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Symbolism And The Rhetoric Of Fiction In Hemingway'S Novels

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Symbolism And The Rhetoric Of Fiction In Hemingway'S Novels

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received 6 7 -1 7 ,6 8 3
MATSUDA, Sumio, 1928-
SYMBOLISM AND THE RHETORIC OF FICTION IN
HEMINGWAY'S NOVELS.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1967
Language and Literature, modern
U niversity Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, M ichigan
SYMBOLISM.AND THE RHETORIC OF FICTION
IN HEMINGWAY'S NOVELS
by
Sumio Matsuda
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1967
UNIVERSITY OF S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE S C H O O L
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, C A LIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
.....................................Sumi.Q-.Mfttauds, ....................................
under the direction of his..—Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date June, 1 96. 7.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
trman
PREFACE
This dissertation will try to show that Hemingway's
symbolism is an important element in his rhetoric of fic
tion. It will not attempt to prove that Hemingway^is a sym
bolist, for this is generally accepted. Rather, it will
attempt to define the nature of his symbolism; and in doing
so it will have to deal, of necessity, with the ways in
which symbolism works with the other elements of Hemingway's
rhetoric of fiction to achieve the meaning or meanings em
bodied in each of his novels— to achieve, that is, the total
impact in which that meaning or those meanings inhere.
Hemingway does not arrive at his symbols antecedent to the
actual writing of his novels. Instead, particular elements
of Hemingway's novels tend to become symbolic in the evolu
tion of the writing process itself. Aspects of his fiction
become increasingly symbolic to meet the needs of the emerg
ing work of art; and they become increasingly symbolic in
conjunction with the other elements of his rhetoric of fic
tion: dialogue, scene, description, juxtaposition, interior
monologue, selection, emphasis, point of view, and a kind of
authorial commentary— the kind of commentary in which a
character utters a sentiment obviously reflective of the
author's own view of things. Thus in order to understand
Hemingway's symbolism one must study it in its relationship
to his rhetoric. In his best works Hemingway's symbolism i
not imposed upon his fiction; his symbolism emerges, to a
great degree, as part of a well-integrated rhetoric of fic
tion. Of an excessive addiction to the imposition of sym
bols, Hemingway is reported to have said;
No good book has ever been written that has in it sym
bols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. . . . That kind
of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread.
Faisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.
This dissertation, in essence, will attempt to study Heming
way's kind of symbolism in the light of the novelist's own
views as to the nature of symbols in "good" books.
“ ''Quoted by Robert Manning, "Hemingway in Cuba, ” The
Atlantic Monthly, CCXVI (August 1965), 104.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter
I.
II.
Ill.
Page
ii
SYMBOLISM, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, AND
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HEMINGWAY ........... 1
The E. M. Halliday and Carlos Baker
Controversy
Other Critics on Hemingway’s Symbolism
Some Aspects of Hemingway's Symbolism,
A Working Definition of Symbolism, and
the Meaning of a Rhetoric of Fiction
Early Life and Apprenticeship of Hemingway
A Restatement of the Purpose of this
Dissertation
THE PROVENANCE OF THE SYMBOL AND IN OUR TIME . 39
Influence of Newspaper Work on Heming
way' s Symbolism
Influence of Gertrude Stein
Influence of Ezra Pound on Hemingway's
Symbolism
Other Possible Influences
Symbolism and In Our Time
Hemingway's Early Symbolism: A Summary
SYMBOL AND RHETORIC IN THE SUN ALSO RISES . . 84
The "Story" of The Sun Also Rises
The Plot: Theme as Aspect of Plot
Book II of The Sun Also Rises
The Final Book of The Sun Also Rises
"Isolated Symbols"
Recurring Symbols
The Effectiveness of the Last Scene
iv
Chapter Page
IV. MOUNTAIN, PLAIN, AND ROAD IN A FAREWELL
TO A R M S ....................................... 137
The Rhetorical Context
The Road
Hemingway1s Early Period
V. SYMBOL AND RHETORIC IN THE MIDDLE PERIOD:
TO HAVE AND HAVE N O T ........................ 169
"Story" and Plot of To Have and Have Not
The Defects of To Have and Have Not
Defects in Character and in Symbol
VI. THE MIDDLE PERIOD: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS . . 192
"Story," Plot, and Central Concern
Theme and Rhetoric in For Whom the Bell
Tolls
The Use of Contrasts
Symbols of Integration and Interdependence
Defects of Symbol and Rhetoric in For
Whom the Bell Tolls
The Middle Period
VII. RHETORIC AND SYMBOL IN THE LATE PERIOD:
ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES AND
THE OLD MAN AND THE S E A .................... 233
"Story," Plot, and Defective Rhetoric in
Across the River and into the Trees
Relationship Between Characters, Rhetoric,
Theme, and Defective Symbolism
Obtrusive Symbolism in The Old Man and
the Sea
Symbol and Rhetoric: A Summary
LIST OF WORKS C I T E D ................................... 261
v
CHAPTER I
SYMBOLISM, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, AND
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HEMINGWAY
In a noted article on Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley in
sisted that the famous novelist was not a naturalist like
Theodore Dreiser or Jack London. He suggested, rather, that
Hemingway's literary "kinship" was "with a wholly different
group of novelists . . . with Poe and Hawthorne and Mel
ville: the haunted and nocturnal writers, the men who dealt
in images that were symbols of an inner world.Previous
to Cowley's linking of Hemingway with writers who dealt in
"symbols of an inner world," David Daiches had written that
Hemingway seemed to be "aiming at a kind of symbolic real-
2
ism"; and almost at the beginning of Hemingway's career,
Louis Kronenberger commented, in a review of In Our Time,
that the young writer's "power of observation" was not only
3
"precise and direct" but also "suggestive and illuminating."
''""Hemingway at Midnight, " New Republic, CXI (August
1944), 190.
2
"Ernest Hemingway," College English, II (May 1941),
727 .
3
"A New Novelist: In Our Time," Saturday Review of
Literature, II (February 1926), 55.
2
Clearly, then, at least some critics have found symbolic
elements in Hemingway's works. Together with their aware
ness of the precision and directness of his powers of obser
vation, they have also been aware of the "suggestive" and
"illuminating" qualities of the things he chose to observe.
It was after Cowley’s 1944 essay on Hemingway, however, that
critics tended increasingly to look for symbol, myth, and
ritual in the novelist's work. Indeed, criticism of Heming
way as a practicing symbolist progressed to the point that,
just five years after the Cowley essay, a critic like
Caroline Gordon could criticize Hemingway for not being as
thorough a symbolist as Kafka:
Hemingway always hit from the shoulder, but his reach
is not long enough. . . . In his stories . . . action
is often symbolic. . . . But this plane of action is for
him a slipping substratum glimpsed intermittently.4
Finally, of course, Carlos Baker's work, Hemingway: The
Writer as Artist, is based on the assumption that Heming
way’s works gain much of their effectiveness from the sym
bolic elements which they incorporate:
From the first Hemingway has been dedicated as a
writer to the rendering of Wahrheit, the precise and at
least partly naturalistic rendering of things as they
are and were. Yet under all his brilliant surfaces lies
the controlling Dichtung, the symbolic underpainting
which gives so remarkable a sense of depth and vitality
to what might be flat two-dimensional portraiture.5
4
"Notes on Hemingway and Kafka," Sewanee Review, LVII
(April-June 1949), 226.
”* (Princeton, 1952), p. 289.
3
The E. M. Halliday and Carlos Baker Controversy
Not all critics agree, however, that Hemingway was to
any great degree a symbolist. In 1956, for example, E. M.
Halliday admitted that Hemingway in "a larger sense, germane
to all good fiction . . . may be said to be symbolic in his
narrative method"; but his conclusion was that Hemingway
"remains the great realist of Twentieth-century American
Fiction." Halliday centered his criticism on Baker's inter
pretation of the symbolism in A Farewell to Arms. According
£
to Baker, by a "process of accrual and coagulation" the
images in A Farewell to Arms "tend to build around the
opposed concepts of Home and Not-Home" (p. 101). According
to Baker, too, a basic mountain-plain symbolism is estab
lished in the very first paragraph of the novel, a symbolism
which becomes a part of the novel's sub-structure:
It does much more than start the book. It helps to es
tablish the dominant mood (which is one of doom), plants
a series of important images for future symbolic culti
vation, and subtly compels the reader into the position
of a detached observer. (p. 94)
Baker made explicit his view of the novel's symbolic struc
ture as he continued his analysis of the novel's opening
paragraph:
"Hemingway's Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony," in
Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P.
Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), p. 71. Reprinted from
American Literature, XXVIII (March 1956), 1-22.
4
The second sentence, which draws attention from the
mountainous background to the bed of the river in the
middle distance, produces a sense of clearness, dryness,
whiteness, and sunniness which is to grow very subtly
under the artist's hands until it merges with one of the
novel's two dominant symbols, the mountain-image. The
other major symbol is the plain. Throughout the sub
structure of the book it is opposed to the mountain-
image. (pp. 94-95)
Through a close analysis of the opening paragraph of
A Farewell to Arms, Halliday argued that Baker did not
really see the actual relationship between the river, the
road, the mountains, and the plain presented in the para
graph (p. 60). He contended further that the plain, being
rich with crops, is not a particularly good symbol for the
"Not-Home" concept (as opposed to the Home concept) with
which the low-lying plain is supposed to be associated. The
mountains, too, are described in that paragraph as being
"brown and bare," hardly, according to Halliday, symbolic of
the "Home concept" (p. 61)- In short, Halliday thought that
Baker's concept of a symbolic sub-structure in A Farewell to
Arms could not be supported by a close reading of the text.
He did suggest that Hemingway, who was sensitive "as always
to those parts of experience that are suggestive and conno-
tative," used "the mountain metaphor which is part of any
figurative heritage to deepen the thematic contrast in A
Farewell to Arms, between war and not-war." Halliday con
cluded, however, that "nowhere did he, as I read the novel,
set up the rigid unrealistic contrast between the Mountain
and the Plain which Mr. Baker's analysis requires" (p. 63).
If Halliday disagreed with Baker about the nature and
the extent of the symbolism in Hemingway’s novel, he did not
7
contend that Hemingway eschews symbolism completely. And
this dissertation will attempt to support the contention
that symbolism is an essential element in Hemingway’s
rhetoric of fiction.
Other Critics on Hemingway’s Symbolism
Malcolm Cowley's essay on Hemingway marked a turning
point in Hemingway criticism. With Carlos Baker's book,
even more critics, despite Halliday's efforts to the con
trary, tended to see symbolic elements in Hemingway's fic
tion. Even a necessarily brief survey of Hemingway criti
cism since the publication of Baker's book will reveal the
extent and nature of the criticism centering upon the sym
bolism implicit in the novelist’s works.
Some critics, even more than Baker, insist upon a
rigidly symbolic interpretation of much of Hemingway. These
critics tend to impose a pattern upon the novel or story
they analyze, leaving little room for other interpretations.
In contrast to these rigidly symbolic critics, there are
those who view Hemingway's symbolism as emerging from the
context of his fiction; symbolism is thus not antecedent to
the fiction itself. The position of these latter critics is
7
See Halliday, p. 71. Halliday contends that Hemingway
uses symbolism "with a severe restraint that in his good
work always staunchly protects his realism."
6
close to that of Halliday, who views Hemingway's symbolism
as being incidental rather than essential. But these latter
critics, unlike Halliday, feel that Hemingway's skillful and
sustained use of a kind of symbolism is an important feature
of his fiction. Unlike Halliday, they feel that symbolism
is thus more than an incidental aspect of Hemingway's art.
They believe that aspects of Hemingway's fiction are made to
carry so much meaning that they begin to glow with the in
tensity of symbols.
Of the critics who tend to impose patterns upon Heming
way's works, many interpret his fiction largely in reference
to ritual, myth, or psychology; and undoubtedly some critics
have used a knowledge of psychology, myth, or ritual to com
ment with an uncommon degree of sensitivity not only upon
Hemingway's fiction as a whole but also upon his individual
works. For example, Philip Young, who foreshadowed much of
the "psychological" approach to Hemingway's works, suggested
with great critical acuteness that Hemingway suffered from a
traumatic neurosis caused by a wound incurred in the First
World War. According to Young, Hemingway's fiction re
flected, in specifically Freudian terms, a "repetition com
pulsion" ;
. . . suffering from the wounds and shock crucially sus
tained in the First World War, Hemingway . . . was con
tinually in his prose disregarding the pleasure principle
and returning compulsively to the scenes of his injuries.®
^Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952), pp. 137-138.
