Convincingly Faking It with Ernest Hemingway
Brandon g
The first thing you should know about Hemingway is what's called the iceberg approach to writing. You see, only one-eighth of an iceberg sticks out above the water. Ship captains would rarely see that one-eighth and would often run into one of the remaining seven-eighths of the iceberg, sending their ships plummeting into the vast sea. Similarly, Hemingway would often hit things in life and drink heavily until he plummeted into a vast stupor. Many famous authors have been raging drunks, but Hemingway makes them all look like pansy-sissy men.
This brings us to a very important point: Hemingway could take just about any other famous author in a bar fight. If you ever find yourself in a fight in which you get to pick two famous authors to fight alongside you, make sure one of them is Hemingway. (The other one is up to you, but I would recommend Edgar Allen Poe. He's crazy. He probably bites people.) Ernest Hemingway is the manliest man that ever was--even if he did wear a dress on occasion.
There are some major themes that span many of Hemingway's writings, which I will briefly cover:
How Much War Sucks: Being a field medic in World War I, Hemingway knew more about war than he probably ever wanted to. Much of his writing is an immediate response to those experiences he had. If asked whether you like Hemingway, a proper response would be: "Yeah— I hate war!" Works such as The Sun Also Rises are more or less all about war, however indirectly; other works, such as The Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, may not be explicitly about war, but still involve such things as bullet wounds, plane crashes, and blatant, unadulterated manliness.
Men in the Woods: Whenever a major Hemingway male character needs to recharge and refocus, he heads off into the woods for some fishing or hunting. In Hemingway's worlds, the woods make everything better—much like how alcohol made everything better in Fitzgerald's works. I suspect if a grizzly bear had ever approached Ernest in the woods, he would have put his arm around it, offered it a beer, and told it old war stories.
Impotence and Other Manly Dysfunctions: The theory behind this involves one of Hemingway's war injuries. A landmine severely damaged his legs, taking him out of the fight and into the ambulance—first as a patient, then as a field medic. Critics have speculated that Hemingway dreaded a life in which the landmine had hit just a little bit further north. Jake, the protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, had sustained such an emasculating injury, which provides much of the conflict and innuendo in the book. If you're a man and you've ever worried about losing your manly parts, you can probably relate to some of Hemingway's characters.
Chauvinism: Just as Hemingway's books are all about men and manly things, the women in his worlds are usually just there for sex. Sorry, ladies, but that's just the way he wrote.
