Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899, Ernest Hemingway started his career as a writer for a newspaper in Kansas City at the age of 17. Today, his writing is among the most recognizable and influential prose of the twentieth century. Many critics believe his style was influenced by his days as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, where he had to rely on short sentences.[1] Hemingway’s technique is uncomplicated, with plain grammar and easily accessible language. His hallmark is a clean style that eschews adjectives and uses short, rhythmic sentences that concentrate on action rather than reflection. Though his writing is often thought as “simple,” this generalization could not be further from the truth. He was an obsessive reviser. His work is the result of a careful process of selecting only those elements essential to the story and pruning everything else away.[2] He kept his prose direct and unadorned, employing a technique he termed the “iceberg principle.” In Death in the Afternoon he wrote, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing[3].”
In addition to his unadorned style of writing, Hemingway is considered a master of dialogue[4]. The conversation between his characters demonstrate not only communication but also its limits. The way Hemingway’s characters speak is sometimes more important than what they say because what they choose to say, or leave unsaid, illuminates sources of inner conflict. Sometimes characters say only what they think another character will want to hear.
Two of his most famous short stories, “Hills like White Elephants,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” are great examples of the two styles of writing Hemingway uses most frequently: simple prose and direct dialogue. Both of these short stories are written mostly in dialogue only using description when necessary. In “Hills like White Elephants,” it is difficult to differentiate the appearance between reality. The seemingly petty conversation about hills and drinks and an unspecified operation is in actuality an unarticulated but decisive struggle between two characters, Jig and the man. These two argue over whether they continue to live the sterile, self-indulgent, decadent life preferred by the man or elect to have the child that Jig is carrying and settle down to a conventional but, in Jig’s view, rewarding, fruitful, and peaceful life.[5] Hemingway writes in a way that seems like he himself is indifferent both to the characters and to the reader. He pretends to be merely an objective observer content to report without comment the words and actions of these two people. Hemingway does not have access to their thoughts and does not try to interpret their emotional quality of their words or movements by using adjectives or adverbs instead he simply records the dialogue.
Similarly, in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” there is a “not so obvious” conflict between the older characters and the younger one. The story deals with characters who have different visions of the meaning of time – the youngest man values it, but the older characters don’t. The oldest character, a man near the end of his life, is simply passing the time until he dies, even attempting suicide in the process.[6] Hemingway’s style contributes to the bleak outlook of the story. Instead of hearing about the despair of the old man, phrased eloquently and poetically over a span of pages, we simply get a direct punch to the story. Its extreme shortness makes its point all the more powerful, and the direct reportage of dialogue and inner monologue are far more effective to his story than any descriptive line. In short, Hemingway captures the complexity of human interaction through subtlety and implication as well as direct discourse.
The powerful impact of Hemingway’s writing on other authors continues to this day. Writers as diverse as Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Elmore Leonard, and Hunter S. Thompson have credited him with contributing to their styles. Direct, personal writing full of rich imagery was Hemingway’s goal. Nearly fifty years after his death, his distinctive prose is still recognizable by its economy and controlled understatement.[7]
[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html
[2] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html
[3] http://relevance.com/ride-the-iceberg-using-hemingways-iceberg-theory-for-content-marketing/
[4] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html
[5]http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Colleges/College%20of%20Humanities%20and%20Social%20Sciences/EMS/Readings/139.105/Additional/Hills%20Like%20White%20Elephants%20-%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf
[6] http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
[7] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html
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