1、UUNITNIT 16 16 A A C CLEANLEAN W WELLELL-LIGHTEDLIGHTED P PLACELACEEarnest Hemingway(1899-1961)Earnest Hemingway(1899-1961)C CONTENTSONTENTSHemingway:Life and His Literary CareerBackground The Lost Generation Nihilism and Existential Nihilism Understanding the Text Writing skills:Showing and Telling
2、 Characterization Metaphors and symbols Theme and MotifFollow-up Assignment Hemingway was born on July 21 in Oak Park,Illinois,one of six children in the family.His father was a highly respected doctor who was fond of hunting,cooking,and fishing.His mother was a singer and music teacher.Both parents
3、 expected their son to excel and he complied.He was an excellent student at high school and wrote short stories for the school paper and literary magazines.After graduation from Oak Park High school in 1917,he chose not to go to college.Instead he left home and worked briefly for the Star as a repor
4、ter in Kansas City.The short simple sentences characteristic of his prose style might have come from such experience.When America entered WWI in 1917,he wanted to take part in it.But the American Army rejected him because of his poor vision in one eye.So he volunteered first as an ambulance driver i
5、n France,and then as a soldier in the Italian infantry in 1918.Shortly after he arrived at the front,about three weeks,he was wounded on both legs and sent to an Italian hospital.During his six-month stay in the hospital,he fell in love with an English nurse.In 1919 Hemingway returned home to comple
6、te his recovery.He met Hadley Richardson and married her in 1921.as soon as he was fully recovered,they left for Paris where he worked as a correspondent covering wars and fighting for the Toronto Star,a Canadian newspaper and as an assistant for an American literary magazine.But his real purpose wa
7、s to write his own stories.Hemingway met Gertrude Stein,Ezra Pound,and Sherwood Anderson in Paris who encouraged him to pursue literary career.With their help he published his first collection of fifteen short stories,In Our Time,in 1925,portraying the world of adulthood as an arena of danger and vi
8、olence.In 1926 he published his first novel,The Torrents of Spring(春天的激流),but The Sun Also Rises about the disillusionment of the lost generation was an immediate success,partly because it was so sharply attacked by many conservative critics and shocked most other readers.This novel contrasts the em
9、pty search for sensation by American expatriates in Paris with the rich Spanish tradition as epitomized in bullfighting.With the success of A Farewell to Arms,he firmly established his reputation as a great American writer.This novel shows that not only war threatens people,but the very texture of l
10、ife itself involves violence and death.By then he had surpassed Fitzgerald,even one of his mentors,Gertrude Stein.During the 1930s he wrote less because he had a strong desire for adventure.This desires took him to watch bull-fights.He saw in the bull-fight as a brutal physical force,a symbol of wha
11、t life is all about.Man versus nature.He also loved deep-sea fishing near Cuba,big games hunting in the far east of Africa and other such exotic physical masculine athletic pursuits,always put an emphasis on athletic power.He created for himself a sensational public image:big game hunter,deep sea fi
12、sherman,bullfight aficionado,and roistering drinker.Grace under Pressure In 1936 he took part in the Spanish Civil War as a journalist,firmly on the Republican side against Fascist Franco.He predicted that the Spanish Civil war would be a prelude to the Second World War.His experience there provided
13、 material for his novel,For Whom the Bell Tolls with the theme that the loss of freedom anywhere is a diminution of it everywhere.This is a love story of great appeal,and this is also a war novel containing the message that all liberals must help each other and act collectively,if good is to endure.
