Sami Ghzala
Mrs. Deller
English Course
Sunday, September 14
hemingway essay
At a very young age, Ernest Hemingway will develop a special love for manly activities, especially for fishing. He will in fact pass most of his youth fishing and hunting with his father during family vacations in a chalet boarding Wallon Lake in Michigan. At the age of 18, Hemingway will engage himself in the Red Cross, and will become an ambulance man on the Italy front during the World War. Gravely injured, he will fall in love with a nurse of the Milan hospital where he was regaining his health. In fact, this will be the start of a long list of fading loves. He will be married four times to four different women, will live a couple of short love flicks and will have three kids. These adventures will strongly contribute towards making Hemingway the man we will learn to know through his writing, a figure of masculinity and toughness, but also a man who often seemed lost through all of this overwhelming world wide recognition. Always trying to project a strong personality, this might of been his way to hide his sense of inadequacy that he felt throughout his life.
This particular sense of inadequacy is well portrayed in three of the short stories we read for this course and possibly in much more of the numerous books Hemingway has wrote. Indeed, Henry from the story Snows of Kilimanjaro is the first character I would like to look upon. Henry is a very interesting character because of his reluctancy to write even thou he has decided to dedicate his whole life to being a writer. After injuring himself, gangrene develops in his wound, leaving him awaiting his death. This loss of physical capacities can then be compared to Hemingway’s injury in Italy. In fact, in the story, the injury seems to cause Henry to reminisce upon some events that have marked his life. However, all these events seem denuded of meaning to his eyes, almost as if everything he had lived for had no more sense and no more importance. Henry, not knowing whom to blame for this shallow life, turns on his wife and blames her for not letting him live the type of life and write the type of literature he would of wanted to write. This attitude, to an extent, is a good example of how people that feel out of place usually react. They feel the need to blame someone else for their failures, anyone except themselves.
The second story I would like to talk about is A Clean-Well Lighted Place. Now in this story we could think that the character that Hemingway wants to put emphasize on is the old man. However, I believe the most important character of the story would more so be the older waiter. This man seems also inhabited by a feeling of inadequacy in the sense that he knows time is catching up on him and that in a few years, he will be looking for a light to hang on to just like this old blind man who has no other place to go than this clean-well lighted bar. The older waiter knows that his progression in age won’t be easy to go by with, but is inevitable. This might be Hemingway’s discomfort towards the old age and the fear to be trapped in an old man’s body.
As for the third story, Francis Macomber seems like he’s also living a life that is quite empty, at least when it comes to his wife who makes a priority to be superior to him. She doesn’t seem to care about him and he takes this attitude without saying anything. A good example of this is when she sleeps with the guide that is with them. He doesn’t react, just as if he thought it was something normal. At the beginning, he also seems like he doesn’t have a very strong personality. That is in fact the third character that I wanted to look at who shows a sense of inadequacy.
In conclusion, some of the characters in Hemmingway’s stories are related to some events of the author’s life. Furthermore, the sense of inadequacy felt by the different characters are closely related to the author’s life just before his death and so we understand the repetitive theme exploited by Hemmingway, but also its vivid and most effective detail and preciseness.
Word Count: 745 words