Mirror Of The Times——On Hemingway's Mental Development Process

Generally, Hemingway is regarded as a passive, pessimistic and decadent man; and his fiction is looked on as decadent literature. Hemingway is mostly famous for his four novels: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old and the Sea. The heroes in these novels behave in very different ways. The complete crowd of characters, from Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan to Santiago, with Hemingway himself as the prototype, indicate the mental development process of Hemingway. Integrating with the historical backgrounds, this dissertation divides Hemingway抯 mental development process into three stages. Hemingway was lost and perplexed in the 1920s; he struggled and strived in the 1930s and the early 1940s; and he turned very rational in the 1950s. His novels, heroes and behaviors are the real reflections of the society. Hemingway is the mirror of the times.