After reading Young's criticism, which is both compelling
and illuminating, one begins to see contours previously
unnoticed in Hemingway's fiction. Another perceptive
critic, Joseph DeFalco, has also been able to analyze sensi
tively many of Hemingway's short stories by seeing them as
symbolic of certain psychic patterns of human experience:
"Initiation experience," "Threshold experience," and "the
9
heroic journey pattern." His analysis of In Our Time is
particularly interesting. Reflecting the pervasive influ
ence of Phillip Young's criticism, still another good
critic, Frederick Hoffman, wrote in 1955 of the "symbolic
wound" that "affected a large share of Hemingway's fic-
.,10
t ion.
However, not all the critics who have interpreted
Hemingway specifically in terms of myth, psychology, ritual,
or allegory have been as sensitive as Young or DeFalco.
Some critics who deal with Hemingway's symbolism tend to
abstract patterns from the novelist's works, infuse those
patterns with all the particulars of their respective disci
plines or predilections, and then impose those patterns,
thus abstracted and thus elaborated, back upon the works
themselves. Unlike Young, DeFalco, or Baker, who also
9
See his The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories
(Pittsburgh, 1963).
^ The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade
(New York, 1955), p. 90.
discuss Hemingway's use of myths and rituals, these critics
do not illumine the works they discuss. Rather they seem to
set up a diagrammatic one-to-one relationship between real
istic narrative and a symbolic or allegorical sub-structure.
Thus, in 1961 John McAleer purported to see specifically
Christian symbolism in A Farewell to Arms, making that novel
over into a kind of allegory: "Frederick Henry's quest is
truly a grail quest and patently Hemingway uses Christ sym
bolism throughout the book."^ Thus, too, Paul Newman, in
the following year saw another grail quest in The Sun Also
12
Rises. And carrying the psychological, if not the
mythical-allegorical, approach to extreme lengths, Stephen
Reid saw in Hemingway's "Capital of the World" a sort of
"Oedipal Pattern"; dealing with the symbolism of the bull
fight in that story, he suggested that the matador stood for
the son, the bull for the father, and the picadors and the
13
banderillos for brothers.
Certainly, criticism which draws upon other disciplines
or other areas of knowledge can be illuminating in the hands
of a Baker, a Young, or a DeFalco; but in the hands of less
^"A Farewell to Arms: Frederick Henry’s Rejected Pas
sion, " Renanscence, XIV (Winter 1961), see especially
p. 275.
12
"Hemingway's Grail Quest," University of Kansas City
Review (Summer 1962), pp. 202, 297.
^"The Oedipal Pattern of Hemingway's 'The Capital of
the World,'" Literature and Psychology, XIII (Spring 1963),
37-38.
sensitive critics what often results is a mechanical imposi
tion of various patterns without the true critic's awareness
of the work of art as a work of art, of its very particular
qualities revelatory of a deeply imagined fictional world or
of the real world we all inhabit.
There is nothing wrong with seeing patterns of symbol
ism in Hemingway's works; and many good critics have seen
them. However, the patterns many sensitive critics discern
are "natural" in the sense that those patterns emerge pri
marily from the works themselves without an overly explicit
buttressing by myth, ritual, psychology, or allegory. Just
as Baker discerned a mountain-plain symbolic polarity in
A Farewell to Arms, other critics have seen other kinds of
symbolic polarities emerging from the body of Hemingway's
works. Thus Melvin Backman saw two symbols which represent
"dominant motifs" in Hemingway's fiction: "The Matador and
1 4
the Crucified." Like Baker (1952) and Backman (1955),
Allen Guttman (1960) discerned a symbolic polarity in
Hemingway’s fiction, a machine-raan symbolic contrast in For
Whom the Bell Tolls: "In symbolic opposition to the cluster
of values represented by the two bands, their mounts, and
15
the earth itself, we have the steel bridge." And recently
14
"Hemingway: The Matador and the Crucified," Modern
Fiction Studies, I (August 1955), 2, 3, 4.
15
"Mechanized Doom: Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish
Civil War," Massachusetts Review, I (May 1960), 543.
10
(1965) Robert W. Lewis, Jr., has seen another sort of sym
bolic polarity in Hemingway’s work: "Thinking of romance
and agape, one would not be wrong in thinking of eros as a
16
kind of prize over which they fight." Lewis's book on
Hemingway, an examination of Hemingway's work in reference
to the concepts of Romance, Agape, and Eros, and to the
interplay of these concepts, represents a sensitive reading
of the writer's fiction. Critics like Baker, Young, Back
man, and Lewis see patterns in Hemingway's work; but, for
the most part, they see patterns developing within the con
texts of the works themselves, not patterns which exist
antecedent to those works.
Somewhat akin to those critics who see patterns emerg
ing within the contexts of Hemingway's works, and unlike
those who tend to impose patterns of various kinds, are the
critics who see a sort of nature symbolism operating within
the body of Hemingway's fiction. Charles R. Anderson found
that there is "a great distinction," in A Farewell to Arms,
"between the 'big rain' symbolizing the general destruction
of war and the 'small rain'" that merely "plagued" Henry's
and Catherine Barkley's love for each other "without dampen-
17
ing it. . . Both Robert Stephens and Golden Taylor
wrote of the symbolism of leopard and mountain in "The Snows
^ Hemingway on Love (Austin and London, 1965), p. 12.
^"Hemingway1s Other Style," MLN, LXXVI (May 1961),
439.
11
18
of Kilimanjaro." William Glasser saw in A Farewell to
Arms an inversion of the symbolism usually associated with
the seasons:
His spring becomes the beginning of death; his summer,
a flourishing death; his fall a waning death; his winter
a dulled anaesthetized life waiting for the renewal of
death.^
John Glendenning saw darkness and light symbolism in To Have
and Have Not: "Darkness and violence are again the con
trolling themes as the novel progresses from morning to
20
night and from slight injury to death." Recently, in
1963, Bern Oldsey saw symbolic snow in Hemingway's fiction:
. . . we discover that snow (with its related imagery of
ice, cold, cleanness, whiteness, and light) constituted
the major natural and symbolic element of Hemingway's
fictional world. . . .21
And more recently, in 1964, Donald Cunningham viewed white-
22
ness as symbolic of death m much of Hemingway's fiction.
What a roughly chronological review of Hemingway criticism
18
Stephens in "Hemingway's Riddle of Kilimanjaro: Idea
and Image," American Literature, XXXII (March 1960), 84, and
Taylor in "Hemingway on the Flesh and the Spirit," Western
Humanities Review (Summer 1961), 84-87.
19
"Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms," Explicator, XX
(October 1961), item 18.
20
"Hemingway's Gods, Dead and Alive," Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, III (Winter 1962), 498.
21
"The Snows of Ernest Hemingway," Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature, IV (Spring-Summer 1963), 172-173.
22
"Hemingway's 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,'" The Expli
cator , XXII (February 1964), item 41.
12
reveals is that a specifically "natural" symbolism may,
according to many critics, play an important role in Heming
way's fiction. It suggests, if the critics are right, that
Hemingway's symbolism did indeed develop "naturally" from
the context of his fiction, including the physical landscape
which his characters inhabited.
Although Halliday and Baker are not as far apart as a
first reading of their criticism of Hemingway's symbolism
may suggest, their controversy does serve to clarify various
approaches to Hemingway. Is Hemingway emphatically sym
bolic? At one extreme are the critics who tend mechanically
to impose patterns derived from a study of specific disci
plines upon the fiction of Hemingway; these critics see
Hemingway's fiction as being definitely and specifically
symbolic. At the other extreme, among critics who have
written at all on Hemingway's symbolism, is Halliday, who
says that Hemingway is only incidentally symbolic. Occupy
ing a middle position are those critics who see a sort of
natural symbolism operating within the contexts of Heming
way's fiction; and this group includes those who infer sym
bolic patterns evolving from the works themselves, not from
pre-existing patterns. Only a study of the rhetorical con
texts of a particular story or novel can give one an under
standing of just how much meaning is embodied in objects,
scenes, actions, and characters, and it is the intensity of
this concentration of meaning which determines whether
13
various aspects of any particular work are only incidentally
symbolic or emphatically so.
It should be mentioned that two doctoral dissertations
have been written on Hemingway's symbolism. Verne Bovie1s
dissertation deals, however, not with how symbols actually
function as elements in Hemingway’s rhetoric of fiction
relative to particular novels but with how "Individual sym
bols gradually grouped themselves around a pair of polar
23
opposites, the universal male and female principle" (remi
niscent of Baker's Mountain and Plain", Backman' s the Matador
and the Crucified, and Guttman’s Man and Machine polarities);
and his dissertation deals with the whole body of Heming
way' s fiction in relation to those "polar opposites," not
with the novels alone. Joseph B. Yokelson's dissertation
also takes all of Hemingway's fiction as its province; and
the chief purpose of his work, although he does comment upon
how Hemingway’s symbolism functions, is that of finding sym
bols overlooked by other critics; "This ground promises the
24
enriched understanding and appreciation of a great writer."
Yokelson does find symbols that others have overlooked, sym
bols like those associated with the "disguise motif" which
"pervades" A Farewell to Arms or with the "recumbent figure"
^ Dissertation Abstracts, XVII (May 1957), 1080. The
title of Bovie's dissertation is "The Evolution of a Myth: A
Study of the Major Symbols in the Works of Ernest Hemingway"
(Pennsylvania University, 1957) .
24
"Symbolism in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway" (Brown
University, 1960), p. 15.
14
symbol in many of Hemingway's stories {see his Chapter V on
"Symbols of Despair").
Despite Yokelson’s and Bovie1s dissertations on Heming
way's symbolism, there still remains a need for another
approach to a study on Hemingway's symbolism; only a study
of Hemingway's symbolism as an element of his rhetoric will
result in a substantial understanding of the symbols inher
ing in his novels. Even a brief survey suggests the scope
of criticism dealing with the symbolic aspects of Heming
way's fiction. And yet there have been few detailed analy
ses of Hemingway's use of symbols to further the central
concerns of his novels; there have been few detailed analy
ses relating his symbolism to his rhetoric of fiction, re
lating his symbolism to the very structure and movement of
his novels.
Some Aspects of Hemingway's Symbolism,
A Working Definition of Symbolism,
and the Meaning of a Rhetoric
of Fiction
Hemingway, undoubtedly, does make use of symbolism in
his novels; but he is not primarily a symbolist. The dif
ference between Hemingway's work and that of a true symbol
ist is not difficult to define. If one does not understand
the symbols in the work of a symbolist, like Kafka, one
misses much of the meaning and impact of his work. However,
one does not have completely to understand the exact nature
of the symbols in Hemingway’s work to appreciate the meaning
15
and impact of his novels. Hemingway's use of symbols is
different in kind from the symbolist's use of symbols. In
Hemingway's work, the symbols carry only a part of the bur
den in the projection of meaning. To a great extent Heming
way’s use of symbols serves to give a resonance, a kind of
"felt" meaning, to his work that it would otherwise lack.
In addition to the approach to Hemingway's symbolism spe
cifically set forth in the preface, this dissertation will
deal also with Hemingway's use of "isolated" symbols to sum
up a situation, project a state of mind, or define a situa
tion. Furthermore, it will also deal with the extent to
which the symbols in a Hemingway novel form themselves into
a kind of structure that parallels closely that novel's
thematic development--that becomes one with that develop
ment .
The definition of the symbol which this dissertation
will adopt is that one proposed by Brooks and Warren in
their Understanding Fiction: "An object, character, or
incident which stands for something else, or suggests some-
25
thing else, is a symbol of that thing." In a sense, of
course, just about any scene, incident, character, or
description in a novel can "stand for" or "suggest something
else"; and this kind of symbolism is especially character
istic of Hemingway's novels, in which scenes, incidents,
25
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding
Fiction (New York, 1959), p. 688.
16
characters, or descriptions are pregnant with meaning rela
tive to the novels' central concerns. Hemingway's symbols
are, however, elusive. One may have a symbol in one's
critical grasp only to have it turn into an image; on the
other hand, one may find an image imperceptibly transformed
into a symbol. Because Hemingway is faithful to the natu
ralistic surface details of his fiction, his objects, char
acters, and incidents can always be explained in terms of
the real fictional situation. To a great extent a symbol
must be felt, but an object becomes a symbol to be felt only
when certain requisites exist. Thus an object becomes a
symbol when it is given prominence throughout the novel,
even more prominence than the naturalistic surface of the
fiction would warrant. It may become a symbol when it is
appropriate to the central concern of the novel. It may be
come symbolic, in certain sections of the novel, when it
becomes an objective correlative of the character's mental
situation. It may become symbolic when that symbol is used
in juxtaposition with other symbols. It may become symbolic
when the image itself contains traditional associations
which can be focused and defined. Finally, if an image has
been used symbolically in other works by the writer, one may
suspect that it may be so used again in the work under
examination.
