Hemingway Tragic Life, Research Paper Example

Although Ernest Hemingway is a celebrated novelist and short-story writer, the details of his personal life indicate that he experienced much tragedy in his lifetime and that he used his biographical experiences in many ways in his literary work. Because so many of Hemingway’s literary themes deal directly with the topics of war and death, many assume that Hemingway’s ultimate verdict on the nature of human experience was negative. This is a partially true statement and it can be easily supported by reference to Hemingway’s works. On the other hand, careful reading of Hemingway’s fiction also reveals a love of life and a tribute to life’s pleasures. Therefore, the best way to view the use of tragedy in Hemingway’s fiction is to read it as a part of a larger whole. Tragedy plays a profoundly significant role in Hemingway’s fiction, but it stands in proportional relation to joy and optimism.

As Philip Gerard observed in his article, “Facing Eternity Alone: Ernest Hemingway, Man and Writer, Is a Study in Contradictions” (1999) Hemingway’s seemingly contradictory nature helped to give tension and feeling to his work. Gerard notes that “The lust for life that made Hemingway such a character in reality was evident in his fiction” but it is generally framed in a feeling of “guilty relief of surviving another attack, another dark night of the soul, another moment of truth” (Gerard 254). This places the use of tragedy in Hemingway’s work as a device that forwards a cyclical view of human life. Though it is difficult to determine the reason why tragedy and joy are so closely connected, this pattern is unmistakable in Hemingway’s fiction.

Gerard goes on to suggest that Hemingway’s power as a writer derives largely from his being “a study in contradictions” and that in some way these contradictions as expressed through his characters serve to show a contrast between heroism and tragedy and virtue and vice. (Gerard 254). This “moralistic” use of tragedy in fiction can be considered conservative to some degree despite the fact that Hemingway was a literary Modernist. The idea that fiction should be morally instructive is a traditional idea nd one that readily lends itself to tragedy and the conception of a classical tragic hero. For example, in the story, “Soldier’s Home,” Hemingway explores the conflict between a young war veteran and the docile society that greets him on his return from the battlefield. By using irony to invert the usual ideas of war and heroism, Hemingway creates a feeling of tragedy that expresses an important political theme.

In the story, Hemingway writes that the young war-veteran, Krebs, came home after the big celebrations had already ended: “By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over” (Hemingway, 89). The use of sustained irony throughout the story is meant to contradict the usual ideas that had traditionally been associated with war-veterans. These ideas such as honor, courage, duty, and heroism and used only ironically by Hemingway in the story. The idea of inverting heroic ideals is to show that war is actually a plague on society rather than an act of national duty or pride. Hemingway’s tragic vision of war gains tension and ironic impact from the romantic ideal that it satirizes with black humor.

In regard to Hemingway’s conservative vision of tragedy, Bluefarb writes that much of Hemingway’s vision of tragedy came directly from his personal experiences during World War One. According to Bluefarb, “Hemingway’s tragic conservatism can in part be traced back to the legendary traumatic wound he sustained in 1918 during the First World War.” The experience of being wounded helped determine Hemingway’s fatalistic ideals and caused him to issue a “challenge to faith in a world where God has disappeared, and despair has filled the void of His loss” (Bluefarb). Hemingway’s notion of tragedy as expressed in his fiction extends to religious convictions, which much like the ideals of war, come under fire in Hemingway’s fiction.

For Hemingway, ideas of death, tragedy, and heroism were deeply connected. In his book Papa Hemingway (1966) A.E. Hotchner points out that at the time that Hemingway killed himself he was “a writer whom many critics call the greatest of the century” who was happily married, in robust health, and in ownership of “a specially rigged yacht to fish the Gulf Stream” (Hotchner, Foreword). Hemingway’s suicide must be understood in relation to his overall tragic conception of life, the same dualistic vision of life that is present in his fiction. Hemingway’s outer-world at the time of his death reflected the accomplishments he had earned in his prime working years. When his ability to live life to its fullest was taken from him, Hemingway opted to kill himself rather than deteriorate into old age.

Stan Trybulski references the fact that Hemingway’s father was also a suicide. He writes that the theme of suicide is a central component of Hemingway’s “Nick Adams” stories. In those stories, the main character, Nick, has a father who kill himself. the series of stories follows Nick through childhood, adolescence, and to the Great War adn back. The “Nick Adams” stories can be read at least in part, as a struggle by Nick to avoid repeating his father’s fatalistic and tragic conception of life.

That said, Nick’s struggle, like Hemingway’s, is steeped in ambiguity: “Although Hemingway does not explicitly say so, we realize that Dr. Adams, like Clarence Hemingway, shot himself in the head” (Trybulski). This detail perhaps more than any other shows the degree to which Hemingway’s tragic conception of life was carried out both in his lived experience and reflected in his fiction. The consequence of Hemingway’s blurring his biography with his fiction is that the stories acquire a resonance with the author’s life. It is as though Hemingway’s way of living and dying vindicated and supported the themes of his fiction, while his life simultaneously provided him with the framework and details for the themes that are evident in his novels and stories.

Works Cited

Bluefarb, Sam. The Essential Tragic Conservatism Of Ernest Hemingway. NewEnglish review. com; (July 2011); accessed 3-30-12; http://www.newenglishreview.org/Sam_Bluefarb/The_Essential_Tragic_Conservatism_Of_Ernest_Hemingway/

Gerard, Philip. “Facing Eternity Alone : Ernest Hemingway, Man and Writer, Is a Study in Contradictions.” World and I. Nov. 1999: 254

Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1925.

Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway. New York, Bantam Books, 1966.

Trybulski, Stan. Adventures of a Young Man: Hemingway’s Nick Adams in the Movies (April 3rd, 2012); accessed 3-31-12 http://stantrybulski.com/blog/?p=722