A CRITICAL STUDY OF HEMINGWAY^S SHORT STORIES IN RELATION TO HIS NOVELS THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF Bottor of pi)iIogopI)p I M English Literature BY SHAHbA GHAURI UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR S. WIQAR HUSAIN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (INDIA) 1997 K'^P^ T6176 TO THE MEMOR OF MY LO¥Me FATHEE CONTENTS Acknowledgment Preface Page No Chapter 1 1 Introduction Hemingway and His Cntics Chapter II 16 Hemingway's Short Stories Distinct Features Chapter III 48 Hemingway's Novels Taking on From the Short Stones Chapter IV Interrelatedness of the Short Stories and the Novels (a) Themes 94 (b) Characterization 125 (c) Vision of Life 158 (d) Methods and Techniques 186 Conclusion 237 Bibliography 246 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT / am highly indebted to my supervisor Professor S Wiqar Husain for his guidance and inspiration throughout my work My obligation and gratitude to him cannot be expressed in words Without his encouragement and support it would not have been possible to complete my work I must also thank Professor Maqbool H Khan, the Chairman, Department of English under whose patronage the study was earned out Thanks are also due to all my teachers as well as the non-teaching staff of the Department of English, AMU Aligarh I sincerely thank all the members of my family for their co-operation dunng the preparation of my thesis I express my heartfelt gratitude to my mother Mrs Ruqaiya Ghauri whose encouragement and blessings have enabled me to do my humble bit to partially fulfill my late father's wishes I am equally thankful to my mother-in-law Mrs Shakira Bano, my aunt Mrs Shahnaz Rizvi and my sister Uzma Ghauri for their encouragement and moral support My husband Mr Sohail Niazi and my children deserve the utmost thanks, as their co­ operation and sacnfices helped me to sustained work, even at difficult times My sincere thanks are due to all my fnends and well-wishers for their helpful attitude I must also extend my thanks to the Maulana Azad Library AMD , the American Centre in Delhi and the ASRC in Hyderabad for their timely help Finally, I express my indebtedness to Aligarh Muslim University for the grant of a scholarship which helped me considerably in completing my thesis PREFACE rnest Hemingway began his literary career as a short story writer and his Estories won considerable critical acclaim while he was still in his twenties While still writing short stories Hemingway moved into the realm of longer fiction The 1914 - 18 war had a decisive impact in his development as a short story writer and continued to serve as a major subject in his early novels His pnncipal thematic concerns put in their early appearance in the short stones These were further explored and developed in the novels, hence the short stories and the novels form a continuity Hemingway's famous prose style too acquired its distinct identity in the early Nick Adams stones Nick Adams is the first Hemingway protagonist v^o keeps appearing under other names in the novels It IS this recurrent figure of the Hemingway-hero which provides a unity and a continuity to the author's work Since there is a frequent recycling of the older matenals in Hemingway's fiction, it is better to study the work as a developing whole and get the nght perspective of the author's craft The present study which follows my M Phil thesis on Hemingway's short stories aims at making a cntical study of Hemingway's short stones in relation to his novels and explore the deeper courses of his creativity with a view to determining as to what extent Hemingway's short stories are similar to and different from his novels The novels have in many ways overshadowed the recognition of the value of the short stories over the years I have tned to point out the intnnsic link of the two The stories contain some of the author's seminal work and my study has led me to confirm the hypothesis that the quintessential Hemingway is found in his early stones Some of these stories are just fragments without a rounded form, yet their punty and force remain unmatched in the context of the writer's total output A critical evaluation of the novels without proper attention to the stories will be partial and in some cases even misleading It is in view of the critics' tendency to read the novels in isolation that a humble effort has been made in the present thesis to trace and emphasize the interrelatedness of the short stories and the novels. CHAPTER— 1 TNTRODUCTTON: HEMINGWAY AND THE CRITICS oth short stories and novels are inseparable constituents of the Btotal literary output of Ernest Hemingway and their interrelatedness should be recognized for a comprehensive study of the writer's fictional creations Since the short story is considered an independent form, it is often studied separately or neglected in favour of the novel But it was the genre in which Hemingway greatly excelled — the genre that was the spawning ground of his novels, Hemingway's stories appeared in three major volumes In Our Time(]925), Men Without fVomen{\927), and Winner Take Noth/ng{\933) Later these stories appeared in a single collection entitled. The First Fortytune Stones{\93S) The Complete Short Stories, the Finca Vigia edition was posthumously published in 1987 He wrote In Our Time with the experience of World War I in the background and the experience of peace time disorder of the entire World in the foreground Men Without Women presents men in various situations of defeat in a post-war world that can no longer produce a deep relationship between men and women Winner Take Nothing was written with the knowledge that his father had committed suicide The defeat of man became even more violent in these stories These incidents might apparently account for the gradual darkening of the shadows in the world of his short stories. Hemingway's stories mark a significant ad\ance in a new direction underlining the care, restraint and control with which they are handled The early stories are sketchy, episodic and have meagre action or plot Sometimes they depend for effect on their placing along the brief vignettes which show in a contrasting or clarifying form what the story tells by way of a more detailed but less obvious narrative Explication, not implication in the weapon customarily used Hemingway almost always avoids direct exposition of theme, didactic description or discussion of character and any authorial commentary upon motive and action. Most of the stones in In Our Trme deal with the life of Nick Adams, a mystified version of the author himself and contain material based on autobiographical events or situations The later stories are of a general nature with themes having a more universal rather than autobiographical value They are more inventive and imaginary, having palpable action and plot, in form they move towards expansiveness In his early stories Hemingway moved along the traditional track and invariably used third person narrative In the later volumes he employed the narrative technique at will and for definite ends The structure as also the effect of these stories i*; based on irony, implication and mode of presentation He attempted qui^e ambitious themes in his later stories. Apparently the least ambiguous of comparable contemporary writers, Herningwa) increasingly dealt v.ith the vague and the intangible in his later stones the subject matter of these stories thus being the undefinable longing of the human heart for understanding Subtle relationships between men and women are explored in some of the stories a girl and her lover discuss her coming abortion (Hills Like ]\hite Elephants), a woman leaves her lover m order to Ine with a lesbian {The Sea Change), a married couple return to Pans to set up separate residences (A Canary for One) There is always more to these stones than meets the eye. Taken together, Hemingway's stories are studies in loss the discoxerv of evil and the resultant melancholy In most of his stories, Hemingway presents a picture on the negative side of life, but e\en this IS not without a stoic conviction Death must be accepted and faced unflinchingly This seems to be the final message that his stones conve\ The seeds of Hemingway's later works can be traced back to those stories of In Our Time, which were concerned chiefly with the scenes of inland American life and a boy's growing awareness of that time in contrast to the disorder and brutality of the war years and the immediate post war time in Europe The vision and method established in the early stories remain substantially unchanged in the later work, however with greater experience and maturity Hemingway seems to probe even more deeply into the emotional and spiritual lives of his characters. Hemingway approached the writing of his first novel with dragging feet, perceiving it as an obligation to be fulfilled if he was to establish a permanent literary reputation, an obligation at odds with his hard-won achievement in the short story form I knew I must write a novel But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel I would put it off though until I could not help doing it I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.' Hemingway wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, who had been expecting a novel from him Somehow I don't care about writing a novel and I like to write short stories so 1 guess Tm a bad prospect for a publisher anyway Somehow the novel seems to me an awfully artificial and worked out form but as some of the short stories are now stretching out to 8,000 to 12,000 words, maybe I'll get there yet ' Ernest Hcmmg\\a>.