14、Then he traveled to China as a journalist and reported on the Japanese invasion and then returned to Cuba.In 1952 he published The Old Man and the Sea,a parable of inner strength and courage about a Cuban fishermans struggle to bring home a great marlin he has caught.This short novel highlights the
15、theme that a man can be destroyed but not defeated.The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in October,1954 with the following defensive statement:for his powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,as most recently evinced in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingways earlier writing displayed
16、brutal,cynical and callous signs which may be considered as variance with the Nobel Prize requirements for a work of ideal tendencies.But on the other hand he also possesses a heroic pathos which forms the basic element of his awareness of life,a manly loveof danger and adventures,with a natural adm
17、iration of every individual who fights the good fight in a world or reality overshadowed by violence and death.The Code Hero One of the important things that make Hemingway popular is that in a time of general despair and pessimism he wrote stories with heroes that the reader could admire.There is a
18、 particular term,“the code hero”,for his character.The code hero with stoic courage lives by a pattern which gives life meaning and value.This is one of the reasons that his stories sold very well.Hemingway explored courage in many forms:He portrayed courage and cowardice in battle and defined coura
19、ge as“an instinctive movement toward or away from the center of violence,with self-preservation and self-respect the mixed motives.”Grace under Pressure He also wrote about courage with which people face the tragedies in life.To him,mans greatest achievement is to show“grace under pressure”or to hol
20、d the“purity of line through the maximum of exposure,”as he once said.In his fictions,the nihilistic vision of sterility,failure,and death is modified by his affirmative assertion of the possibility of living with style and courage.Therefore,he often dealt with war and its effects on people,with con
21、tests such as hunting and bullfighting which demand stamina and courage,and with the question how to live with pain.He was more limited in scope than most of his contemporaries,for he had but a single theme:how man face tragedy in a world stripped of all values except that of intensity.Language and
22、Sentence StyleStriking lean,economical style of writing:sentence short,uncomplicated,but active;words simple but filled with emotion;few modifiers,and great control of pause with action of the story continuing during the silences.He believes that the most powerful effect comes form restraint and und
23、erstatement,the strongest effects comes with an economy of means.Emphasis on emotion:He was interested in conveying a deep emotional feeling and wanted to recreate for the reader the emotion of being there.So he is often called a lyric writer.The term“Lost Generation”was firstly used by Gertrude Ste
24、in(1874-1946),one of the leaders of this group.It included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.It means this generation had lost the beaut
25、iful sense of the calm idyllic past.Steins comment suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of expatriates as they aimlessly wandered about the Continent,drinking,making love,and traveling from place to place and from party to party.These activities seem to justify their search for new meanings to
26、 replace the old ones.Yet in fact,being cut off from their past,disillusioned in reality,and without a meaningful future to fall on,they were lost in disillusionment and existential voids.They indulged in hedonism in order to make their life less unbearable.NihilismNihilism(/na.lzm/or/ni.lzm/;(Latin
27、 nihil,nothing)is a philosophical doctrine that suggests the negation of one or more reputedly meaningful aspects of life.Most commonly,nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism,which argues that life is without objective meaning,purpose,or intrinsic value.Moral nihilists assert that
28、 morality does not inherently exist,and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived.Nihilism can also take epistemological or ontological/metaphysical forms,meaning respectively that,in some aspect,knowledge is not possible,or that reality does not actually exist.Nihilism The term is
29、sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realizing there are no necessary norms,rules,or laws.Anomie:social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values also:personal unrest,
30、alienation,and uncertaintyExistential nihilism The belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.With respect to the universe,existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant,without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence.The
31、 meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism.Understanding the text Lead-in Questions1.Whats the difference of the writing style among Nathaniel Hawthorne,William Faulkner and Earnest Hemingway?2.What are the two general narrative skills generally presen
32、ted in novel writing and film production?3.How much do you know about showing and telling?4.What is iceberg theory put forward by Hemingway?5.What are Hemingways other writing features presented in this short story?showing and telling Showing:The dramatic method simply presents the characters talkin
