Discuss the major concerns of Hemingway in his short stories and the formal strategies he often adopts in highlighting them.

 Hemingway has been immortalized by the individuality of his style. Short and solid sentences, delightful dialogues, and a painstaking hunt for an apt word or phrase to express the exact truth, are the distinguishing features of his style. He ‘evokes an emotional awareness in the reader by a highly selective use of suggestive pictorial detail, and has done for prose what Eliot has done for poetry”. In his accurate rendering of sensuous experience, Hemingway is a realik.

As he himself has stated in Death in the Afternoon, his main concern was ‘to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were that produced the emotion you experienced’. This surface realism of his works often tends to obscure the ultimate aim of his fiction. This has often resulted in the charge that there is a lack of moral vision in his novels. Leon Edel has attacked Hemingway for his ‘Lack of substance as he called it. According to him, Hemingway’s fiction is deficient in serious subject matter. It is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection-such reflection as there is tends to be on a rather crude and simplified level’.

But such a casual dismissal as this, presenting Hemingway as a writer devoid of ‘high seriousness’, is not justified. Though Hemingway is apparently a realist who has a predilection for physical action, he is essentially a philosophical writer. His works should be read and interpreted in the light of his famous ‘Iceberg theory’: ‘The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above theater’. This statement throws light on the symbolic implications of his art. He makes use of physical action to provide a symbolical interpretation of the nature of man’s existence, It can be conyincingly proved that while representing luyan life through fictional forms, he has consistently set man against the background of his world and universe to examine the human situation from various points of view.

A moral awareness stings from his awareness of the larger life of the universe. Compared with the larger life of the universe, the individual is a puny thing, a tragic thing. But in this larger life of the universe, the individual has his place of glory. This awareness of the futility of human existence led Hemingway to deal with the themes of violence, darkness and death in his novels. By presenting the darker side of life, he tries to explore the nature of the individual’s predicament in this world.

What attitude should a man take toward a world in which, for reasons of the world’s own making and not of his own, he is fundamentally out of place? What personal happiness can he expect to find in a world seething with violence … what values could one respect when ethical values as a whole seemed university disrespected?

This metaphysical concern about the nature of the individual’s existence in relation to the world made Hemingway conceive his protagonists as alienated individuals fighting a losing battle against the odds of life with courage, endurance and will as their only weapons. The Hemingway hero is a lonely individual, wounded either physically or emotionally, He exemplifies a code of courageous behaviour in a world of irrational destruction. “He offers up and exemplifies certain principles of honour, courage and endurance in a life of tension and pain which make a man a man’. Violence. struggle, suffering and hardships do not make him in any way pessimistic. Though the vague unknown’ continues to lure him and frustrate his hopes and purposes, he does not admit defeat. Death rather than humiliation, stoical endurance rather than servile submission are the cardinal virtues of the Hemingway hero.

A close examination of Hemingway’s fiction reveals that in his major novels he enacts the general drama of human pain, and that he has used the novel form in order to pose symbolic questions about life’. The trials and tribulations undergone by his protagonists are symbolic of man’s predicament in this world. He views life as a perpetual struggle in which the individual has to assert the supremacy of his free will over forces other than himself. In order to assert the dignity of his existence, the individual has to wage a relentless battle against a world which refuses him any identity or fulfillment.

To sum up. Hemingway, in his novels and short stories, presents human life as a perpetual struggle which ends only in death. It is of no avail to fight this battle, where man is reduced to a pathetic figure by forces both within and without. However, what matters is the way man faces the crisis and endures the pain inflicted upon him by the hostile powers that be, be it his own physical limitation or the hostility of society or the indifference of unfeeling nature. The ultimate victory depends on the way one faces the struggle. In a world of pain and failure, the individual also has his own weapon to assert the dignity of his existence. He has the freedom of will to create his own values and ideals. In order to achieve this end, he has to carry on an incessant battle against three oppressive forces, namely, the biological, the social and the environmental barriers of this world.

According to Heming-way, the struggle between the individual and the hostile deterministic forces takes places at these three different levels. Commenting on this aspect of the existential struggle found in Hemingway’s fiction, Charles Child Walcutt has observed that, the conflict between the individual needs and social demands is matched by the contest between feeling man and unfeeling universe, and between the spirit of the individual and his biological limitations this observation is probably the right key to understand Hemingway, the man and the novelist.

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