Literary Analysis Paper: Ernest Hemingway

Introduction

Ernest Miller Hemingway (Oak Park, July 21, 1899 - Ketchum, July 2, 1961) was a writer and journalist, and one of the leading novelists and storytellers of the twentieth century. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the following year the Nobel Prize for Literature for his entire work. The literary writer Hemingway used severe technical mastery and achieved glory for his stories. His work tells us specifically about Americans in the twentieth century, home and abroad, as well as showing us that concerns of love, honor, and bravery are universal and will endure. Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. This paper presents a literary criticism of Ernest Hemingway. In doing so, the paper critically explores his literary styles and themes in his short stories: A clean, well-lighted place, and, the old man and the sea.

Thesis Statement

Hemmingway's fictional characters appear natural in that they usually relate to life and death.

Discussion

As related by Garcia Marquez, Hemingway evoked the storyteller. In her view, if a writer omits something because she does not know, then there is a gap in the story. Philip Young, one of the best critics of Hemingway, says that "the most widely emulated feature of Hemingway's style appears in his prose”. In Young's view, Hemmingway establishes a delicate simplicity of vocabulary and structure sentence. The words used are usually short and in current use. This is a stark simplicity and a curious freshness. On the other hand, Hemmingway was recognized as a master of dialogue because he had an ear catching, like a trap, all accents and expressions of human language. His expressions give life to the character quickly by reducing the spontaneous language of the dialogue, a patterned expression and responses are the essential characteristics of Hemingway's speech. It gives us an illusion of reality than reality itself which would give us. His characters are usually so defined by their action and events that there are rare explanations of intent in long monologues in his stories.

These approaches clarify the nature of the story in Hemingway. Most of his work raises a hero facing death who meets a kind of honor code. Usually they are bullies, fighters, boxers, soldiers, hunters and other beings under pressure. Maybe his work must be understood as a kind of modern romanticism, which combines a sense of honor, action, love, skepticism and nostalgia as their principal vectors. His stories inaugurate a new kind of "realism" that have roots in the nineteenth century American story. This type of style would influence subsequent great storytellers as R. Carver.

Hemingway's literary importance is rooted in his stylistic innovations. The advice that he received as a fledging reporter at the Kansas City Star—to cut out all unnecessary words and to concentrate on active verbs—led to plain, succinct prose that has proved easy to parody, but very hard ...