Life And Death--A Thematic Study Of Ernest Hemingway's Works

Ernest Hemingway, as an outstanding modern American writer, has presented to his readers an overview of the particular generation after World War I. Journeys to Spain to watch bullfighting and to report on the civil war, hunting expeditions in Africa, fishing in the Caribbean, experiences on special missions and as war correspondent during World War II constitute Hemingway's colorful life. Like the author himself, the Hemingway hero lives a life of great adventure. Whether big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing, boxing, bullfighting, or soldiering, he displays what Hemingway called "grace under pressure." All Hemingway's novels and many of the short stories are concerned with life on the threshold of death or disaster. In all the major books risks are taken; life is staked on a hazard, with skill and luck deliberately balanced death which is always imminent. And the stories are mainly concerned with "tough" people.The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first successful novel, brilliantly captures his years in Paris as one of the "lost generation". As the leading spokesman for the "lost generation" he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values. The story tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war, who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in A Farewell to Arms (1929), a poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during World War I. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), an epic story set against the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere; and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), an allegorical tale of a struggle between an old fisherman and a big fish. These novels are most characteristic of Hemingway's fiction and represent the author's highest literary achievements. Reading of these novels provides access to the understanding of Hemingway and his permanent theme. One finds in these novels the different problems that are combined to shape the author's predominant thematic concern in regard to the problematic relationship between life and death. In the face of death the question of bravery or cowardice becomes important. Interwoven with this are problems of loyalty or treachery to a country, a cause, or the person himself.