An example of an image that becomes symbolic in the
ways described above is that of the road in A Farewell to
17
Arms. - The image is prevalent throughout the novel. The
road image is appropriate to the central concern of the
novel, Henry's quest for meaning. In the Caporetto retreat
section of the novel, it mirrors the frustration and futil
ity inherent in Henry's situation. It is used in conjunc
tion with other images; in the first paragraph of the novel
the road is seen in juxtaposition with the symbolic mountain
and the symbolic plain, and the road, furthermore, serves
both literally and figuratively to connect the two regions;
and toward the close of the novel the metaphor of the ants
frantically trying to escape death by fire seems exactly to
parallel the movements of Henry on the confusing maze of
roads during the Caporetto retreat. Because of the rhetori
cal context in which the road image occurs, that image,
which in itself has latent traditional associations, begins
to "glow" with symbolic intensity. The symbol emerges from
the rhetoric; it is not imposed upon the novel.
The Rhetoric of Fiction
The term "rhetoric of fiction" is more difficult to
define. The term itself, the title of a book by Wayne C.
26
Booth, implies that the writer of fiction has something to
say, or an effect to achieve, and that he goes about achiev
ing meaning or impact through the more or less artful use of
the material that enters into his short story or novel.
26
The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961).
18
Booth himself writes of the ways in which authors manage to
say what they want to say; he does not, one notes, contend
that one mode of story telling is inherently better than
another, that, for instance, The Ambassadors is necessarily
better than Tom Jones. Both James and Fielding have written
novels whose forms appropriately embody their authors'
respective purposes and intentions. Booth stresses, too,
that in many ways an author of seemingly impersonal narra
tive is as much present in his novel as is "Fielding" in
Tom Jones. In fact Booth states explicitly that Fielding's
presence is important to the embodiment of the novelist’s
purposes:
In a fictional world that offers no single character who
is both wise and good . . . the author is always there
on his platform to remind us, through his wisdom and
benevolence, of what human life ought to be. (p. 217)
In his book, Booth does not say that the older novel
ists with their seemingly obtrusive commentary are neces
sarily bad or that modern novelists with their seemingly
impersonal, objective methods of narration are necessarily
good. Both ways can be good if they serve to further their
authors' intentions. Booth, furthermore, deals with the
ways in which authors, without explicit commentary, manage
to say what they want to say or to achieve effects that they
want to achieve. After pointing out the weaknesses of the
arguments supporting the "modern" approach to storytelling
{"True Novels Must Be Realistic," "All Authors Should Be
Objective," "True Art Ignores the Audience"), he suggests
19
the ways in which the modern author's voice can remain
"dominant as dialogue that is at the heart of all experience
with fiction":
With commentary ruled out, hundreds of devices remain
for revealing judgment and molding responses. Patterns
of imagery and symbol are as effective in modern fiction
as they have always been in poetry in controlling our
evaluations of details. Decisions about what parts of a
story to dramatize and about the sequences and propor
tion of episodes can be as effective in The Hamlet as
they are in Hamlet, as decisive in Ulysses as they are
in the Odyssey. In fact all of the old-fashioned devices
of pace and timing can be refurbished for the purposes
of dramatic, impersonal narration. (p. 272)
In this passage Booth touches upon a fruitful approach to
the study of Hemingway's novels: the ways in which symbol
ism can operate as an element in the rhetoric of fiction.
One notes, furthermore, that Booth's reference to "patterns
of imagery and symbol" are suggestive of Carlos Baker's
concept of a sub-structure of symbolism inhering in some of
Hemingway's novels, particularly in A Farewell to Arms.
The Concept of Plot
Allied to the concept of a rhetoric of fiction is the
concept of plot; for, in a sense, the writer uses his com
mand of that rhetoric to realize his plot in all its possi
bilities. An understanding of plot is thus requisite to an
understanding of the rhetoric of fiction.
In Understanding Fiction, Brooks and Warren define plot
as being a pattern of incidents, each incident of which re
lates to a "central question” or "central conflict" (pp.
654-655). Howard E. Hugo thinks of plot as "an arrangement
20
27
of events or happenings by the author. With Hugo and with
Brooks and Warren, Elizabeth Bowen emphasizes the unity of
plot and theme when she says that the author is "forced
towards his plot" by "the 'what is to be said,'" that "plot
must further the novel towards its objective . . . the non-
28
poetic statement of poetic truth." Many critics, includ
ing E. M. Forster and Aristotle, imply, furthermore, that
plot cannot be separated from character— that plot is, in
essence, a coalescence of character and what Forster terms
"story." And "story," according to Forster, is a "narra
tive of events arranged in their time sequence," in contrast
to the plot, which is "a narrative of events, the emphasis
29
falling on causality." "Story" is thus merely a relation
of events in sequence, whereas plot, in terms of fictional
causality, comprehends character and motivation. When, for
example, Aristotle says that tragedy imitates the action of
a particular kind of man, he implies the coalescence of
action (Forster's "story") with character to form plot.
Aristotle, moreover, discusses in his Poetics the ways in
which the playwright can arrange his events in order to give
expression to the tragic force latent in a "story."
27
Aspects of Fiction (Boston, 1962), p. 253.
28
Excerpts from "Notes on Writing a Novel" (New York,
1950), reprinted in Aspects of Fiction, ed. with introd. by
Howard E. Hugo, pp. 177-178.
79
Aspects of the Novel (London, 1927), p. 130.
Aristotle's concept of plot thus suggests not only a coa
lescence of plot and character but also the best possible
arrangement of the events in order to give focus and power
to the force which inheres dormant in a simple "story" or
action. In one sense, too, plot comprehends the actual
strategy employed by a writer to work his "story" into its
finished form; in another sense, plot comprehends the ideal
strategy employed by an ideal writer to achieve the ideal
finished form.
The working definition of plot assumed in this disser
tation, admittedly derivative and eclectic, will then be the
following: a plot, in addition to representing a coales
cence of "story" and characters, is an arrangement of events
to produce a particular effect or to sustain a particular
theme or set of themes. By "events" will be meant not only
scenes and incidents but also thoughts, internal monologues,
descriptions, and, to an extent, segments of dialogue.
Furthermore, in one sense, plot exists antecedent to
the finished novel itself. It exists in the form of what
Ronald S. Crane terms a "shaping cause":
. . . in the artist's intuition of a final form capable
of directing whatever he does with his materials in a
particular work . . . is an essential cause of poetic
structure, the most decisive, indeed, of all the causes
of structure in poetry because it controls in an immedi
ate way the act of construction itself.30
30
"Toward a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic Struc
ture, " in Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York,
1963), p. 269.
22
It is this "shaping cause" resulting in completed form that
"gives to the subject-matter the power it has to affect our
opinions and emotions" (Crane, p. 281). The writer, accord
ingly, uses all the elements in the rhetoric of fiction to
develop the "shaping cause," a kind of embryonic plot, into
its complete form, the form in which it has "the power . . .
to affect our opinions and emotions in a certain way." The
relationship of symbolism to the rhetoric of fiction,
simply, is that it is one of the elements in that rhetoric
by which the writer can achieve that final form with its
attendant meaning and impact.
Early Life and Apprenticeship of Hemingway
Because this dissertation will also deal chronologi
cally with the development of Hemingway1s symbolism, because
much of the material in it will assume a knowledge of
Hemingway's career, and because to a great extent Heming
way's novels are based on personal experiences, a brief
presentation of the early life and apprenticeship of the
novelist is not only useful but also essential in giving a
perspective and a coherence to matters which may seem other
wise accidental and amorphous.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak
Park, Illinois, the son of Dr. Clarence Hemingway, a gradu
ate of Oberlin College and of the Rush Medical College in
23
31
Chicago, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a talented contralto.
As the son of a doctor and of an artist, Hemingway himself
seems symbolic of the origins of his symbolism; for the sym
bolism peculiar to any writer has its origins in both direct
experience and in art, a kind of indirect experience.
Whereas a doctor, by the nature of his profession, confronts
naked reality, the artist, in terms of his art, apprehends
life indirectly and expresses it symbolically; in a compre
hensive sense, all art is symbolic. With his doctor father,
Nick Adams confronts the facts of birth and death in the
story "Indian Camp." Rinaldi, the surgeon friend of
Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, confronts the tan
gible evidence of mortality. Much of Hemingway's fiction,
moreover, is filled with images of bodies mangled in bull
fights, wars, hunting accidents, and a variety of other
kinds of violent encounters. The mutilated body, the sub
ject of the doctor's skill, becomes symbolic of the world's
violence. And it becomes symbolic through the medium of
art.
In childhood and in his school years, Hemingway
exhibited both a love of nature and of literature, two
sources, direct and indirect, of his symbolism. From his
father, a lover of nature and of hunting and fishing,
Hemingway early acquired a taste for the outdoors. During
31
See Leicester Hemingway, My Brother Ernest Hemingway
(Cleveland, 1961), pp. 20-21.
24
the summer of 1900, Hemingway's parents had visited Walloon
Lake in Northern Michigan, and liking the area they bought
two acres of land on the shoreline. Many of Hemingway's
Nick Adams stories have as their setting the Northern
Michigan area which he got to know in childhood. Here the
family summered; here, too, Hemingway exhibited early a
proficiency in outdoor activities. Hemingway's experiences
in Northern Michigan not only supplied the setting for many
of his short stories; they also serve in part to explain the
symbolism of much of his fiction. Nature in Northern Michi
gan, for example, supplies elements of the symbolism in
"Big Two-Hearted River," Parts I and II. In his novels,
too, nature is a rich source of symbols. The symbolic earth
plays an important role in both The Sun Also Rises and For
Whom the Bell Tolls; mountains, plain, and the seasons func
tion symbolically in A Farewell to Arms; and the sea and the
creatures in it are explicitly symbolic in The Old Man and
the Sea. It would be hard to imagine Hemingway's fiction
being written by a man without a direct experience of the
outdoors.
Related to Hemingway's involvement in nature is his
love of the outdoor sports; and these sports, too, provide
important aspects of the symbolism in Hemingway's fiction.
Hemingway's symbolic use of fishing, hunting, and bull
fighting, for instance, is evidenced in both his short stor
ies and his novels. His emphasis on the exact way of
25
fishing and hunting becomes suggestive of an attitude toward
life; it becomes suggestive of a way of confronting life, of
ordering it, and of achieving meaning by the imposition of a
species of art. The bullfight, in particular, becomes a
means of achieving meaning and order.
Even in early childhood, Hemingway combined a love of
the outdoors with a bookish knowledge of natural history.
By the time he was three, for instance, he had learned from
an illustrated book that his father had read to him the
Latin names of over two hundred and fifty North American
birds. According to Leicester Hemingway, Hemingway's
younger brother, the Latin names of birds like "Erithacus,
rebecula and Merula migratoria were as familiar to him as
'robin' and 'oriole' were to lads years older" (Leicester
Hemingway, p. 20). Hemingway's key metaphor of the ants
toward the close of A Farewell to Arms reveals a precision
which only a person acute in the observation of nature and
practiced in a description of it can achieve. His descrip
tion of the grasshoppers in "Big Two-Hearted River" reveals
a similar precision, an exactness which reminds one of
Thoreau. A naturalist is not only trained to observe nature;
he has also acquired, through a reading of the literature in
his field, the ability to write about it. Just as an "indi
rect" and direct knowledge of nature may combine to shape a
naturalist's prose, so may they coalesce to become one of
the sources of a novelist's symbolism.
26
Throughout his school years, Hemingway was a constant
reader. His mother "often found him deeply absorbed in
reading, " and when she urged him to go outside to play base
ball with the boys his answer was often likely to be, "Aw
Mother, I pitch like a hen" (Leicester Hemingway, p. 26).
Even during his summers in Northern Michigan, Hemingway was
a voracious reader. Dr. Hemingway, in fact, had to warn an
old nurse of the Hemingway's not to let Ernest have books
at night. The old nurse recalls the following:
Each evening I'd search his cabin and take away all
the books. When I'd tuck him in, he'd say good night,
as sweet as could be, then in the morning I'd find books
stuffed under the mattress, in the pillowcase, every
where. He read all the time--and books way beyond his
years.^
According to Leicester Hemingway, Hemingway read St.
Nicholas and Harper1s magazines, which published Richard
Harding Davis and Stephen Crane. He also enjoyed reading
Kipling, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens,
Thackeray, and Shakespeare. Of these writers the only one
who may have had a discernible influence upon the formation
of Hemingway's symbolism would be Stephen Crane, and under
standing of whose story "The Blue Hotel," for instance,
depends upon an awareness of certain salient symbols: the
blueness of the hotel as contrasted to the blueness of a
heron's leg, the hotel itself, and the storm raging about
3 2
See Constance Cappell Montgomery, Hemingway in Michi
gan (New York, 1966), p. 70.
