Ernest Hemingway Research Paper

Before the advent of Ernest Hemingway's Theory of Omission, the typical writing philosophy of writers in the twentieth century in regards to fiction was to include as much information about your story as possible. This was not the case for Hemingway. His revolutionary writing prose, also known as Iceberg Theory, completely transformed the common paradigm of fiction writing. One of his most lauded works, The Old Man and the Sea, as well as many of his other works, use concision and the omission of fundamental concepts, rather than their inclusion, to strengthen the story's emotional affect on the reader.

To understand why Hemingway wrote his stories with such simplicity, as well as the intention of omission, one must know of his occupational

The name of the theory derives from the fact that only a small portion of an iceberg is what one can see above water; water submerges the large majority of the iceberg. Followers of this theory, like Hemingway, believe that fiction should be told in the same manner as an iceberg, where the sensory detail within a story is only a small portion of a bigger picture that can not be seen nor touched, but felt through the emotions and events driving the characters. Another example of this was at the near end of the book, “Then he lay down on the bed. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and then over his back and legs and he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up.” (120-121) This passage eloquently describes the feeling of the trial and fatigue that the old man has just gone through. However, it achieves this without once referring to the fact that the old man was tired or fatigued at all. Through the actions of the old man and specific details like carelessly sleeping on newspapers, the reader can understand the character's emotion and the purposes driving those emotions without the author ever stating them to the reader. Hemingway clarifies this purpose of exclusion in another one of his books, Death in the Afternoon, “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He then goes on to say that, “If a writer ... knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated