In Another Country by Hemingway

1094 Words3 Pages

In Another CountryHemingway

Hemingway’s “In Another Country” is the story about the wounded soldiers who are puled back from the front lines due to injuries. The setting of the story is a military hospital in Milan, Italy, during the war. Although author does not specifically give the time we can say that he refers to the World War I because this short story was published in the book “Men Without Women” in 1927; it was another book of short stories which collected "The Killers," "In Another Country," and others.

In the story we can see two main and few secondary characters. The two main characters are an American soldier, at the same time the narrator, and the major. The secondary characters are the boys, similar in age as narrator, and the doctor. Throughout interaction and conversation between characters, and through good selection of setting, author successfully passes the message and the theme of the story to readers. In my opinion the major theme of the story is loss and different ways of confronting it. At the same time loss is one of the things that all characters in the story share, it is something that connects them, makes them similar, and keeps them coming to the hospital every afternoon. Another theme that comes out in the story is the discrimination that the American soldier faced.

The narrator, and the protagonist, is an American soldier who was in the hospital due to the problem with his leg. There he was in contact with other people who shared similar experiences with him, due to their injuries and wounds but yet they differed a lot. For everybody he still was a foreigner and we figured that out from the way they named him. We are not told his name but we know him as the “American”.

...

... middle of paper ...

... illness, and we guess that he knew a lot of his patient’s lives and with an everyday interaction became a kind of their friend.

Besides the doctor there are also the boys, who were similar in age and medals, to the narrator, an American. “They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier” (268). They were the ones with whom an American was sometimes going to the Café Cova after the treatment in the hospital. There they were more similar then in the hospital because they had some similar experiences that people in Café, who disliked them, couldn’t understand. These characters didn’t play an important role in the story except in the part when they changed their attitudes toward the American because of the way he earned his medals and in that way showed a kind of discrimination.

Open Document