27
the hotel. Just as Crane uses the hotel as symbolic of
man1s attempt to assert himself in a vast and perhaps mean
ingless universe, so does Hemingway use the lighted terrace
of a Cafe, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," as symbolic of a
shelter against a universal nada. Hemingway also uses
storms symbolically, particularly in For Whom the Bell
Tolls. Of course influences shaping the work of any writer
are almost always conjectural, but the fact that Hemingway
had been an early reader, that his reading had been fairly
comprehensive, must have had some bearing on the development
of his symbolism. Perhaps the strictly literary methods he
had absorbed from his reading helped to transmute his expe
riences into the symbolism implicated in his fiction.
With a background both of reading and of experiences
that could be transformed into fiction, Hemingway began
actually to write during his years at Oak Park High School.
Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, Hemingway's older sister, re
calls that he wrote short stories in the manner of Poe, Ring
33
Lardner, and 0. Henry. In addition to experimenting with
various styles of writing, however, Hemingway began to write
stories based upon his personal experiences. One story,
"Sepi Jingan," appeared in the November, 1916, issue of
Tabula, the Oak Park High literary magazine. This story, as
will be noted later, prefigured some aspects of Hemingway's
3 3
See Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingway's
(Boston, 1961), p. 138.
28
later narrative methods. In high school, he also began
writing feature stories on sports in the style of Ring
Lardner, who was then writing a column for a Chicago news
paper. His writing on sports continued to be a minor fea
ture of his later writing. In his early journalism, Heming
way combined both an interest in literary matters, such as
Ring Lardner's colloquial prose style, and also a requisite
awareness of the real world.
In addition to writing about sports, Hemingway was an
active participant in football and swimming. He thus com
bined not only an outsider’s Knowledge of various sports,
but an insider's appreciation as well. Hemingway's insist
ence on professional skill as a means of organizing and
interpreting experience later took the form of a symbolic
division of men between those who "know the score" and those
who do not, between those who confront life with courage and
discipline and those who cannot: the "insiders" and the
"outsiders." His insistence on professional skill as a
means of ordering life and interpreting it in itself
acquired symbolic significance. The fact that he not only
wrote about sports but also participated in them is sugges
tive of his emphasis upon experience as a source of fiction;
and perhaps that fact is revelatory of some aspects of his
symbolism.
After graduation from high school in June, 1917,
Hemingway went to work as a reporter for the Kansas City
29
Star. For the next few years, except for some time spent in
Italy during the First World War, he was a practicing jour
nalist. As a journalist, he was necessarily involved in two
activities, that of perfecting his skill as a writer and
that of understanding the world about him. His skill as a
writer became the means of ordering the raw material of
life. As a reporter Hemingway had to confront actual life;
as a writer he developed an ability to reveal the facts of
life with fidelity while simultaneously achieving impact and
meaning through an ordering of those facts. Later, as a
reporter for the Toronto Star in the early Twenties, Heming
way covered much of the European scene, writing many arti
cles which revealed his ability to focus on the sharp tell
ing detail. A reporter for the Star, he covered the war
between Turkey and Greece, and his experiences in that war
helped to provide the images of violence and brutality which
later, in In Our Time, became symbolic of a disordered
world. In his art he contained that violence and made it
meaningful. His symbolism is thus the result of a direct
confrontation between the facts of life, often violent and
brutal, and his art. And his life as a journalist helps to
explain the nature of much of that symbolism.
Between jobs as first a reporter for the Kansas City
Star and then a correspondent for the Toronto Star, Heming
way participated in the First World War as an ambulance
driver for the American Expeditionary Force. Having joined
30
the service in February, 1918, Hemingway was wounded about
seven months later, July 9, in the Piave sector of the war
in Italy. Hemingway's experiences in the war, together with
his later experience of the war between the Greeks and the
Turks, without doubt were major influences in his fiction.
The symbolic force inhering in his images of a world out of
joint, of wounded men, of an emasculated Jake, of men and
women uprooted by war, depends upon the authenticity derived
from deeply felt personal experiences. These images assumed
symbolic significance in the context of his fiction, and
they became intensely symbolic through a juxtaposition with
a symbolic nature he had known in his childhood. Nineteen
years of age when he first experienced war, Hemingway must
have been profoundly affected by it, much more so than by
his later experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the
Second World War.
After the First World War, Hemingway spent a few months
in recuperation. In the summer of 1919, he attempted writ
ing stories at Windemere, the Hemingway summer home at
Walloon Lake. In the winter following that summer of inten
sive writing, Hemingway began to write articles for the
Toronto Star on a free-lance basis. For a time he lived in
Chicago; there he met Sherwood Anderson, who thought highly
of the young writer's talents, and a girl named Hadley
Richardson, whom he married in the summer of 1921.
31
Having arranged with the Toronto Star to be its corre
spondent in Europe, and armed with letters of introduction
from Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway and his wife left for
Europe on December 8, 1921. In Europe, in addition to work
ing at his craft, Hemingway met many of the literary figures
of the time. He got to know Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound,
James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of the writers he met
in Paris, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, in particular, in
fluenced Hemingway in his writing. Later in a pamphlet con
taining testimonies to Pound by various writers, Hemingway
stated his opinion of the poet in unequivocal terms:
Any poet born in this century or in the last ten
years of the preceding century who can honestly say that
he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from
the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than
rebuked. It is as if a prose writer born in that time
should not have learned from or been influenced by James
Joyce or that a traveller should pass through a great
blizzard and not have felt its cold or a sand storm and
not have felt the sand and the wind. The best of Pound's
writings--and it is in CANTOS--will last as long as there
is any 1iterature.^4
In addition to the incidental praise accorded James Joyce,
one notes Hemingway's use of concrete images in his testi
mony to one of the founders of imagism. Later still, in his
A Moveable Feast Hemingway again speaks highly of Pound as a
man he "liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man
who believed in the mot juste--the one and only correct word
34
The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies by Ernest
Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Hugh Walpole,
Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, and Others (New York, 1933),
p. 13.
32
35
to use--the man who taught" him "to distrust adjectives."
In the same book, Hemingway says of Gertrude Stein that
"She had . . . discovered many truths about rhythms and the
use of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and
she talked well about them" (p. 37). Of the two, Pound
probably had the greater influence in the formation of
Hemingway's symbolic method. Pound’s ideas on imagism and
vorticism may have strongly influenced Hemingway. The mot
juste, in fact, could represent the exact image, shorn of
adjectives, needed to express a feeling or a situation.
As in his childhood and youth, Hemingway, in addition
to confronting life directly, continued to read incessantly.
According to Daniel Fuchs, Hemingway revealed in The Sun
Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms the influence of writers
seemingly quite different from him in their literary
methods: "What does relate Hemingway to writers so very
different from him as France and Hardy is the pose of the
3 6
Ecclesiast." To a question as to who his literary influ
ences were, Hemingway replied:
Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendahl, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoi,
Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne,
Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat,
Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto,
Heironymous Bosch, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van
35
A Moveable Feast, p. 134.
3 6
"Ernest Hemingway, Literary Critic," American Litera
ture , XXXVI (January 1965), 446-447.
33
Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Gongora--It would
take a day to remember everyone.37
He was influenced by the cultural milieu of the Twenties;
and he was influenced by composers, painters, and writers of
all periods. His allusions to painters, however, is espe
cially noteworthy relative to the development of his symbol
ism; for painters of necessity work with visual images which
may, or may not, be infused with symbolic force. Both the
solidity of Cezanne's world and the images of war in Goya's
may have entered into Hemingway's prose.
During the Paris years, which lasted from December,
1921, until his return from Europe in 1928, Hemingway,
except for a brief stay in Toronto, lived on the continent.
All the forces operating to make Hemingway a writer found a
congenial location for their convergence in Paris, where
Hemingway began to publish his various works. Three Stories
and Ten Poems, which included the stories "Up in Michigan,"
"Out of Season," and "My Old Man," was published in August,
1923, by Robert McAlmon's Contact Press. A volume of brief
prose sketches, in our time, written during 1922 and 1923,
was published in March, 1924. The vignettes included brief
scenes drawn from the First World War, the war in Asia
Minor, and his experiences in Chicago. During his Paris
37
George Plimpton, "Interview with Hemingway," in
Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthony, ed.
with a checklist of Hemingway criticism by Carlos Baker
(New York, 1961), p. 27. Reprinted from the Paris Review,
XVIII (Spring 1958), 19-37.
34
years, moreover, Hemingway began publishing some of his more
or less major works of fiction: In Our Time (1925); The
Torrents of Spring (1926); and, of course, The Sun Also
Rises (1926).
Besides the works which were published in book form
during that period, Hemingway also published many short
stories and some poems in little magazines: six vignettes
(later included in in our time), "Mr. and Mrs. Eliot," and
"A Banal Story" in The Little Review (Spring 1923; Autumn
and Winter 1924-1925; and Spring and Summer 1926); "Big
Two-Hearted River" and "The Undefeated" in This Quarter (May
1925, and Autumn and Winter 1925-1926); "The Doctor and the
Doctor's Wife" and "Cross Country Snow" in Transatlantic
Review (December 1924, and January 1925); "Soldier's Home"
in Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925) ;
"Nothoemist Poem" (misprint for "Neothomist Poem") in Exile
(Spring 1927); and a German translation of "The Undefeated"
("Stierkampf") in two issues of Querschnitt (Summer 1925,
and July 1925) .
Hemingway's life after returning to America in 1928 is
well known. With a home established in Key West,Florida, he
still managed to see much of the world. He hunted in Africa;
and he participated actively, both as a correspondent and as
a propagandist for the Loyalist cause, in the Spanish Civil
War. In World War II, he also participated as a correspond
ent. After the war, he lived in Cuba until Castro came into
35
power; he then returned to the United States.
The important events in Hemingway's life after his
return from Europe were, of course, the publication of his
works: A Farewell to Arms in 1929; Death in the Afternoon
in 1932; Winner Take Nothing, a collection of short stories,
in 1933; To Have and Have Not in 1937; The Fifth Column and
the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938; For Whom the Bell
Tolls in 1940; Across the River and Into the Trees in 1950;
and The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. In 1954, Hemingway won
the Nobel Prize. In 1961, he died of a self-inflicted shot
gun wound. Since his death, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's
recollection of his days in Paris, has been published.
During his life as a journalist, sportsman, and active
participant in wars, Hemingway also managed to acquire four
wives. Divorced from Hadley on March 11, 1927, he almost
immediately married Pauline Pfeiffer. Divorced from Pauline
in November, 1940, Hemingway two weeks later married Martha
Gellhorn, a correspondent whom he had met during the Spanish
Civil War. And divorced from Martha Gellhorn in December,
1945, he married Mary Welsh, a correspondent he had met dur
ing the Second World War; their marriage lasted until his
death. If war and his experiences as a journalist, together
with his love of nature, were the source of much of the sym
bolism in his fiction, the theme of love is also closely
associated with that symbolism; his marriages may thus have
had a fairly direct bearing upon his symbolism. Three of
36
his major novels were written during his marriages to and
love affairs with three of his wives: The Sun Also Rises
was written while he was married to Hadley; A Farewell to
Arms was completed while he was married to Pauline; and For
Whom the Bell Tolls was written while he w^g in love with
Martha Gellhorn.
And the theme of love, of course, is important in all
his novels: the impossibility of love in The Sun Also
Rises; the tragic futility of love in A Farewell to Arms;
the mystic fulfillment of love in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In The Sun Also Rises, the theme of an impotent love, mir
roring a dislocated society, lends a contrasting force to
the nature symbolism in the novel, a nature symbolizing a
wholeness and a sanity unattainable in an imperfect world.
In A Farewell to Arms, the mountains, according to Carlos
Baker, symbolize in part the sort of life Henry and
Catherine Barkley could have together in a world at peace.
And in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Maria, whom Jordan loves,
herself becomes a symbol for the Spanish earth; and Jordan's
love for her is thus associated with the nature symbolism in
the novel. Although love does not find a direct symbolic
embodiment in his novels, it is thematically pervasive in
all of them; the theme of love affects his symbolism, is
part of the content of his symbolism. Hemingway's love
affairs and marriages, as do other aspects of his direct
apprehension of life, thus find their ways into his novels.
37
A Restatement of the Purpose
of this Dissertation
A knowledge of Hemingway's life serves to illumine the
symbolism common to much of fiction. The subject of this
dissertation, more specifically, will be the relationship
between Hemingway's symbolism and the rhetoric of fiction in
individual novels. And it will have to deal with the con
cept of plot which is closely allied to that concept of
rhetoric. An examination of that symbolism in relation to
that rhetoric will reveal some of the ways in which Heming
way went about writing his novels. Such an examination will
show that Hemingway's symbolism is essential to his narra
tive method; it will show that Hemingway's symbolism is
essential to the communication of meaning. It will show,
too, that his symbolism serves to give coherence to his
novels, a coherence that brings into focus the central con
cerns of his novels. A detailed examination of his symbol
ism as an element of his rhetoric of fiction will show the
extent to which Baker was correct in positing his concept of
a sub-structure of symbolism inhering in some of Hemingway's
novels. Such a detailed examination will serve to make
explicit the nature and extent of Hemingway's use of symbol
ism. In fact, only by studying Hemingway's symbolism in
relation to his rhetoric of fiction can one gain an under
standing of the nature of that symbolism as an intimate part
of the very structure and movement of his novels. This dis
sertation, then, will consist of just such detailed examina
38
tions. There will, however, be varying emphases from chap
ter to chapter. Thus the chapter on The Sun Also Rises will
be an over-all study of the relationship of Hemingway's sym
bolism to his rhetoric of fiction; the chapter on A Farewell
to Arms will focus largely on the matter of a consistent
sub-structure of symbolism; the chapters on Hemingway's
middle period in his career as a novelist will heavily
emphasize the relationship between point of view and Heming
way 's use of symbolism; and the chapter on Hemingway's late
period will deal, in the main, with symbolism as an obtru
sive element.
