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Karah Smith Professor James Seaton ENG 314 15 November 2014 The Significance of Death in Hemingway’s Fiction Ernest Hemingway, author of In Our Time and The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, contemplates the idea of death in numerous narratives. Hemingway was a member of the “Lost Generation,” and exemplified many of its themes about the meaning of life and death in his work. The “Lost Generation” was a group of American authors and artists who moved to Paris after World War I where they struggled to find a deeper meaning to life amidst the moral ambiguity and decline of traditional values caused by the slaughters of the Great War. In many of his works, Hemingway suggested that life and death are insignificant and that the universe is indifferent to human beings, beliefs that were later admired by existentialists like Satre and Albert Camus. Hemingway’s fixation on the lack of meaning behind life and death is reflected in his writing with ‘death’ being a recurring element in his fiction. Overall, Hemingway’s underlying treatment of death through his writing depicts it as being meaningless, macabre, and largely undignified, a feat that he achieves through his pointed use of imagery, irony, and dialogue, as well as through his failure to provide context. One of the first stories that appear in Hemingway’s In Our Time is “Indian Camp” where the reader meets Nick Adams for the first time as a young child accompanying his father, a doctor, to a Native American village where he performs an emergency caesarean section on a woman struggling to give birth. After a successful surgery, the visit quickly turns south when the doctor finds the baby’s father dead in the bunk above where the infant just breathed its first
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breath of life. The simultaneous occurrence of life and death is ironic because generally having a baby is a very joyous occasion and cause for celebration, but in this case the happiness of welcoming a new life is suddenly replaced with sorrow as a result of the father’s suicide. This is a prime example of the apparent lack of moral order present in Hemingway’s work, because it suggests that the universe is indifferent to the well being of humanity, and that there is no good God or greater force of justice reigning over mankind. Hemingway describes the discovery of the dead father with uncensored imagery saying, “The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets” (18). The detailed description used to describe the suicide portrays death in its bloody, gory reality, and highlights the undignified manner in which the father chose to take his own life. With little contextual background information on the man, the reader cannot form an identity for him, and the only explanation provided about why the man killed himself is when Nick’s father claims that perhaps it was because “he couldn’t stand things” (19). Hemingway’s inclusion of the father’s suicide thus reveals that in this imperfect world, one can be confronted with more suffering than one can explain or accept, and that things can get so bad that suicide seems like the only means to an escape from the pain. However, the suicide also suggests selfishness and a lack of dignity on the father’s part, because instead of being there to support his wife and newborn child he decides to kill himself even though help has finally arrived to relieve his wife’s pain. Once Nick and his father abandon the camp and return to their boat, the narrator describes the arousal of nature and the start of a new day by saying, “The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water” (19). Through this description of a peaceful dawn occurring despite the horrifying events of the night, Hemingway draws attention to the fact that
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no matter what happens, and no matter who dies, the universe moves on and the death that occurred is insignificant and meaningless on the universal scale. Furthermore, because the narrator takes the point of view of Nick as a young child throughout the story, death is contrasted between a child’s naïve understanding of it and its harsh realities. The dialogue between Nick and his father at the end of the story highlights this juxtaposition as Nick asks his dad, “Is dying hard, Daddy?” to which his father responds, “No, I think its pretty easy, Nick. It all depends” (19). In this exchange, Nick’s father conveys an innocent interpretation of death in order to reassure his son. The young Nick absorbs this belief and claims a sense of immortality conveyed through the story’s concluding phrase, “he felt quite sure he would never die” (19). With this exchange of dialogue immediately following the gruesome description of the man’s suicide, Hemingway is able to directly contrast a childish perspective of death as being easy and not pertaining to youth, with its true, ugly reality. Thus, in “Indian Camp” as a whole, Hemingway uses imagery, irony, and dialogue, as well as minimal contextual background information to portray death as horrifying, meaningless, and undignified while contrasting these harsh realities with a childish perspective of death being peaceful and unthreatening. Throughout In Our Time, brief episodic vignettes separate the short stories from each other and act as pointed snapshots that highlight the meaningless violence and suffering Hemingway associated with death. At the beginning of chapter five, one of these vignettes opens with the statement, “They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital” (51). Already the scene is dripping with irony because a hospital is where people go to be saved from death. To be killed against its walls contradicts the purpose of hospitals altogether. The next three sentences in the short narrative are dedicated to describing
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the presence of water, dead leaves, and rain. Hemingway writes, “There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard” (51). The imagery in these three sentences, specifically the portrayal of the dead leaves lying among puddles of water, parallels the later image of the sick minister slumped dead in a pool of water on the ground, suggesting that he is as insignificant as the dead, scattered leaves. The vignette goes on to describe a man, sick and weak with typhoid, being carried out of the hospital by enemy soldiers. The soldiers try to make him stand for his execution, but he is too feeble and dies sitting in a puddle of water with his head on his knees. Firstly, it is significant to note that the man is severely ill and would likely have died soon anyway from his disease. In such a state, he is by no means a threat to anyone, so their insistence on killing him execution style with the other political figures emphasizes the pointlessness of his death. Secondly, because the soldiers attempted to make the sick minister stand up for the sake of following protocol only to have him sink down into a puddle of water stresses the realistic weakness and pitiful nature of death. Being unable to stand and face death with honor and dignity exemplifies Hemingway’s portrayal of death overall as being undignified. Lastly, because there is no context to the episode that provided the reader with information as to why the man deserved to be executed, the death that results is conveyed as violent and unnecessary. Another vignette that appears later in the book depicts two Hungarian men who supposedly broke into a local cigar shop at two in the morning. Two police officers, Drevitts and Boyle, arrived at the scene and, while the Hungarians were backing their wagon out of the alley, “Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box” (79). The matter-of-fact and dry imagery used in this scene highlights the easiness with which Boyle was able to pull the trigger and kill two men in cold blood. Through the imagery in this vignette, death is treated as
