ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A VERY SHORT STORY

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

WRITINGSThree Stories and Ten Poems (1923)In Our Time (1925)The Torrents of Spring (1926)The Sun Also Rises (1926)Men Without Women (1927)A Farewell to Arms (1929)Winner take Nothing (1933)Green Hills of Africa (1935)To Have and Have Not (1937)The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Storie) (

1938).For Whom the BellTolls (1940)Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

El viejo y el mar The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

WORLD WAR I PARIS

SPANISH CIVIL WAR

CUBA

SUICIDE

Was an American writer and Journaliste. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of Worl War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fictionwriting. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics of American literature.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A VERY SHORT STORY

DESCRIPTION

“A very short story” is about the love affair of an ordinary soldier and an Italian nurse

during a war, and how they disintegrate after the war, how their relationship ends.

The story is a perfect work in terms of the reality that a war affects people very terribly,

and its losses are not only deaths. The lives of people who engage in the war drastically

ruin.

SUMMARY

 

The soldier meets Luz inside an army camp in Padua, Italy; they fall in love. Everybody around them knows of their relationship. One day the soldier must return to the front. So he and Luz go to a church and pray, they feel married but want to make it formal, but unfortunately they could not married because they did not have the right papers. Luz writes her soldier but he does not receive the letters until after the armistice. The letters said that Luz missed him terribly and could not live without him. After armistice, Luz and the soldier agree that he will return to New York and get a job to prepare to marriage. He would just live for Luz, but she decided go to help open another hospital in a remote lonely town in Italy. There was a battalion located nearby. The major of the battalion made love to Luz and she fell in love with him. She wrote her first soldier and said it was only a boy-girl affair between them and that she was going to marry her major in the spring. She also admitted it was a sudden engagement. She told her soldier that she expected great things for him and wished him good luck. During the following spring Luz writes again her first soldier, she told him that she never married her major but he did not reply. He contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl.

Love, Commitment, Hope, Dreams, Hopelessness.

TIME AND SPACE

 The story begins in Padua, Italy; in an army camp. Then, he returns to his own country, USA, and Luz stays in Italy, Pordenone and helps open a hospital.As to the time the author does not say which war the story mention about. A clue for understanding it is the World War I, because of the term “ARMISTICE” which is specifically used for XXI century.

CHARACTERS

He is the stereotype of an ordinary soldier. He has no rank. As to the roundness, during the war he seems having values, being loyal. However at the end, it can easily be understood that his behaviors. Actually, in terms of the categorization of the characters, Luz is not different from him. Again, she seems having values at first. There is a religious faith. But the tragic end shows that she loses her values too of course there are reasons, one of which is the war.