CHAPTER II
THE PROVENANCE OF THE SYMBOL
AND IN OUR TIME
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway said that he had
been trying in his early Paris years to write about "what
really happened in action; what the actual things were which
produced the emotion that you experienced." He elaborated
further that
the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which
made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year
or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely
enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard
to try to get it.l
With the passage of time, perhaps, the "real thing" that
Hemingway tried so hard to capture, and which eluded him for
so long, tended more and more to acquire symbolic overtones;
and when, finally, Hemingway began to succeed in capturing
the "real thing," it was no longer simply actuality but an
image which verged on the symbolic. The progression was
from the literal to the symbolic; and in managing this pro
gression Hemingway was able to retain the immediacy of the
"real thing."
^(New York, 1932), p. 2.
39
40
Perhaps even from the beginning, Hemingway was not
merely in search for the "real thing" that a camera, for
example, can capture. Rather he was searching as early as
in Chicago in around 1920 . . . for the unnoticed things
that made emotions such as the way an outfielder tossed
his glove without looking back to where it fell, the
squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled
gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn's skin when
he had just come out of stir and other things I noted as
a painter sketches.
The emphasis, surely, was on the emotion produced by the
"real thing" as much as on the objective existence of the
"real thing" itself; and the emphasis, surely, was also on
the selection from a welter of "things" the specific "real
thing" that created the emotion associated with the experi
ence of which that "real thing" had been a part. And again,
surely, the emphasis was not only on the experiencing of the
emotion triggered by the "real thing" but also on the com
munication of that experience by describing that "real
thing" as scrupulously as possible. In a way, then, the
"real thing" that Hemingway was in search of in "Chicago
around 1920" and in Paris stood for something else--the emo
tion felt by Hemingway. Later when Jake Barnes, disap
pointed by Brett Ashley's having forgotten an appointment
to meet him, sees some barges on the Seine "being towed
2
George Plimpton, "An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,"
Paris Review, XVII (March 1955), 61-82, reprinted in Heming
way and His Critics, ed. and with an Introd. by Carlos Baker
(New York, 1961), p. 35.
41
3
empty down the current," one feels sure that the "empty
barges," a "real thing" certainly, stand for Jake's feeling
of disappointment. Here, the "empty barges" communicate to
the reader the state of Barnes' mind precisely because they
would be just the sort of objects that such a man would
notice, just as when one feels depressed one notices, per
haps, the fading wall paper of one's room, the trash accumu
lating in the gutter, or the nasty acridity of one's last
cigarette. Somehow, too, one feels that the empty barges
are vaguely "symbolic"--perhaps because they no longer stand
for the state of Hemingway's mind but, rather, for that of
Jake Barnes who, as a character in a novel, himself assumes
a symbolic function. To the symbolic empty barges one can
relate the symbolic gesture of Nick Adams in "The Battler"
when he pocketed the ham sandwich given him by the Negro
companion of the punch-drunk former champion boxer; in
pocketing the sandwich--this takes place at the very close
of the story— Nick seems symbolically to accept the experi
ence he had had with the boxer and his companion. Nick
seems to accept and live with the irrational violence of a
life in which a punch-drunk boxer can turn from amiability
4
to deadly violence with no apparent cause. E. M. Halliday,
speaking of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms,
^Sun Also Rises (New York, 1926), p. 41.
4
In Our Time (New York, 1925), p. 79.
42
refers to this sort of situational symbolism as "objective
epitome--a symbolist technique, if you like— to convey the
5
subjective condition of his characters." According to the
Brooks and Warren definition of a symbol ("an object, cha
racter, or incident which stands for something else, or sug
gests something else"), the "objective epitome" is surely
equivalent to a kind of symbolism. And there seems to be no
reason, in this dissertation at least, for substituting the
term "objective epitome" when the term symbol is more famil
iar and just as accurate. The "objective epitome" does have
the advantage, though, of revealing a more exact relation
ship between Hemingway's sort of symbolism and the rhetoric
of fiction. Obviously the "objective epitome" was used by
Hemingway, in keeping with his implicit rather than explicit
method of storytelling, to say what he wanted to say about a
situation or a state of mind. Just as certainly, however,
Hemingway used this kind of symbolism to give depth and
"poetic" resonance to his novels. And thus the term symbol,
which one associates with just this sort of "poetic" reso
nance, has an aptness that the term "objective epitome"
lacks.
Perhaps the relationship of the "real thing" to the
symbol as such can be more clearly seen in a passage from
“’"Hemingway's Ambiguity: Symbolism and Irony," American
Literature, XXVIII (March 1956), 1-22, reprinted in Heming
way: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), pp. 56-57.
43
Death in the Afternoon, in which Hemingway tried to define
the effect created in him by the sight of a bullfighter who
had been gored in a bullfight:
When he stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk
of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the
dirtiness of rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit
underwear and the clean, clean, unbearably clean white
ness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that
which was important.^
Surely, the contrast between the dirtiness of the breeches
and the underwear and the whiteness of the bone was the
"real thing" that affected Hemingway as the essential fea
ture of the scene; but surely, also, the "unbearably clean
whiteness" of the bone, like the whiteness of Melville's
whale, becomes symbolic in a sense apart from its function
solely as an "objective epitome" of Hemingway's state of
mind. One need not wax mystical in feeling that the white
ness could stand for a sudden intimation of man's mortality,
the essential truth about life laid bare, or the nada which
underlies all human endeavor, even bullfighting. One feels
the impact of the whiteness; and one feels that it has the
force of a symbol different in kind from the sort of symbol
represented by the "objective epitome." In a sense, too,
many instances of the "objective epitome," in addition to
symbolizing a situation or a state of mind, can also symbol
ize some concept, idea, or feeling of a more general nature.
Thus the empty barges seen by Jake could, perhaps, symbolize
^Death in the Afternoon {New York, 1932), p. 20.
44
the loneliness of all men who have experienced what Jake has
experienced. Perhaps, too, Nick's gesture of pocketing the
ham sandwich symbolizes not only the acceptance of life by
Nick in particular but also the unavoidable acquiescence to
life on the part of men in general; it may symbolize the
fact that all boys, as they mature into men, must learn to
confront life and to accept it for what it is. A Hemingway
symbol of this type may then simultaneously serve two rhe
torical functions— that of performing the narrower function
of epitomizing a state of mind or situation and that of
generalizing that state of mind or situation into a univer
sally valid "truth." At this point, perhaps, a more spe
cific relation of some of the influences that shaped the
symbolic aspect of Hemingway's rhetoric of fiction would be
helpful; universal "truths," at any rate, are much too elu
sive to define within the limits of this dissertation.
It should be noted, first of all, that Hemingway early
revealed his characteristic approach to fiction in "Sepi
Jingan," a story published in the November, 1916, issue of
7
Tabula, Oak Park High School’s literary magazine. In this
7
See Constance Cappell Montgomery, Hemingway in Michi
gan (New York, 1966), pp. 50-52. Constance Montgomery has
published the full text of "Sepi Jingan" in her recent book
on Hemingway. She has also published two other stories
which Hemingway wrote for Tabula; "Judgment of Manitou"
from the February, 1916, edition of Tabula and "A Matter of
Colour" from the April, 1916, edition of Tabula (see pp. 44-
49 of her book for the full texts of both stories ) .
45
story, Billy Tabeshaw, an Indian, describes Paul Black Bird
in the following terms:
"Yes. He was a bad Indian. . . . He used to drink all
day--everything. But he couldn't get drunk. Then he
would go crazy; but he wasn’t drunk. He was crazy be
cause he couldn't get drunk." (Montgomery, p. 51)
This brief description of character is interesting not only
because it reveals Hemingway's precocious insight into human
motivation but also because it indicates his ability to
seize upon the telling incident, "the real thing," to sug
gest the complex reality of a man's state of mind. One is
almost tempted to say that Black Bird's drinking is symbolic
of whatever it is that troubles him.
An insight into the character of Billy Tabeshaw, who
tells the story of Paul Black Bird, is also presented by
means of a telling detail. "Sepi Jingan" opens with Billy
Tabeshaw's buying tobacco at a country store: "'Velvet’s
like red hot pepper, 'P.A.’ like cornsilk. Give me a pack
age of 'Peerless'" (Montgomery, p. 50). And the next to the
last sentence of the story consists of Billy's advice to the
narrator. "'You can take my advice and stay off that
'Tuxedo'— 'Peerless' is the only Tobacco'" (p. 52). Because
Tabeshaw's ability to make distinctions among various brands
of tobacco is made emphatic at both the very beginning and
at the end of the story, that distinction becomes signifi
cant as an insight into his character. He is a perceptive,
competent, and shrewd man. And these qualities are import
ant for they enable him to apprehend the murderer Black Bird.
46
It is his shrewdness, moreover, which enables him to
describe Black Bird's character. The story is titled "Sepi
Jingan" after the name of Tabeshaw*s dog. Although the dog
is important to the story in that he saves Tabeshaw from
death at the hands of Black Bird, the title of the story
could have been just as aptly "'Peerless,'" the choice of
which tobacco is symbolic of Billy Tabeshaw's shrewdness and
competence; he is indeed without peer.
Hemingway wrote two other stories for the Tabula: "The
Judgment of Manitou" and "A Matter of Colour" (see p. 44,
n. 7). "The Judgment of Manitou" is the story of two trap
pers, Pierre and Dick Haywood. Suspecting that Dick has
stolen his wallet, Pierre plans vengeance. He lays a trap
for Dick; and caught in the trap, Dick is eaten alive by
timber wolves. Having learned that Dick has not stolen his
wallet, Pierre rushes out to rescue his friend whom he had
wrongly suspected. Finding Dick dead, Pierre, now also
caught in another trap, kills himself before the timber
wolves devour him as they have devoured his companion. "A
Matter of Colour," a humorous story about boxing," seems
inferior to both "Sepi Jingan" and "The Judgment of Manitou."
Although the two stories reflect Hemingway's interest in
death and violence, unlike "Sepi Jingan" they are not notable
for telling detail.
Influence of Newspaper Work
on Hemingway's Symbolism
Later, after Hemingway had become a reporter on the
Kansas City Star, he received a kind of apprenticeship in
writing that further reinforced his proclivity for the tell
ing incident, scene, object, gesture, or dialogue, a pro
clivity already revealed in "Sepi Jingan." Rule 21 in the
Kansas City Star1s style sheet of Hemingway's day is:
"Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant
0
ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc." If
one avoids the excessive use of adjectives, then, obviously,
the incident itself, the object itself, the scene itself,
the dialogue itself must carry the burden of the writer's
meaning. Unavoidably, each incident, each scene, each
object described becomes suggestive of something else— sug
gestive of the "message" the writer is trying to convey,
suggestive, at least, of the steps by which he develops his
"message." Although no news story written for the Star can
be definitely attributed to Hemingway, Charles A. Fenton
does quote in full the kind of story which might very well
have been written by Hemingway:
A well dressed young woman entered the jewelry divi
sion of the welfare loan agency yesterday. She presented
a worn pawn ticket. It was for a wedding ring pawned
nine months before.
"I never intended to come back for that," she said.
"I didn't wear it and it always seemed just an expression
g
Quoted by Charles Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest
Hemingway (New York, 1954), p. 33.
48
of sentiment and I believed I was an unsentimental woman.
But my husband was drafted and I thought 11d like to
have the ring to remember him by in case he never comes
home." (Kansas City Star, March 1, 1918) (Fenton, p. 43)
The whole incident is written in an objective style,
surely; but, obviously, the writer is making a comment on
the impact of the war on the "well dressed young woman."
And, just as surely, the writer is not presenting only an
"objective" picture of what happened; the writer is involved
in the story; he has selected this incident, patently, not
as an isolated, atypical occurrence but as an incident
revelatory of what must have been taking place all over
America, revelatory, too, of the general mood of women who
were faced with the imminent departures of their husbands.
