Mrs.Mallards character (The story of an hour)

Analysis of Hemingway’s Narrative Technique as a Short- Story Writer

For many years, the narrative technique of Hemingway has been under debate. Writers before him had already achieved works that bear the characteristics of the modern short story, and many of their works could stand today, with those of Hemingway and of writers like Faulkner, as representative short stories of modern times. What distinguishes Hemingway both from his predecessors and from his contemporaries, however, is the theory he produces to deal with the challenge of spatial limitation which every short story writer has to face: how can he say more than his space actually allows him to say? The principle of the iceberg, as the theory is called by Hemingway, leaves distinctive imprints on his short stories: a clipped, spare style, naturalistic presentation of actions and observations, heavy reliance on dramatic dialogue, and a pattern of connection extending backwards and forwards between the various stories.

Because of the above, it is helpful to have some understanding of his theory. In Death in the afternoon, Hemingway (1932,191) points out that no matter how good a phrase or a simile a writer may have, he is spoiling his work out of egotism if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary. The form of a work, according to Hemingway, should be created out of experience, and no intruding elements should be allowed to falsify that form and betray that experience. As a result, all that can be dispensed with should be pruned off: convention, embellishment, rhetoric. It is this tendency of writing that has brought Hemingway admiration as well as criticism, but it is clear that the author knew what he was doing when he himself commented on his aim:

…I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Everything you know you can estimate and it only strengthens your iceberg (cited in Moritz 1968, 168).

One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of s...

... middle of paper ...

...felt for those who “need a light for the night” and could go to sleep only “with daylight”; the American soldier told us that “if I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep because I knew my soul would only go out of me if I were dark”; and Nick told Captain Paravicini that he could not sleep “without a light or some sort.” What all of them share, we can say, is a fear of Death and Nada.

Hemingway’s narrative technique, then, is characterized by a curt style that emphasizes objectivity through highly selected details, flat and neutral diction, and simple declarative sentences capable of ironic understatements; by naturalistic presentation of actions and facts, with no attempt of any kind by the author to influence the reader; by heavy reliance on dramatic dialogue of clipped, scrappy forms for building plot and character; and by a sense of connection between some different stories so that a general understanding of all is indispensable to a better understanding of each. He thus makes the surface details suggest rather than tell everything they have to tell, hence the strength of his “iceberg.” His short stories, accordingly, deserve the reader’s second or even third reading.