Plot Summary:
Jim Gilmore, a blacksmith, lives in a very rural corner of Michigan, and dines at a place called "D.J. Smith's," where he is waited on by a young woman named Liz Coats. Liz has a crush on Jim, while Jim seems indifferent to her. Her overwhelming attraction towards him increases when he goes off on a hunting trip with friends. Upon his return, he eats and drinks whisky with the two men from the hunting party at D.J. Smith's, one of the two men being Smith himself. He gets up from the dining area, goes into the next room where Liz is sitting in a chair thinking about him, kisses her and grabs her, leads her on a walk to a boathouse, has his way with her, and falls asleep on top of her.
Criticism:
The girl's emotional longings and the blacksmith's physical impulses are not compatible. Are women and men ever compatible? What degrees of surrender on the parts of more than one party are necessary to qualify for compatibility? When we finish the story we know that something is wrong. But Liz wanted Jim and Jim wanted Liz, so why these complexities? Liz made verbal objections to Jim's "advances" in the boathouse, but he ignored her and the incident therefore qualifies as rape.
The twist that makes the plot more complicated than just the rape of woman is the woman's attraction to the man. Liz wanted Jim on her terms, or perhaps even on some mutual terms that could have developed in the way that a normal relationship might allow. Jim wanted her on his terms, and took her without consideration for a mutual ground. And what is meant by 'want' is distinct to their respective sex. Hemingway delineates these types of desire, assigns them to the sex they are normally attributed to, and clashed them together, hard. Something breaks.
Friday, March 30, 2007
"Old Man at the Bridge"
This story takes place in Spain during a civilian evacuation of San Carlos. Written in the first person, the narrator enhances the sense of flight by speculating about when some unnamed enemy will reach the bridge that most of the townspeople have already crossed. A seventy six year old man remains sedentary on the wrong side of the bridge and the narrator encourages him to go with the others. Not knowing anyone or anything other than his town and the animals that he had been watching over, he is reluctant to leave.
The point here seems to be to depict the plight of the refugee. Hemingway was actually in Spain as a journalist while this conflict was going on. The story is therefore a manifestation of his experience as a witness to the injustices of war, particularly the evacuation of ones home.
The point here seems to be to depict the plight of the refugee. Hemingway was actually in Spain as a journalist while this conflict was going on. The story is therefore a manifestation of his experience as a witness to the injustices of war, particularly the evacuation of ones home.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
Characters:
Harry - Man dying from gangrene infection
Helen - His rich wife
Plot:
Harry is a writer on a trip to Africa with his wife, Helen. He scraped his leg on a thorn and, not bothering to treat it right away, is deeply infected with advance stages of gangrene when we meet him in the story. For the most part he remains physically static, but engages in eating, drinking alcohol, speaking with his wife, and reflecting. He feels Death in a physical sense, and in fact his wife finds him dead in the night at the end of the story.
Dialogue exists in two forms throughout. Explicitly there is communication with his wife, a woman in love with him, but towards whom he has feelings of indifference. One particular sentence gives a good impression of the affair: "...it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved." He treats her poorly in many of their exchanges, being very candid about everything as he prepares to die. The second dialogue is an internal discourse reflecting on experiences and ideas which he had always meant to write, but never did because he did not feel that these impressions had been perfected. "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
This is said to be one of Hemingway's best stories, and there is also speculation that it is one of his most autobiographical. It is undoubtedly good, but the interpersonal complexities and identity struggles in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" are better ingredients to a story than the internal struggles of Harry in the face of incompletion and death.
Best line in the story:
"So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."
Harry - Man dying from gangrene infection
Helen - His rich wife
Plot:
Harry is a writer on a trip to Africa with his wife, Helen. He scraped his leg on a thorn and, not bothering to treat it right away, is deeply infected with advance stages of gangrene when we meet him in the story. For the most part he remains physically static, but engages in eating, drinking alcohol, speaking with his wife, and reflecting. He feels Death in a physical sense, and in fact his wife finds him dead in the night at the end of the story.
Dialogue exists in two forms throughout. Explicitly there is communication with his wife, a woman in love with him, but towards whom he has feelings of indifference. One particular sentence gives a good impression of the affair: "...it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved." He treats her poorly in many of their exchanges, being very candid about everything as he prepares to die. The second dialogue is an internal discourse reflecting on experiences and ideas which he had always meant to write, but never did because he did not feel that these impressions had been perfected. "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
This is said to be one of Hemingway's best stories, and there is also speculation that it is one of his most autobiographical. It is undoubtedly good, but the interpersonal complexities and identity struggles in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" are better ingredients to a story than the internal struggles of Harry in the face of incompletion and death.
Best line in the story:
"So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."
Saturday, March 24, 2007
"The Capital of the World"
Here we have an exploration of the "coming of age" theme, but a case in which the protagonist never actually comes to age. A hotel in Madrid is filled with various characters associated with bullfighting, the matadors themselves, picadors, and banderilleros. A boy, Paco, works at the hotel and fantasizes about becoming a brave bullfighter himself. Paco is unquestionably a romantic, and is contrasted by his cynical co-worker, Enrique, who had tried bullfighting himself, but run in fear from the bull's charge.