33、g and acting(dialogues and action,what the characters say and do),make the characters reveal themselves directly through their dialogues and actions.It is often employed in drama,film,TV play,which leaves the reader to infer the motives and dispositions that lie behind because there is no narrator a
34、nd no comments from the narrator.Showing may show not only external speech and actions,but also a characters inner thoughts,feelings,and responsiveness to events.(stream of consciousness)Understanding the writing skills:showing and telling Telling:the author intervenes authoritatively in order to de
35、scribe,and often evaluate,the motives and dispositional qualities of the characters.The characterization is done through the use of names,appearance,the narrators comments.The method of telling relies on exposition and direct commentary by the author/narrator.Other writing features and Literary Idea
36、The Iceberg Theory“If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about,he may omit things that he knows and the reader,and if the writer is writing truly enough,will have a feeling of those things as strongly as through the writer has started them.”-Hemingway Hemingways sentences only give one s
37、mall bit of the meaning.The rest is implied.One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.His vocabulary and sentence patterns are easy,but they are extremely difficult to be fully understood.1/8 above the water7/8 under the waterThe work the characterizatio
38、nThe old man:lonely,in despair,having a feeling of“nada”toward life-an existential angst(anxiety)about his place in the universe and an uncertainty about the meaning of life;grace under pressure,dignity in face of adversity.Hemingway uses the waiters to judge the old man and portray his views toward
39、 the type of drinker he is.As a clean drunk,the man does not spill a drop as he drinks and walks“unsteadily but with dignity”when he finally leaves the caf.the characterizationThe young waiter:indifferent,selfish,brash and insensitive,immature,holding a dismissive attitude toward human life.Youth an
40、d job make the young waiter full of confidence.He has less experience and understanding of life.So he wonders how anyone could sit alone while drinking instead of buying a bottle for himself while drinking in the comfort of his own home.He complains about having to stick around the caf waiting for t
41、he man to finish drinking.He claims that he has a wife waiting for him,he would rather go home and be in bed than stay in the caf.He doesnt know that youth can be perishable,aging and death is doomed to come.the characterizationThe old waiter:lonely,also having a feeling of nothingness,sympathetic.I
42、t is he who defends the old man.He acknowledges that it is better for the man to have many drinks in public than any drinks in private.He is sensitive and sympathetic because he can relate and even see himself in the man.He,too,prefers a clean well lighted place to drink and will later appreciate su
43、ch a place in his old drinking age.He recognizes that soon will he have the same fate as the old man.the characterizationTo sum up,in this story Hemingway portrays a difference in age,experience,and opinion of drinking and their attitude towards life through the unique characters that could represen
44、t a progression of age,the three characters stand for three stages of life:Youth,middle age and old age,which also demonstrate the transition from being young and social to aging and feeling lonely.MetaphorsThe light:order,clarity,hope The shadow:nothingness and darkness;chaotic,confusing;death The
45、caf:a natural refuge from the despair felt by those who are acutely aware of the nothingnessThe old mans deafness:his separation from the rest of the worldThe young waiter,the middle-aged waiter and the old man:three stages of life-youth,middle age and old age;process from possession to loss.Metapho
46、rsThe contrast between light and shadow differentiates the old man from the young people around him,the deafness of the old man has a metaphorical meaning of his separation from the rest of the world.ThemeTheme:Nothing,there is no meaning in life.Hemingway suggests that life has no meaning and that
47、man is an insignificant speck in a great sea of nothingness,which is clearly indicated in the older waiters words,“It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too.”The actual words of praying is“Our Father who art in heaven,”but the older waiter substitutes the Spanish word nada(nothing)into the pray
48、ers and says,“Our nada who art in nada”,this indicates that religion,to which many people turn to find meaning and purpose,is also just nothingness.Theme Not everybody is aware of the nothingness,however.For example,the younger waiter hurtles through his life hastily and happily,unaware of any reaso
49、n why he should lament.For the old man,the older waiter,and the other people who need late-night cafs,however,the idea of nothingness is overwhelming and leads to despair.Though they has tried to stave off despair in several ways,they failed.An unnamed,unspecified malaise seems to grip them.This mal
50、aise is not“a fear or dread,”as the older waiter clarifies to himself,but an overwhelming feeling of nothingnessan existential angst about his place in the universe and an uncertainty about the meaning of life.Motif Motif:Loneliness Loneliness pervades the text and suggests that even though there ar
