EVOLUTION OF WRITING STYLE IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S WORKS FROM 1916 TO 1929 A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Departmental Honors by Zachary O. Loudin December, 2013 Thesis written by Zachary O. Loudin Approved by ______________________________________________________________________, Advisor _____________________________________________________, Chair, Department of English Accepted by ___________________________________________________________, Dean, Honors College ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTERS I. CHAPTER I ............................................................................................................ 8 II. CHAPTER II ......................................................................................................... 27 III. CHAPTER III ....................................................................................................... 65 IV. CHAPTER IV ....................................................................................................... 83 V. CHAPTER V ...................................................................................................... 112 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 138 WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................................... 142 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the creation of this project, many conversations were had and many ears were talked off. To the owners of all those poor ears, I thank you for your time and patience. Specifically -- to Dr. Dauterich, Dr. Holt, and Dr. Howard, thank you for your discerning eyes and incisive input. To Dr. Trogdon -- this project would not have been possible at all without your guidance, depth of knowledge, and encouragement from the very beginning. Thank you for showing me the ins-and-outs of scholarship. Lastly, a special thanks to G.M. Keillor for her eleventh-hour formatting prowess. iv INTRODUCTION It has been several years since, prompted by the sight of Old Man and the Sea -- one of the few books on my high school reading list that I enjoyed -- on the shelf at a used bookstore, I asked the owner to recommend another Hemingway novel. He suggested The Sun Also Rises, which I read with much pleasure -- appreciating the humor, the dialogue, the bullfighting and descriptions of expansive countryside -- if perhaps, on first read, missing some of the underlying depth and intricacies of a well-crafted novel. By the end of that year I had read many of the author's other works, some as good or even better than those first two. So when I became interested in my studies to the point that the relative sense of transience that one semester provided felt somehow lacking -- and I found out that the opportunity to complete a thesis through the Honors College was an option -- Hemingway's works were the most obvious place for me to begin my extended research into literature. When beginning a three-semester long research project, a general familiarity of and fondness for one author's works is a start in the right direction -- and that is about it. The original topic I had in mind was something about gender -- which is literally how specific my ideas on that topic became. Initial readings into some of the scholarship covering gender and sexuality in Hemingway's works at once dwarfed my applicable knowledge on the matter and turned off my desire to spend a year and a half with it. But those initial readings began to reveal a topic that I could (and did) spend a long time looking into. All those critiques of the sexuality in stories' characters and plots and symbols obviously made use of the text themselves. That is, in a text, 1 2 scholars were seeing this, and claiming that and using lenses of interpretation to read into the creativity of somebody they probably have not met -- a rather complex way to interact with little blurbs of ink spread out on paper. I began to wonder how one could make a claim about the role of, say, men and women in a specific story if the words "man" and "woman" are never actually written. If they are mentioned, how can a scholar suggest that one sex is favored over the other, if the text is void of written evidence for such? What I'm getting at is that those little blurbs of ink pull together to form words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs, and then... you get the point. It is the job of writers to organize these blurbs into a form that accurately presents the information they would like to portray -- we call this "style." Before any other theoretical lens can be laid over a text, the author's style must be in place. And so, as I found myself looking around for another topic, I began to notice all my pencilled-in notes on the margins of those dog-eared novels, exclaiming a unique syntactical construction ("syn!") or being confused by the ambiguous use of punctuation ("punc?"), or my simple amazement of the effectiveness of a passage ("whoa"). Style. I had found a topic that was diverse and interesting enough for this length of project. In discussing this project with Dr. Trogdon, he suggested a chronological approach to style across Hemingway's works. Though there are, of course, other ways to structure such a study -- short stories vs. novels, focusing only on third-person or first-person narration, stories with less than three or more than three characters are a few that come to mind -- chronology seemed the most accessible and comprehensive approach. Next was a consideration of what texts to discuss. The prolific stature of Ernest Hemingway -- whose writing career spanned nearly 40 3 years, ten novels (three published posthumously) and several short story collections -- was frankly intimidating. Where should I start? How far should I go? I started at square one -- Hemingway's high school writings. These stories were, as may have been expected, not very good. Instead of being put off by this experience, I was merely excited. How does one go from writing this to writing that, the highly effective and artistically complex fiction that I had come to know? Having found a starting point, I considered a stopping point. Conveniently, writers have what is necessarily their final published work. That seemed a clear-cut ending, and so I intended to stretch my examination of style from the very beginnings of Hemingway's writing to the very end, wrapping up somewhere in the 1950s with what would be published as the posthumous The Garden of Eden. I quickly realized, however, that this project (with its relatively short time- frame of three semesters) was going to be a question of more text with less depth, or less text with more depth. Desiring to make the most of my studies, I opted for the latter, selecting 1929, the publication year of A Farewell To Arms, as the cut-off point of my investigation. This range of time would bring a substantial amount of work under my microscope. High School fiction and other juvenilia would be joined by four short-story collections, one short satirical novel, and two full-length novels. It would also show the evolution of Ernest Hemingway's skills as a writer. What starts out as a 16-year-old high school kid mimicking what narrative voices he could find ends with the 30-year-old author -- by this time internationally famous -- publishing what some regard as the finest novel of the decade, and possessing a fully mastered adult style of fiction-writing that is all his own. 4 Next, I needed a definition of literary "style." This proved more difficult to obtain than expected. When discussing fiction, there are so many intersecting facets within a work; to these facets are applied so many opinions and thoughts that to find a comprehensive scientific, or even pseudo-scientific, definition of "style" was unlikely. In my search for an operating definition, I was struck by a letter Philip Roth wrote to a critic who had written a negative review of one of his novels. In the letter he writes: In my novel... virtues and values are “proposed” as they generally are in fiction–neither apart from the novel’s predominant concern nor in perfect balance with it, but largely through the manner of presentation: through what might be called the sensuous aspects of fiction–tone, mood, voice, and, among other things, the juxtaposition of the narrative events themselves. (Roth 35) I appreciated this view for discussing the "manner of presentation," and for some reason it reminded of the simplistic maxim of geography: "what's where and why is it there?" This presents a few simple postulations: there is a place that is somewhere, but where is somewhere? and why there and not somewhere else? While this may sound like a digression, it was from Roth's explanation of his own craft and paired with this simplification of the study of geography, that I postulated my own operating definition for "style" that I use throughout this project: "how is the author saying what he wants to say, and does it work?" That is: how does the author use form to present the content of the text? What grammatical structures are used and to what effect? Repetition of, say, choice words, structures, or punctuation, as I will show,