Enrique challenges Paco's claims to bravery in the face of an actual bull, and simulates a charge of the bull's horns with a chair which he has fastened kitchen knives to. Paco predictably gets stabbed and dies. He dies without ever experiences the decline and fall of a bullfighter, an experience that the three past-their-prime matadors staying at the hotel went through. He never comes to age, but dies a romantic. Hemingway gives us this line in the final paragraph: "He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions."
Equally interesting is a peripheral issue concerning the matadors. One of them is specifically labeled a coward. He was impaled by a bull's horn but survived and was since a less than impressive matador. Hemingway brings the issue of cowardly men and their treatment by women into this story much as he did in the Francis Macomber tale. The matador makes advances on Paco's sister, a chambermaid at the hotel, and is rejected by her. She even resorts to calling him a coward to his face. At the end of the story again, a second matador takes home a prostitute for whom the coward was buying drinks. This dynamic of masculinity and women seems to be a recurring theme in Hemingway's writing.
Overall, a decent story. It is somewhat predictable, and in parts, especially at the beginning, the perhaps unnecessarily excessive description of characters overpowers the plot. Not as good as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," but still worth reading.
Enrique challenges Paco's claims to bravery in the face of an actual bull, and simulates a charge of the bull's horns with a chair which he has fastened kitchen knives to. Paco predictably gets stabbed and dies. He dies without ever experiences the decline and fall of a bullfighter, an experience that the three past-their-prime matadors staying at the hotel went through. He never comes to age, but dies a romantic. Hemingway gives us this line in the final paragraph: "He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions."
Equally interesting is a peripheral issue concerning the matadors. One of them is specifically labeled a coward. He was impaled by a bull's horn but survived and was since a less than impressive matador. Hemingway brings the issue of cowardly men and their treatment by women into this story much as he did in the Francis Macomber tale. The matador makes advances on Paco's sister, a chambermaid at the hotel, and is rejected by her. She even resorts to calling him a coward to his face. At the end of the story again, a second matador takes home a prostitute for whom the coward was buying drinks. This dynamic of masculinity and women seems to be a recurring theme in Hemingway's writing.
Overall, a decent story. It is somewhat predictable, and in parts, especially at the beginning, the perhaps unnecessarily excessive description of characters overpowers the plot. Not as good as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," but still worth reading.
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
Characters:
Francis Macomber - Tall, handsome, rich husband of Margaret Macomber, protagonist, wise in the ways of business and the modern sophistications man must understand to be successful
Margaret Macomber - Wife of Francis, possesses beauty, high degree of feminine prowess
Robert Wilson - shorter, red-faced safari guide, represents the more primal and less sophisticated sense of being a man, good instincts
Summary:
Francis and Margaret Macomber are on a hunting safari in Africa. They are accompanied by their guide, Robert Wilson, who takes Francis out to hunt a certain lion in the area of their camp. Francis shoots and injures the lion, but must confront his fear when the guide insists that they go into the thicket and finish off the crouching brute. He goes in with the guide, but runs in fear from the lion when it charges them. Margaret sees her husband run from her view in the nearby jeep, and also sees the guide subsequently square off with the animal and shoot it head on. The relationship between everyone becomes strained after Francis's embarrassment and Margaret sneaks out of her husband's tent in the middle of the night to go sleep with Wilson. The husband finds out and is even more humiliated, but it isn't openly discussed, just danced around at breakfast. On the next day they hunt buffalo. Again they must go into some bush to flush out a buffalo who was injured, but not killed. Francis asserts himself by assuring everyone he is not afraid this time despite the threat of the buffalo's horns. He goes in, the buffalo charges, his wife tries to shoot the buffalo from the jeep but kills her husband instead.
Criticism:
The story explores the nature of masculinity, and the nature of the female response. While Francis is successful as a man back in an American city, he proves to be inadequate as a man in the realm of raw nature. He lacks the primal masculinity that we see in Wilson. His success is not in his intrinsic identity as an individual man, but in the sophisticated and detached framework of modern existence, where he is defined by contacts, credentials, and cash.
Wilson, however, is the alpha male in this African setting. He is completely at ease with himself, and unaffected, at least externally, by the tensions of Francis and Margaret. We do not know how he would fare in Francis's world, but almost certainly he would maintain his security as a man.
Margaret sleeps with Wilson for several reasons:
First, she doesn't really love Francis anymore than he loves her, or else even his cowardly retreat could have been forgiven if she considered him enough of a man otherwise that such a one-time display was outweighed by other qualities.
Second, Hemingway is using this African setting to explore the basic instincts of human nature. In the animal kingdom the dominant male is pursued by females, and when the absence of the sophistications of modern life are absent, people are left with little more than these basic instincts.
Third, Francis isn't really a man. He has never grown up. He is an identity tied to institutions, opinions, and cocktail parties. He would not survive alone on a desert island.
