he reflects on the time spent there with respect and fondness. Though the life of a expatriate author in Roaring Twenties Paris seems like a dream to many, Hemingway reveals that not all times were good, in fact, there were times he and his first wife, Hadley, could not afford three meals a day. Despite his hunger, Hemingway manages to use it as a driving force in his creative venture. Through alluring descriptions of fine foods, Hemingway uses this as a distraction

Early on, Hemingway describes that he was “always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working” (22). While spending the day with his wife at the horse races, Hemingway wants to “go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner” (47). The two of them head to Michaud’s, a finer restaurant. Though Hemingway debates whether he is truly hungry in the simple sense or in a deeper way, he decides that he is hungry in the simple sense, and they have a “wonderful meal” at Michaud’s (49). There is some sort of practicality of being hungry as Hemingway argues that “in Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries” (83), as though, it is more important to have “luxuries” than it is to have money for meals. This necessity for hunger, is characterized better through the methaporhical meaning in A Moveable