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Ernest hemingway essay
The life of Ernest Hemingway
Themes of the lost generation
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Notions of the lost generation in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” The notable impact of being lost generation is disputable in “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway. The generation who had experienced the World War I and reflected its influences through literary works spontaneously. Themes, including decadence and idealized past are predominant. Illustration of writer’s life like autobiographical works is exhibited throughout many parts of this story. A skillful reader can observe handling these notions in “Hills Like White Elephants”. First of all, decadence of American dreams and is obvious theme in this story. “The American” who has no name, is generalized to all Americans deliberately. As story develop, …show more content…
Baggage in the story represents the past, which is as same as the future to the America. When he picks up the suitcases and carries them to the other side of the station, he is indicating he wants to continue as before. The past is the other side which is fertilized, green, mountainous and natural, but there is no way to revert. The last notion which is used in the story and considered in this essay is autobiographical style of writing this story. This work is autobiographical based on Hemingway’s use of mythologized versions. It is mostly pertained to the writer’s experiences in the real life. For example, as we know Hemingway is an American who travelled to Spain and had problems in his relationships with women. Finally, we can imply Hemingway as a lost generation writer who wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” as a story of the lost generation. He used major themes such as deterioration of America and past as an embodiment of perfection. He subsumes himself in his story to show he came of age during the
Gale. Weeks, Lewis E., Jr. "Hemingway Hills: Symbolism in 'Hills like White'" Elephants. Studies in Short Fiction. 17.1 (Winter 1980): 75-77.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills like White Elephants." Responding to Literature. Ed. Judith Stanford. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. 841-44. Print.
“Hills Like White Elephants” fits with the curriculum of Junior Year by relating to specific values and social conventions, by having literary merit and lastly by transcending time by influencing modern society’s media themes and motifs. It does all this by using a truthful method of writing, dialogic. Hemingway is able to paint a brilliant picture of the Human condition. He does this by incorporating motifs which depict societal qualms. Hemingway was able to influence society today by displaying how identity and autonomy are important to the individual. He was against a single tyrannical power telling an individual what they should do, how they should write. He stood for an individual having a choice, an opinion. He wanted people to be people He wanted to send a message and a message can be sent with just one single, meaningful, four letter
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. As Rpt. in Rankin, Paul "Hemingway's `Hills Like White Elephants'." Explicator, 63 (4) (Summer 2005): 234-37.
Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” tells the tale of a man and a woman, who at first might seem to be having a normal and rather dull conversation at a train station, but it is only when you look closer into what is actually being said by the characters and find the small clues that Hemingway cleverly knit into the story, that you realize how heavy the conversation actually is. Unlike many authors, Hemingway leaves it to the reader to delve deeper into the story and decipher the situation for themselves, and a seemingly simple story can become something so much more. The woman in the story is contemplating whether to stick to the life she knows or begin a brand new chapter in her life that could change her relationship with the man forever. Sometimes one’s true intentions are not always clear.
Yanling, Shi. "The Style and the Theme of Loss in Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants." Studies in Literature and Language (2013): 107-109. ProQuest.
---, "Hills Like White Elephants." The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner?s Sons, 1953. 273-278.
The art, literature, and poetry of the early 20th century called for a disruption of social values. Modernism became the vague term to describe the shift. The characteristics of the term Modernism, all seek to free the restricted human spirit. It had no trust in the moral conventions and codes of the past. One of the examples of modernism, that breaks the conventions and traditions of literature prior to Modernism, is Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants”. The short story uses plot, symbolism, setting, dialogue, and a new style of writing to allow human spirit to experiment with meaning and interpretation.
We notice, right from the beginning of his life, that Ernest Hemingway was confronted to two opposite ways of thinking, the Manly way, and the Woman way. This will be an important point in his writing and in his personal life, he will show a great interest in this opposition of thinking. In this short story, Hemingway uses simple words, which turn out to become a complex analysis of the male and female minds. With this style of writing, he will show us how different the two sexes’ minds work, by confronting them to each other in a way that we can easily capture their different ways of working. The scene in which the characters are set in is simple, and by the use of the simplicity of the words and of the setting, he is able to put us in-front of this dilemma, he will put us in front of a situation, and we will see it in both sexes point of view, which will lead us to the fundamental question, why are our minds so different?
Hemingway, Earnest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Compact Literature. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 8thth ed. Boston: Wadsworth, n.d. 129-33. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. 268-272.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants”. (1927). The Norton Introduction To Literature, Portable 10th ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. 113-117
Hemingway has a very simple and straightforward writing style however his story lacks emotion. He makes the reader figure out the characters’ feelings by using dialogue. “...
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Literature Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. DiYanni, Robert. 2nd ed. New York. Mc Grew Hill. 2008. 400-03. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. Eds. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. 113-117. Print.