The very objectivity of the story forces one into seeing the
incident as suggestive, as symbolic, as a particular inci
dent mirroring a general situation. If the writer were to
elaborate on the meaning of the incident, relating that par
ticular incident to others of its kind and drawing general
conclusions from that relation, then much of the symbolic
force of the incident would be lost. One notices, too, the
obviously symbolic use of the "worn pawn ticket" and the
wedding ring, the pawn ticket symbolic of the "unsentimental"
view of affairs and the wedding ring of a change in the
woman's attitude after her husband's departure.
This news item is typical of the kind of story that
must have been an influence in shaping Hemingway's "objec
tive" style or writing with its necessarily implicit rather
49
than explicit approach to conveying meaning in the form of
fiction. His eye for the telling incident, the "real
thing," must have been sharpened by his stay on that paper.
At the least, it must have prepared the ground for the later
development of his literary methods. Fenton says that the
Star story is very similar to the "fragmentary sketches
Hemingway was producing five years later in such work as
'A Very Short Story1 and 'The Revolutionist'" (Fenton,
p. 43). Although Fenton does not elaborate on the news
story except to note the similarity between it and some
later stories and sketches by Hemingway, one cannot help
seeing the "implicit," "suggestive," or "symbolic," approach
to narrative inherent in the objective approach to story
telling much admired on the Kansas City Star of that period.
"Pure objective writing," according to Lionel Calhoun Moise,
a legendary reporter on the Star of that day, "is the' only
g
true form of story-telling." But the point is that "objec
tive writing" demands an implicit, suggestive approach to
fiction if the writer is successfully to convey meaning,
theme, attitude, or feeling.
In 1921 Hemingway began working for the Toronto Star,
and much of his writing for that newspaper reflected his
training on the Kansas City Star. As a foreign correspond
ent for the Toronto Star, he wrote many feature stories that
g
S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1961),
p. 15. Sanderson quotes Calhoun.
50
relied on implication, indirection, suggestion--symbolism of
a kind— to achieve their effectiveness. After writing of a
"strange-acting and strange-looking breed" congregated at
the Cafe Rotonde, for example, Hemingway went on to describe
some of that cafe's customers who had "achieved a sort of
uniformity of eccentricity":
. . . a short, dumpy woman with newly-blond hair cut Old
Dutch Cleanser fashion, a face like pink enameled ham
and fat fingers that reach out of the long blue silk
sleeves of a Chinese-looking smock . . . smoking a ciga
rette in a two-foot holder . . . [and] a big, light
haired woman sitting at a table with three young men.-*-0
One notices first the concreteness with which each character
is presented; each one of the Cafe Rotonde characters is a
particular individual, carefully observed by Hemingway. In
addition, however, the characters obviously stand for the
"scummiest scum" that migrated to Paris from "the scum of
Greenwich Village." The very sharpness of the observed
details helps to make these two characters symbolic of a
type of Bohemian who has "no time to work at anything else"
because he puts in "a full day at the Rotonde." In another
feature story--"Germans Are Doggedly Sullen or Desperate
over the Mark" (Toronto Daily Star, September 1, 1922,
p. 23)--Hemingway summed up the incongruous normality of
^"American Bohemians in Paris a Weird Lot," Toronto
Star Weekly, March 25, 1922, p. 15. Reprinted in Hemingway:
The Wild Years, ed. and with an introd. by Gene Z. Hanrahan
(New York, 1962), pp. 77-79. This collection of articles
written by Hemingway for the Toronto Star is an original
paperback edition published by the Dell Publishing Company.
51
Freiburt Ira Breisgau, a German town, in the following scene:
We saw a girl in a coffee shop eating a breakfast of
ice cream and pretzels, sitting across the table from an
officer in full uniform with an iron cross on his chest,
his flat back even more impressive than his lean white
face, and we saw mothers feeding their rosy-faced child
ren beer out of the big half liter steins.H
Hemingway, in this scene, tried to epitomize the con
trast between Freiburt, where prices were low, and cities
like Berlin, where the prices were high and getting higher
in "spending orgies." The incongruity of the contrast be
tween orgiastic Berlin and seemingly normal Freiburt was
caught in the incongruity of a girl's "eating a breakfast of
ice cream and pretzels" and of "mothers feeding their rosy-
faced children beer"--just the sort of incongruous normality
that a tourist would notice; the "real thing"--the incon
gruous sights just noted--caught perfectly the situation in
Freiburt as Hemingway experienced it. His eye for the tell
ing incident can be seen in still another news story--his
description of a march of Christian refugees from Eastern
Thrace toward Macedonia. After a detailed description of
the march as a whole, Hemingway centered on an incident that
seemed to capture the horror of the retreat of "The Silent,
Ghastly People."
A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labor in
one of the carts to keep off the driving rain. She is
the only person making a sound. Her little daughter
looks at her horror and begins to cry. And the proces-
'^Reprinted in Hemingway: The Wild Years, p. 115.
sion keeps moving on. (Toronto Daily Star, November 3,
1922, p. 10)12
In re-working this scene for the Chapter II sketch of
In Our Time, Hemingway made the child-birth scene the cen
tral image of the short descriptive narrative, the rest of
the details in the picture seemingly a background for that
central incident: "There was a woman having a baby with a
young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared
13
sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation."
In the re-working, the incident became symbolic not only of
the march of the Christian refugees in particular but also
of the horrors of war in general. First, Hemingway empha
sized the figure of the woman having a baby by introducing
that figure with a weak, prefatory "There was. ..." Sec
ond, he emphasized the reactions of the girl holding the
blanket: "Scared sick looking at it." Third, he deluged
the whole scene— not only the central image itself--with a
pervasive rain: "Minarets stuck up in the rain," "mud
flats," "carts through the mud," "the Maritza . . . running
yellow almost up to the bridge," and finally the last sen
tence in the sketch, "It rained all through the evacuation."
Somehow, the rain, providing a kind of depressing unity to
the’whole scene, became symbolic of the horrors of the war.
And in the closely knit, total scene, the central child-
12
Reprinted in The Wild Years, p. 200.
~^In Our Time (New York, 1925), p. 23.
53
birth scene thus acquired, even more than it had in the
original, a kind of symbolic force. This was war; this is
war. In contrasting the original Toronto Star report with
the shorter, more forceful sketch, a sketch that has the
unity of a vivid nightmare, one sees the hand of an artist
at work, emphasizing those details ("the real thing") which
would suggest the writer's intent without the need for overt
commentary.
Influence of Gertrude Stein
Hemingway was still in his teens while a reporter on
the Kansas City Star; and he was in his early twenties while
a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Newspaper
work occupied much of his time as a writer; and it would not
be too farfetched to assume that his work as a newspaperman
influenced his serious writing. The reporter's eye for the
telling detail, the concrete particular, is to some degree
present in his serious work. Besides the influence of
journalism, there were other influences equally difficult to
define. Along with other critics, Fenton makes, for example,
a very strong case for Gertrude Stein as an influence on the
work of Hemingway. And Hemingway himself, as observed in
Chapter I, acknowledged the importance of Gertrude Stein,
particularly the significance of her ideas on the uses of
rhythm and repetition in prose. To buttress the case for a
Steinian influence on Hemingway, Fenton quotes the opening
paragraph of "Up in Michigan":
54
Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he
walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen
door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked
it about his mustache. She liked it about how white his
teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that
he didn't look like a blacksmith. . . .
Commenting on the repetition of the word "liked,"
Fenton says that Hemingway "showed the variety and the sen
sation of her liking" and that he "displayed its immediacy"
(Fenton, p. 153). It seems, however, that the "immediacy"
and "variety" stemmed not merely from the repetition of the
word "liked." Fenton could have also said that the repeti
tion of the word "liked" served to emphasize just what Liz
liked: Jim's way of walking, his mustache, his white teeth.
In short, repetition and rhythm also served to isolate the
"real things" that she liked about Jim. The "real things,"
certainly in this case, were in no way symbolic; but they
were undoubtedly suggestive of just how she felt about Jim;
she felt a strong sexual attraction for a man who did not
"look like a blacksmith." Fenton quotes the passage as an
example of Steinian influence; but repetition is a funda
mental device, and Hemingway had had recourse to it even
before he met Gertrude Stein. In "Our Confidential Vacation
Guide" (Toronto Star Weekly, May 21, 1921), for example,
Hemingway wrote two short ironic descriptions which depend
very much for their effects upon the repetition of key
words:
Beautiful Lake Flyblow nestles like a plague spot in
the heart of the great north woods. All around it rise
the majestic hills. Above it lowers the majestic sky.
55
On every side of it is the majestic shore. The shore is
lined with majestic dead fish--dead of loneliness.
Smiling Lake Wah Wah is always smiling. It is smil
ing at the people who stalk along its shore grim and
unsmiling. ^
In the first paragraph the repetition of "majestic"
served to emphasize not only "hills," "sky," and "shore" but
also the final image of the "dead fish," which seemed to
epitomize Hemingway’s distaste for "Beautiful Lake Flyblow."
The dead fish "symbolized" the vacationers at that resort.
In the second paragraph, the use of "smiling" first as an
adjective and then as a verb emphasizes by contrast the pic
ture of the "grim and unsmiling people." Repetition appears
in both paragraphs, of course, for rather heavily ironic and
obviously humorous effect; but at the same time it was used
also to center effectively on the telling image that con
veyed exactly what Hemingway wanted to say about the two
vacation resorts. Surely Stein influenced Hemingway; but a
reading of Hemingway's pieces for the Toronto Star reveals
that he must have been predisposed to her influence.
Influence of Ezra Pound on
Hemingway's Symbolism
Together with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound was an influ
ence on Hemingway's work. Two of the poems from Three Stor
ies and Ten Poems (Paris, 1923), for example, are reflective
of Pound's ideas on imagism. One poem, "Oklahoma,"
14
Quoted in Hemingway; The Wild Years, p. 38.
56
contrasts the past and the present largely by means of jux
taposed images. The first stanza gives one an idea of
Hemingway1s method:
All the Indians are dead
(A good Indian is a dead Indian)
Or riding in motor cars
(The oil lands, you know, they're all rich)
Smoke smarts in my eyes,
Cotton wood twigs and buffalo dung
Smoke grey in the tepee—
(or is it my myopic trachoma)
"Motor cars" and "oil lands," symbols of modernity, are con
trasted with images symbolic of the past, with "buffalo
dung" and "Smoke grey in the tepee." In the remaining two
stanzas of the poem Hemingway continues to make a concrete
past merge with a concrete presence: "prairies," "moon,"
"ponies," and "grass" are juxtaposed with the image of a
"crop failing" in present-day Oklahoma. In the other poem,
"Along With Youth," Hemingway again uses concrete images to
recreate the past: "A Porcupine skin / Stiff with tanning,"
"Stuffed horned owl," "Pompons," "Piles of old magazines,"
"Drawers of boys letters," and "the canoe that went to
15
pieces on the rock / The year of the big storm." Both
poems reveal that Hemingway used patterns of images to cre
ate his effect, in the first poem a pattern based upon a
juxtaposition of past and present and in the second a
15
The poems I have quoted from are in a pirated edition
of Hemingway's poems. There is no date of publication for
this edition, but the title page reads as follows: Number
One of the Library of Living Poetry, The Collected Poems of
Ernest Hemingway, Originally Published in Paris.
57
pattern based upon a personally meaningful, if seemingly
random, selection of objects. And in both poems the images
in juxtaposition carry much of the burden of meaning. Later
in the short sketches of in our time, Hemingway used a
similar kind of juxtaposition of images in order to achieve
his effects in the medium of prose. An examination of the
poems reveals a relationship between Hemingway's "real
thing" and Pounds's "image."
The relationship, moreover, not only between the "real
thing" and the "image" but also between Pound's ideas in
general and Hemingway’s is worthy of some mention. In an
essay on "Vorticism," for instance, Pound set forth some of
the tenets of the "Imagistic faith": I. "Direct treatment
of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective"; II. "To
use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the pre
sentation" ; III. "As regarding rhythm: to compose in
sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.Hemingway's emphasis on the "real thing," in
both its objective and subjective manifestations, is clearly
adumbrated in tenet I of the Imagistic faith. Tenet II, of
course, is almost descriptive of Hemingway's approach to
writing. As for tenet III, perhaps the Imagists believe
that the musical phrase was a more natural reflection of the
^ F o r t n i g h t l y Review, XCVI (September 1914), 461-471,
reprinted in Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed.
Walter Sutton and Richard Foster (New York, 1963), p. 133.
58
music's inner spirit and direction, whereas the metronome
represented a mechanical imposition of a rhythm adventi
tiously applied. Tenet II, too, can be related to Heming
way's insistence that writing is the result of a personal
assimilation of experience, that original writing emerges
"From things that have happened and from things as they
exist and from all the things that you know and all those
17
you cannot know. ..." If the writing, that is, emerges
from one's own assimilation of experience, it should have a
personal inflection in its style (a "natural" style) and
should be a true and original representation of reality.
