Ernest Hemingway(1899~1961)

Life

Major works

Life and career

He was born in Oak Park, July 21, 1899. After high school, he went to work as a

reporter for the Kansas City Star. During World War I, he volunteered to serve

as a driver for an American ambulance. In 1918,he was severely wounded in Italy. After the war, he went to Paris as a foreign

reporter.

Life and career

He was a war correspondent from 1936-1939 during the Spanish Civil War.

After the war, Hemingway moved to Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 moved to Idaho.

In 1961, Hemingway shot himself with gun in his home.

Hemingway’s marriage

In his whole life, Hemingway had forth marriage with the unrest and painful emotional life. This led to his attitude to female, his works of female characters often lack the reality. Hemingway’s private life is very bohemian and love affair continuously.

Hemingway’s marriage

Hadley Richardson

married in 1923

divorced in 1928.

Pauline Marie Pfeiffer ,

married in 1928

divorced in 1940.

Hemingway’s marriage

Martha Gellhorn,

married in 1940

divorced in 1945.

Mary Welsh,

married in 1946 till final.

Spokesman of "the Lost Generation"

Hemingway became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called ‘a lost generation’.

Refers to those writers who were devoid of faith, values and ideals and who were alienated from the civilization the capitalist society advocated.

Hemingway’s awarding

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Major works

《春潮》（ The Torrents of Spring) 《太阳照样升起》（ The Sun Also Rises ） 《永别了，武器》（ A Farewell to Arms ） 《虽有犹无》（ To Have and Have Not ） 《丧钟为谁而鸣》（ For Whom the Bell Tolls ） 《渡河入林》（ Across the River and Into the Trees 《老人与海》（ The Old Man and the Sea) 《伊甸园》（ The Garden of Eden ） 《初见即真》（ True At First Light ） 《乞力马扎罗的雪》（ The snows of Kilimanjaro ） 《午后之死》（ Death in the Afternoon ） 《非洲的青山》（ Green Hills of Africa) 《流动的飨宴》（ A Moveable Feast ） 《危险夏日》（ The Dangerous Summer ）

Writing style

★Simple （朴实）

★ Ocular( 直观 画面视觉冲击 )

★ Dialogue （对话）

★ Stream of consciousness （意识流）

★ Iceberg theory （冰山原则） ★ Death （死亡 - 暴力 , 血腥 , 客观的死亡 , 不是哥特式小说中的恐怖与悬疑或者浪漫式死亡）

★ Relationship between men and women （男女关系 , 折射作者自己男女关系与情感写实）

Simple

The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just summoned, into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man’s chest.

老人放下钓索，把鱼叉举得尽可能地高，使出全身的力气，加上他刚才鼓起的力气，把它朝下直扎进鱼身的一边 , 刚好就在大胸鳍后面一点儿的地方，这胸鳍在空中高高地竖立着，与老人的胸部一般高。

The author combined the simple verb -dropped ， put ， lifted ， drove ， summoned and noun-line ， harpoon ， strength ，and still strength, to described a drastic, furious scene.

Ocular

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade on to the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

男人躺在帆布床上，他越过含羞树的浓荫向阳光炫目的平原望去，有三只硕大的鸟讨厌地蹲着，还有许多在展翅翱翔

This kind of language feature dues to the influence post-impressionist master Cezanne (mosaics get extra visual punch by making the whole picture of the same atoms). The writer used the character’s view to choose the environment and scenery and the same time showed the character’s quality

Dialogue

His dialogue is a show of conversation, not just a narration, which belongs to the perfect imitation ( 完美模仿 ) put forward by Plato. An perfect imitation (pure imitation 纯模仿 ) shadows the trace of writer and narration, and this closet the dialogue with the character themselves.

In The snows of Kilimanjaro, the author started the whole novel with a dialogue between the hero and the heroin. And there is no big words (influenced by Mark. twain) in his long dialogue, which can understood by most readers even without a introduce of the speaker.

In The old man and the sea, he set the dialogue between the old man (Santiago) and the boy (Manolin), or the old man with himself, or the old with the animal (of course no answering). This extrudes the psychological description, which is really similar to the feature of stream of consciousness. The use of interior monologue in the snows of Kilimanjaro, and two streams of consciousness –being wake and asleep both led into the word death.

The snows of Kilimanjaro is also a excellent work of stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness

Death

And the separations between the characters were accompanied with death.

In A farewell to arms, the hero and heroine were separated by Catherine's dystopia. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero Robert Jordan sacrificed himself into the right cause.

And when the snows of Kilimanjaro was adapted into a film, Hemingway was angry about the ending of the movie-the hero came back America with the heroin rather than died under the Kilimanjaro. In a degree Hemingway it is right to said that Hemingway advocated death although he loves life.

Relationship between men and women

His code heroes are always solo fighters, and in the old man and the sea, he even outlined a world with only one man, I mean one man on the sea. And the woman in his works were always going to die or already die. In the old man and the sea, he only mentioned Santiago's dead wife by the colored picture which had been taken down by the lonely man. And even the female animals seems to got a more frequent feature writing by Hemingway.

D.H Lawrence 在海明威短篇小说中观察到一种男女关系模式：“一个人想无拘无束。只要避免一件事：卷入进去。绝不能卷入进去。如果你被某件事情缠住，摆脱它。别被缠住。摆脱它，离开。”

Code heroes

Hemingway’s heroes live adventure-filled lives that are driven by courage and limited by fear

They hide a sensitive heart under a tough exterior

“Grace under pressure” is their motto His heroes are hemmed in by forces beyond

their control

Iceberg theory （ Cezanne ， Freud ）

He used iceberg principal hid thoughts and emotions description in extremely succinct words, which is very important in traditional literature.

This principle was extensively applied into his works. Hemingway also advocated this principle to show character’s quality and the evolve of the whole story.

Comment （ Plato ）

There is no complex relationships between characters. So the writer can’t avoid extruding the inner contradiction and the subtle change within the character. I really appreciate the technique that Hemingway mastered which hid the characters behind the simple conversation--the speaker’s tongue and words and the way of thinking.

Hemingway was a myth in his own time and his life was colorful.