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common and insignificant. Drevitts is frightened about repercussions when he discovers Boyle had killed both the men and tells him that he “oughtn’t to have done it” (79). Boyle defends his actions by responding, “They’re crooks, ain’t they? ...They’re wops, ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble” (79)? The exchange described between Boyle and Drevitts paints the former as having a light attitude towards death with little consideration before shooting and no expression of remorse for his murderous actions. When prompted, Boyle justifies his killing of the two men by claiming that they deserved it because they were (a) criminals, and (b) wops1. However, the accuracy of declaring them criminals is extremely vague because of the minimal context Hemingway provided in the episode. All he wrote was that the two men “got into a cigar store” and then later were seen “backing their wagon out of an alley (79). While it is highly likely that they were in fact thieves due to the whole scene occurring at two o’clock in the morning, there is no hard proof in the text that confirms these men actually stole anything from the store, and Boyle did not wait to verify their guilt before taking their fate into his own hands. Additionally, they were incorrectly identified as “wops” when they were actually Hungarians. In this sense, their deaths can be interpreted as hate crimes based on their perceived ethnicities and physical appearances because Boyle emphasizes that his actions were warranted and that no negative repercussions will happen to him due to these men merely being “wops.” The fact that neither of the Hungarians are given a “speaking” role in the scene leaves their identities completely anonymous, thus making their deaths that much more unwarranted, undignified, and cold-blooded. In this vignette, Hemingway utilized straightforward imagery, dialogue between characters, and minimal contextual information to convey death as not only as meaningless,
1 “Wops” is a derogatory term, or slur, referring to Italians that was commonly used in the early 1900s in the United States.
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commonplace, and committed through malice, but also as the natural consequence for those who are negatively stereotyped based on their physical appearance and racial profile. Hemingway’s theme of death continues with full force in another of his books, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. One of the stories included in the book, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” is a prime example of Hemingway’s use of imagery, irony, and dialogue to interpret death. In the scene where Macomber is hunting a lion, there is a subtle shift in point of view from Macomber’s perspective to that of the lion’s. It is from the lion’s perspective that Hemingway writes, “he swung away toward the cover of the trees as he heard a crackling crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach…Then it crashed again and he felt the blow as it hit his lower ribs and ripped on through, blood sudden hot and frothy in his mouth” (132-133). The gruesome imagery and detailed description of the lion’s sensations here draws attention to the intense suffering and pain the lion is going through upon being shot, but not cleanly killed. When the lion finally dies, Macomber describes its head as being huge and “mutilated” from all of the bullets, continuing the horrific depiction of his death (137). Towards the end of the story when a newly emboldened Macomber squares off to a charging buffalo, his wife, Margot, who is in the motor car behind Macomber, fires a shot with a rifle at the buffalo and ends up hitting her husband in the back of the head. This is ironic because Macomber had killed the lion with a rifle and then ends up being killed with a rifle himself. After this incident, Wilson, the hunting guide, responds in a business-like fashion first commenting on the “hell of a good bull” they had shot and then ordering the driver of the car to “spread a blanket over the body and stay by it” (154). He approaches Margot and asks her, “Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England” (154). Wilson’s bitter question blatantly accuses Margot of
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murdering her husband in cold blood, and emphasizes that being murdered by a gunshot to the head is a violent and messy way to die, whereas being poisoned would have been a much subtler and more peaceful way to go. With condemning sarcasm, Wilson explains to a sobbing Margot that she shouldn’t worry and says, “There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There’s the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You’re perfectly alright” (154). Wilson’s belief that Margot purposefully murdered her husband is obvious in this statement, and in a scornful tone he assures her that her guilt will be well documented for prosecution purposes. In response to her cries to “stop it,” Wilson says, “I’m through now…I was a little angry. I’d begun to like your husband” (154). This quote shifts the attention away from Macomber’s death and onto Wilson’s own feelings of anger that just as he was starting to like Macomber, Margot had to go and kill him. Thus, through Wilson’s dialogue and stoic behavior of quickly cleaning up the scene, Macomber’s death quickly loses significance as plans for the future take over. In conclusion, Hemingway’s fiction places a lot of emphasis on death and its meaningless, macabre, and undignified nature. Through stories such as “Indian Camp” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” as well as through episodic vignettes in In Our Time, Hemingway depicts multiple instances of gruesome and undignified deaths, that when all is said and done, have no meaning in a universe that is indifferent to human beings. The decline of traditional moral values that occurred as a result of the brutality of World War I greatly influenced Hemingway’s work as well as his treatment of death. Through the use of literary devices such as dialogue, irony, and imagery, as well as through his minimal contextual support, Hemingway portrays death as something that is overall gruesome, undignified, and meaningless.