The relationship between Pound and Hemingway also in
volved the ways in which the two artists attempted to appre
hend the real world and also to define an emotion. After
having said that the image is the poet's pigment, Pound went
on to explain how he came to write one of his poems: "The
apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet,
black bough." Pound's explanation, in part, of the poem's
origin reads as follows:
. . . that evening as I went home along the Rue Ray-
nouard, I was still trying, and I found suddenly, the
expression. I do not mean I found the words, but there
came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little
splotches of color. It was just that--a "pattern,"
hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with
a "repeat" in it.
17
George Plimpton in Hemingway and His Critics, p. 37.
18
Ezra Pound, "Vorticism" in Modern Criticism: Theory
and Practice, p. 135. "Vorticism" was first published in
Fortnightly Review, XCVI (September 1914), 461-471.
Pound's description of his hitting upon the arrangement of
images--the image being the poet's pigment— seems very simi
lar to Hemingway's description of how he centered on the
"whiteness of the thigh bone" as the important "image," as
the important and distinguishing element, in his reaction to
the goring of the bullfighter Hernandorena. It was the
"clean whiteness of the thigh bone, along with the other
images ("white and dirty" face, "dirtiness of the rented
breeches," and the dirtiness of his "slit underwear"), that
was the essential element in the "pattern" which elicited
Hemingway's reaction. He also noted, one recalls, "the gray
color of Jack Blackburn's skin when he had just come out of
stir"; and it was, to Hemingway, just such things, unnoticed
by the casual observer, that "made emotions." According to
Hemingway, as quoted by George Plimpton, it was these ^'un
noticed things for which he was searching." When one reads,
in the passage from Plimpton’s interview quoted earlier in
this chapter, that the novelist noted things "as a painter
sketches," the relationship between Pound's concept of the
image and Hemingway's concept of the "real thing" seems even
closer. In terms of painting, Pound thought of images as
pigments that an artist arranges in a painting; and the
"whiteness" of Hernandorena's thigh bone and the color of
Blackburn's skin are, in a sense, "pigments" seen as essen
tial elements in an arrangement with other "pigments."
Furthermore, Hemingway, like Pound, related the experience
60
of writing to that of painting. Of his days in Paris
Hemingway said, for example, that he
was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that
made writing simple true sentences far from enough to
make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying
to put in them.
Robert L. Lair suggests the nature of Cezanne's influ
ence upon Hemingway;
The extreme naturalists proved to us that nature is too
diffuse and unqualified for ready aesthetic assimila
tion. Cezanne's landscapes and modeling of figures show
how clearly he knew this . . . his inner sense was always
active, correcting and simplifying. . . .20
Speaking of Cezanne's Boy in the Red Vest, Lair says, "This
simplification in terms of elemental shapes presents for the
alert viewer an experience of the essence which is far more
provocative in terms of insight and emotion" (p. 167). What
Pound tried to do with his search for the "pattern" of
images, and Hemingway with his search for the "real thing,"
was, it seems likely, very similar to what Cezanne, accord
ing to Lair, tried to do with his "inner sense . . . always
active, correcting and simplifying." Hemingway, like
Cezanne and Pound, was searching for an "experience of the
essence"; and, like Cezanne and Pound, he centered on the
"real thing," the "pattern," or the "elemental shape" that,
according to Lair in his comment on Cezanne, would be "far
19
A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), p. 13.
20
"Hemingway and Cezanne; An Indebtedness," Modern
Fiction Studies, VI (Summer 1960), 166.
61
more provocative in terms of insight and emotion," far more
suggestive, it seems, than any exhausting detailing of real
ity would be. With Pound, with Cezanne, and with Hemingway,
the emphasis was not on "objective" reality but on the
artist's true response to that reality. The "image," the
"pattern," the "elemental shape" become suggestive, to the
reader or the viewer, of the artist's response; beyond that
they may become "symbolic" of all human response to given
aspects of reality, symbolic because, if the artist has done
his job well, the resulting work of art would be "valid in a
year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it
purely enough, always" (Death in the Afternoon, p. 2).
Pound's Equations and Hemingway's Dimensions
Pound's 1914 essay on Vorticism, too, can shed light
upon the "fourth and fifth dimensions" of prose which
Hemingway discusses in Green Hills of Africa. To Harry
Levin, Hemingway achieved a kind of third, if not a fourth
or a fifth, dimension by "presenting a succession of
images," thus achieving his "special vividness and fluid-
21
ity " r j i 0 Malcolm Cowley, in his noted New Republic
article previously mentioned, the fourth dimension of time
was related to the presence of rites and rituals in Heming
way's works. To Joseph Warren Beach, the fourth dimension
21
"Observations on the Style of Hemingway," m Heming
way and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York, 1961)
p. 109.
62
in Hemingway could be related to "the recognition that,
within the limits of mortality, it may be possible to real-
22
ize values . . . which cannot be measured by the clock."
And to F. I. Carpenter, Hemingway's fifth dimension was
related to a kind of Bergsonian "perpetual" or "immediate"
23
now. Surely all the critics who have commented on Heming
way's fourth and fifth dimensions of prose have illuminated
certain aspects of what Hemingway was trying to do. No
critic, it seems, has commented on the relevance of Pound's
ideas to Hemingway's search for elusive dimensions in prose;
yet there are striking parallels between Pound's ideas on
"equations" in art and Hemingway's ideas on "dimensions" in
prose.
After having stated that there are "four different
intensities of mathematical expression," Pound specified, in
his essay on Vorticism, just what he meant: "... the
arithmetical, the algebraic, the geometrical, and that of
analytical geometry." First, the arithmetical equation
(3x3 plus 4 x 4 equals 5x5) is equivalent to "ordinary
conversation," "a simple statement of fact." Second, the
2 2
algebraic equation (a plus b ) "is the language of phil
osophy"; the algebraic statement "makes no picture" and
22
"How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen," in Hemingway and
His Critics, p. 243.
23
"Hemingway Achieves the Fifth Dimension," m Heming
way and His Critics, p. 193.
63
"applies to a lot of facts, but it does not grip hold of
Heaven." Third, the geometrical equation does describe a
picture (which has to do with the "ratio between the squares
on the sides of a right-angled triangle and the squares of
the hypotenuse"), but it does not actually "create form."
Fourth, in analytical geometry, which has to do with "the
separation of space by two or by three axes," one is "given
the idiom . . . able actually to create." Having stated
that in analytical geometry, a certain equation "governs
the circle," that it "is not a particular circle, it is any
and all circles," Pound went on to say that "Great works of
art contain this fourth sort of equation," that they "cause
form to come into being." Then, Pound related the "image"
to the equation in the following specific terms:
By the "image" I mean such an equation; not an equation
about mathematics, not something about a, b, and c hav
ing to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, and night,
having to do with mood.^
Pound's description of the ways in which images operated to
create mood seems an apt description of the ways in which
Hemingway used images to create mood. In Hemingway,
24
"Vorticism," m Modern Criticism, pp. 136-137. The
relationship between Pound and Hemingway is even more strik
ingly illustrated when A. E. Hotchner tells of Hemingway's
drawing an analogy between the development of his art and
the various branches of mathematics in order to defend
Across the River and Into the Trees against the attacks of
critics: "In this book I have moved from calculus, having
started with straight math, then moved to geometry, then
algebra; and next time out, it will be trigonometry. If
they don’t understand that, to hell with them." Papa
Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (New York, 1966), p. 69.
64
furthermore, the mood thus created became a function of his
rhetoric of fiction. The mountains, the plain, and the rain
in A Farewell to Arms are cases in point. In the short
story "Hills Like White Elephants," too, one feels the per
vasive presence of the hills informing the narrative. The
relationship between Pound's equations and Hemingway's
dimensions, then, may be that both have to do with certain
precise ways in which images can be used to create specific
moods. Images, which verge on being symbols, may thus have
something to do with Hemingway's fourth and fifth dimensions
in prose.
That an equation in analytical geometry (and such an
equation, according to Pound, is like the image in art) is
both a "particular circle" and also "any and all circles"
would seem to relate both the equations and the image to the
symbol; for a circle which stands for "any and all circles"
is obviously symbolic of circles in general. That the equa
tion, in terms of art, has to do with images in their re
lationship to "mood" is also suggestive of Hemingway's use
of the physical environment to create an enveloping emo
tional context within which the characters of his fiction
act. Of the relationship between physical environment and
characters in the fiction of Hemingway, Lillian Ross, in her
famous New Yorker article, relates an intriguing and telling
incident. Hemingway, while visiting the Metropolitan Museum
in New York, commented on a painting by Francesco Francia,
65
"Portrait of Federigo Gonzaga, 1 1 showing a "small boy with
long hair" against a landscape. Hemingway pointed to the
trees in the background of the painting, saying "This is
what we try to do when we write. . . . We always have this
25
in when we write.” Hemingway was interested, that is, in
the landscape, the physical environment, which like the
earth or like the Gulf stream will endure long after this
generation has passed on. Carpenter's allusion to the fifth
dimension as being a sense of the "perpetual now" is sug
gestive; perhaps Hemingway achieved that "perpetual now" by
placing mortal beings against a background of an enduring
physical world. The "now" (people) coexists with the
"always" (the landscape); and characters dressed in the
evanescent fashion of the times are seen against the un
changing landscape, for example, of Italy, of Spain, or of
France. Hemingway achieved, in addition to a sense of the
"perpetual now," an awareness of the fragile mortality of
man seen against the solidity of an enduring landscape.
Hemingway's juxtaposition of man and landscape is similar to
Pound's, and Hemingway's, arrangement of images to create
mood; used symbolically that juxtaposition helped to create
a more precise kind of mood.
Indeed, recurrent references to the earth and to
natural phenomena may have helped to form a kind of sub-
25
"How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen," in Hemingway: A
Collection of Critical Essays, p. 35.
66
structure of symbolism in the novels of Hemingway. It is
possible, for example, that rain in A Farewell to Arms
helped to create both mood (Pound's 1 1 sea, cliff, and night
having to do with mood") and associated meaning, which, of
course, is comprehended by that mood. It is possible, too,
that landscape, symbolic of an enduring earth, is a part of
the sub-structure of symbolism in The Sun Also Rises, and
that weather and landscape enter into the creation of mean
ing in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Other Possible Influences
Before proceeding to an examination of In Our Time, one
should be aware of other influences at work in the formation
of Hemingway's kind of symbolism. In addition to the
Imagist's image, Earl Rovit, for example, mentions Joyce's
"epiphany," Eliot's "objective correlative," and Mann's
2 6
Leit Motif as being related to Hemingway's "real thing."
Certainly Eliot's idea of the "objective correlative" bears
a definite similarity to Hemingway's idea of the "real
thing . . . that made the emotion" and to Pound's idea of a
pattern of images:
. . . a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,
such that when the external facts, which must terminate
in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immedi
ately evoked. 7
2 ^
Hemingway (New York, 1961), pp. 44-45.
27
T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," The Sacred
Wood (London, 1920), p. 100.
67
Unlike Eliot's influence on Hemingway, Mann's influence is
more difficult to define; he was, certainly, part of the
cultural ambience that must have exerted its influence upon
many young writers of the time.
One has, however, to do more than discuss the possibil
ity of influences; one has to discuss what Hemingway did
with the "real thing" once he felt himself capable of cap
turing that elusive quarry. In short, Hemingway’s "real
thing," as it functioned as an element of his strategy,
almost necessarily had to become "symbolic." The "real
thing" then served not only to evoke genuine emotion but
also to create and to support meaning within the context of
Hemingway's fiction.
Symbolism and In Our Time
Since In Our Time is not a novel in the ordinary sense,
this dissertation will deal with it only briefly. Even a
brief examination of the work will, however, illuminate the
nature of Hemingway's symbolism. On a cursory reading, In
Our Time seems, simply, to be a collection of fourteen
short stories, each prefaced by a short vignette. E. M.
Halliday has said that In Our Time reflects the "theme of
chaotic irony in modern life" and that it would be "futile"
to search for connections between the chapters (the short
prefatory vignettes taken from the earlier in our time) and
68
28
the stories; the structure thus mirrors the disorder of
modern life. To an extent, this may be true, but there are,
in addition to the seeming disorder, elements that serve to
unify the stories into a sort of coherent whole. First, of
course, the subject matter, much of it dealing with vio
lence, death, and aborted love, provides a tenuous coher-
29
ence. Second, however, a sort of recurrent symbolism pro
vides a kind of unity. For example, "On the Quai at Smyrna,"
serving as an introduction to In Our Time, is filled with
images of a violent world: "women with dead babies"; "nice
things floating around in the harbor"; "mules with their
30
forelegs broken pushed over into shallow water." The
image of dead babies, of mutilation, carries over into the
first story, "Indian Camp," which tells of a young Indian
who slits his throat because he cannot stand the torture his
wife is going through in giving birth.