Margaret is still wicked nonetheless, but she serves as an important foil to the two men to help Hemingway define and explore the idea of masculinity. This is the first story in the book, it is 23 pages long and I was impressed with it. The imagery of the African landscape and the realism used in the depiction of the animals being hunted was excellent.
Francis Macomber - Tall, handsome, rich husband of Margaret Macomber, protagonist, wise in the ways of business and the modern sophistications man must understand to be successful
Margaret Macomber - Wife of Francis, possesses beauty, high degree of feminine prowess
Robert Wilson - shorter, red-faced safari guide, represents the more primal and less sophisticated sense of being a man, good instincts
Summary:
Francis and Margaret Macomber are on a hunting safari in Africa. They are accompanied by their guide, Robert Wilson, who takes Francis out to hunt a certain lion in the area of their camp. Francis shoots and injures the lion, but must confront his fear when the guide insists that they go into the thicket and finish off the crouching brute. He goes in with the guide, but runs in fear from the lion when it charges them. Margaret sees her husband run from her view in the nearby jeep, and also sees the guide subsequently square off with the animal and shoot it head on. The relationship between everyone becomes strained after Francis's embarrassment and Margaret sneaks out of her husband's tent in the middle of the night to go sleep with Wilson. The husband finds out and is even more humiliated, but it isn't openly discussed, just danced around at breakfast. On the next day they hunt buffalo. Again they must go into some bush to flush out a buffalo who was injured, but not killed. Francis asserts himself by assuring everyone he is not afraid this time despite the threat of the buffalo's horns. He goes in, the buffalo charges, his wife tries to shoot the buffalo from the jeep but kills her husband instead.
Criticism:
The story explores the nature of masculinity, and the nature of the female response. While Francis is successful as a man back in an American city, he proves to be inadequate as a man in the realm of raw nature. He lacks the primal masculinity that we see in Wilson. His success is not in his intrinsic identity as an individual man, but in the sophisticated and detached framework of modern existence, where he is defined by contacts, credentials, and cash.
Wilson, however, is the alpha male in this African setting. He is completely at ease with himself, and unaffected, at least externally, by the tensions of Francis and Margaret. We do not know how he would fare in Francis's world, but almost certainly he would maintain his security as a man.
Margaret sleeps with Wilson for several reasons:
First, she doesn't really love Francis anymore than he loves her, or else even his cowardly retreat could have been forgiven if she considered him enough of a man otherwise that such a one-time display was outweighed by other qualities.
Second, Hemingway is using this African setting to explore the basic instincts of human nature. In the animal kingdom the dominant male is pursued by females, and when the absence of the sophistications of modern life are absent, people are left with little more than these basic instincts.
Third, Francis isn't really a man. He has never grown up. He is an identity tied to institutions, opinions, and cocktail parties. He would not survive alone on a desert island.
Margaret is still wicked nonetheless, but she serves as an important foil to the two men to help Hemingway define and explore the idea of masculinity. This is the first story in the book, it is 23 pages long and I was impressed with it. The imagery of the African landscape and the realism used in the depiction of the animals being hunted was excellent.
Why This
My intent here is to force my interpretations of Ernest Hemingway's short stories into articulated thoughts, rather than leaving them floating around like shapeless abstractions that can be sensed but not realized. It seems that we can understand things to varying degrees of depth, depending on our experiences, cognitive processes, logic, and the time and effort and spirit we are willing to devote to whatever it is we are trying to understand.
At the most superficial level literature is limited to being read and felt in the sense that we relate to the mood, the atmosphere, and the moral sense expressed by the author. The other end of the spectrum might take the same work and apply such a sophisticated analysis that the author's intention becomes apparent, and flaws might even be exposed in the author's style or thinking. I hope to go beneath the surface to understand everything that I can possibly draw from each story.
I chose to undertake this project when my sister, Amy, suggested that we read the same book as a way for us to stay in touch and have something common to draw from while we live so far apart. I aim to read all of Hemingway's many short stories, and make substantive comments after analysing the text. Hopefully, at the end, I'll have enjoyed some good fiction while improving my critical thinking and writing. If anyone reads this, I hope they will comment if they should find anything that interests them.
The version of short stories used is the "Finca Vigia Edition."
At the most superficial level literature is limited to being read and felt in the sense that we relate to the mood, the atmosphere, and the moral sense expressed by the author. The other end of the spectrum might take the same work and apply such a sophisticated analysis that the author's intention becomes apparent, and flaws might even be exposed in the author's style or thinking. I hope to go beneath the surface to understand everything that I can possibly draw from each story.
I chose to undertake this project when my sister, Amy, suggested that we read the same book as a way for us to stay in touch and have something common to draw from while we live so far apart. I aim to read all of Hemingway's many short stories, and make substantive comments after analysing the text. Hopefully, at the end, I'll have enjoyed some good fiction while improving my critical thinking and writing. If anyone reads this, I hope they will comment if they should find anything that interests them.
The version of short stories used is the "Finca Vigia Edition."
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