2 8
"Hemingway's In Our Time," Explieator, VII (March
1949), item 35.
29
See Phillip Young, "Hemingway's In Our Time," Expli-
cator, X (April 1952), item 43. Young, refuting Halliday,
says that violence, not disorder or chaos, is the subject
matter of In Our Time. Perhaps both critics are correct,
for violence, in a sense, suggests disorder.
30
In Our Time (New York, 1925).
69
The Road, the Wall, and the Bullfight
In themselves the vignettes of In Our Time seem to be
merely short, vivid prose depictions of actions and scenes.
The vignettes prefacing the first six stories, in fact, are
unified by recurrent "symbols." The first two vignettes,
for example, involve a kind of "road" or procession symbol
ism. The symbol that comes to mind immediately is that of
the "road of life," but the road Hemingway here describes is
a depressing one that he associates with violence, death,
and meaninglessness. In the first vignette, the "whole bat
tery was drunk going along the road in the dark," and it was
"funny going along the road" (p. 13). In the second
vignette Hemingway describes the retreat of the Christian
population of Thrace to Macedonia: "carts . . . jammed for
thirty miles," "Old men and women, soaked through," "a woman
having a baby with a young girl holding a blanket over her."
This "road of life," like the other dark road in the first
vignette, mirrors a depressing and disillusioned view of
existence.
The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh vignettes
contain a sort of symbolic "wall," not a protective wall but
one which is a kind of barrier to human endeavors. The
third vignette, for example, deals with the death of a
German soldier as he tries to climb over a wall in a garden
in Mons: "He had so much equipment on and looked awfully
surprised and fell down into the Garden." The fourth
70
vignette describes a kind of wall, "an absolutely perfect
barricade" which British soldiers have "jammed" across a
bridge: the Germans "tried to get over it," and the British
"potted them from forty yards" (p. 44). In the fifth
vignette six cabinet ministers are shot "against the wall of
a hospital." In addition to the central image of the wall,
there are, in the fifth vignette, other images which, taken
together, become expressive of a moribund world: "Pools of
water," "wet dead leaves," "shutters of the hospital . . .
nailed shut," "One of the ministers . . . sick with typhoid"
(p. 64). In the sixth vignette Nick Adams, wounded, "sat
against the wall of the church where they had dragged him
to be clear of machine gun fire in the street" (p. 82); here
Nick tells Rinaldi, a comrade in arms, "You and me have
signed a separate peace." The wall, in this vignette, is
certainly protective, but this symbolic wall, too, is
associated with death: "Two Austrian dead . . . in the
rubble"; "Stretcher bearers" who "would be along any time
now"; "others dead up the street"; Nick himself "hit in the
spine." The seventh vignette involves a kind of wall, the
earth itself. During a bombardment Nick Adams "lay very
flat" against it "and sweated and prayed." This "wall," to
which he is pinned, like an insect transfixed and helpless,
is again obviously associated with death or at least its
.. . . . 31
possibility.
31
See Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American
71
Of the remaining vignettes, the eighth, seemingly a
transitional vignette, has to do with two Hungarians who are
shot by two policemen, Drevitts and Boyle: "They're crooks,
ain't they. . . . They’re wops, ain't they? Who the hell is
going to make any trouble." The eighth vignette is notable
because it comes close to making an explicit comment on the
violence and moral anarchy of a dislocated world. Hemingway
has Boyle say, "Wops . . . I can tell wops a mile off."
With the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth
vignettes, which deal with the bullfight, Hemingway shifts
his focus from a view of the morally dislocated world of the
eighth vignette; in centering on the bullfight, he suggests
the possibility of order in a disordered world. Although
the thirteenth vignette is only indirectly about the bull
fight, it is important in that it describes the kind of man
that can make order out of chaos. This vignette describes
the bullfighter Maera, together with the narrator, watching
a festival procession in which another bullfighter, Luis, is
dancing, drunk and oblivious to entreaties that he quit the
procession. Apart from the procession, the dedicated bull
fighter Maera seems symbolic of the skill and courage neces
sary to achieve order and meaning. This vignette recalls
the road symbolism of the first two vignettes, particularly
Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York, 1965), pp. 91-92.
Hoffman comments briefly on the wall and rain symbolism in
In Our Time.
72
of the first one describing an army unit in which everyone
is drunk, "going along the road in the dark." But in the
thirteenth vignette, the main figure is not in the proces
sion. Symbolically, he does not participate in the world's
disorder; he is thus in the best position to achieve meaning
and order.
As a whole, the bullfight vignettes seem to be symbolic
of a violent world, but with a difference. Instead of a
wall that symbolizes an obstacle to man's endeavors, there
is now the symbol of the encircling arena that contains the
world's violence within limits; and within these limits the
bullfighter does what he can to deal with that violence and
the imminence of death. The symbol of the wall mirrored the
futility of men's endeavors; the symbol of the bullfight
mirrored an attempt to give purpose to a violent world by
containing and ordering that violence through ritual, skill,
and courage. In short, there is a kind of progression of
thought and attitude reflected in the whole of the fourteen
short vignettes, and that progression is reflected in
Hemingway's symbols.
In addition to the road, wall, and bullfight symbols,
there is yet another symbol used to unify the separate
vignettes into a semblance of unity: rain. Rain drenches
the Christian refugees in retreat from Adrianople; and rain
falls upon the six cabinet ministers shot against the hospi
tal wall. Rain is an important symbol, too, in the story
73
"Cat in the Rain." The fairly consistent use of symbolism
to unite the vignettes into a coherent whole becomes a spe
cies of symbolic sub-structure that supports Hemingway's
vision of a world in violent dislocation and of uncertain
and shifting values. Brilliant delineations of brief scenes
and incidents, the vignettes reflect Hemingway's view of the
human condition.
The Fifth Vignette of In Our Time
Viewed separately each vignette is a masterpiece of
selection and emphasis; it is the process of selection and
emphasis, indeed, which helps to create symbols inhering in
each vignette. A case in point is the fifth vignette, in
volving an execution of six cabinet ministers. With a
painter's eye Hemingway here selects the details which coa
lesce to achieve a powerfully intense view of a moribund
world, a world in which pity and a sense of humanity seem
lost in moral anarchy and in social dislocation; the
vignette is specifically a comment on war and generally a
comment on the human condition. The subject of the vignette,
of course, is the death of six cabinet ministers; and each
detail selected helps to comment upon these deaths. First,
the fact that they are shot against the wall of a hospital,
an institution one usually associates with healing rather
than with death, is a subtly ironic comment on the amoral
violence of our modern world. Second, the "pools of water,"
in context with the other images, could suggest stagnation
74
and, by association, death. Third, the image of the shut
ters of the hospital being nailed shut reinforces the idea
that that institution has "closed its eyes" to suffering and
death. Fourth, the dead leaves on the paving of the court
yard are obviously symbolically related to the deaths of the
ministers which, in turn, are symbolic of death and violence
in the world at large. Finally, the image of the minister
sick with typhoid and "sitting down in the water with his
head on his knees" when "they fired the first volley" seems
symbolic of the world's moral disorder; for he is seated
before the wall of an institution which is supposed to min
ister to the sick. Hemingway does not comment explicitly on
the deaths of the ministers; he has no need to do so.
Singly the details may not be meaningful; but arranged in a
"pattern" (Pound's "pattern" of images in poetry), they cre
ate the impression Hemingway wishes to achieve. And because
they are selected and arranged for that "pattern" supporting
Hemingway's intent, each detail itself begins to assume sym
bolic dimensions in relation to that intent. Taken together,
certainly, the wall, the shuttered windows, the pools of
water, the dead leaves, and the rain create an impression
compounded of futility and death.
The vignette, actually, brings to mind Pound's "pat
tern" of images selected to create a particular mood; the
vignette, of course, goes beyond the mere creation of mood.
The pattern of images, verging on symbols, creates both mood
75
and meaning. Hemingway, surely, has here captured the "real
things" that help to communicate both meaning and the mood
that envelopes that meaning. Frederick J. Hoffman has com
mented on the "sparse symbolism" in In Our Time (p. 91).
The symbolism may be sparse, but it is absolutely essential,
in many of the vignettes, to the communication of meaning.
Hemingway's "sparse" prose style, in fact, makes it neces
sary that each detail selected carry the maximum weight of
meaning? thus the details begin to verge on symbolism.
Hemingway is neither a realist nor a naturalist in the sense
that he accumulates details only to create the illusion of
the actual. Rather he selects details first to create
genuine emotion and second to express his vision of life.
In the process details or images tend to become symbolic.
Relationship Between the Stories and the
Vignettes
The vignettes of In Our Time (1925) were the chapters
of the earlier in our time (1924). In Our Time consists of
fourteen stories alternating with the vignettes taken from
in our time. Hemingway is fairly specific about the rela
tionship between the vignettes and the stories. Hemingway
comments as follows:
Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter of In Our
Time [the earlier in our time] between each story--to
give the picture of the whole before examining it in
detail. Like looking with your eyes at something, say a
passing coast line, and then looking at it with 15X
76
binoculars. Or rather, maybe, looking at it and then go
ing in and living in it--and then coming out and looking
at it again.^2
The vignettes were to create, then, a unified picture of the
world; and the stories were to provide a more personal expe
rience of it, a more detailed examination of portions of
that very same world. Many of the stories have to do with
the difficulties involved in trying to live in a world
represented by the vignettes; and, as with the vignettes,
much of the meaning in the stories is conveyed by a judi
cious use of symbols.
Of the fourteen stories, the first five and the four
teenth deal with Nick Adams, a character whose background is
in many ways similar to Hemingway's. The first five stories
are about Nick's growing awareness of the facts of life. In
the first story, "Indian Camp," Nick confronts the fact of
death and suffering in the form of an Indian woman suffering
through a Caesarian childbirth and in the form, also, of the
woman's husband, who kills himself by slitting his throat
because he cannot stand his wife's agony. The doctor,
Nick's father, seems to symbolize a sort of professional
detachment from the reality of human suffering, whereas the
husband represented the other extreme of complete involvement
in suffering. Nick, who is still young enough to call his
father "Daddy," observes the contrasting reactions to the
3 2
Shores of Light (New York, 1952), p. 23.
77
fact of suffering; but he reaches a conclusion that, of
course, Hemingway intends to be ironic. Nick, though he has
just witnessed the fact of death, cannot yet reconcile him
self to mortality: "In the early morning on the lake sit
ting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he
felt quite sure that he would never die" (p. 21). Meaning
fully, childbirth becomes symbolic of death not only in this
first story of In Our Time but also in "On the Quai Smyrna,"
the introduction to the work, and in the following vignette
about the retreat of the Christian population during the war
between the Greeks and the Turks. Childbirth becomes sym
bolic of death because, simply, in two juxtaposed stories
and a vignette it is associated with death. Childbirth is
an apt symbol for death, it seems, because the world is a
place where death, violence, and moral anarchy prevail; and
in being born into such a world, one is born into death,
violence, and moral anarchy. Nick's fresh awareness of
childbirth and death are juxtaposed, too, with that of the
experienced observer 1s awareness in the introduction and in
the second vignette. Thus the vignettes and the stories are
held together by both theme and symbol, the theme of death
and violence and the symbol of childbirth.
The fourth story, "The End of Something," describes the
termination of an affair between Nick and Marjorie; and at
the very beginning Hemingway presents the reader with a
landscape symbolic of the end of that affair--that of
78
Horton's Bay, a deserted lumber town: "Ten years later
there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white
limestone of its foundation. ..." {p. 36). In "The Three
Day Blow," one learns just why Nick has ended his affair
with Marjorie, and one learns, too, of Nick's growing aware
ness of the complexities of life. Marjorie, it seems, is
not a member of Nick’s class, whatever that may be. Bill,
Nick's friend, comments on the end of the affair in the
following terms: "You can't mix oil and water and you can't
mix that sort of thing any more than if I'd marry Ida that
works for the Strattons" (p. 57). It is interesting to note
that the two vignettes flanking this story contain "wall"
symbols (the garden wall and the "absolutely perfect barri
cade"), for it seems that, in this instance, at any rate,
social differences have acted as barriers to Nick's continu
ing his affair with Marjorie; he likes Marjorie very much,
and he feels very bad about having ended the affair.
Throughout the "Three Day Blow," Nick and Bill drink whiskey,
and their drinking seems to stand for a sort of adolescent
attempt at sophisticated maturity; to the soldiers going
into battle in the first vignette, however, drinking is an
opiate, an anodyne, that, perhaps, makes the world a more
bearable place. In both story and vignette becoming drunk
thus serves both as a comment on the world and as an indica
tion of the contrast between adolescents who really know
very little of the world and soldiers who have seen too much
79
of the world's violence. The symbolic ritual of becoming
drunk serves, furthermore, to relate the world of the
vignettes with the world of the stories.
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"
Nick’s introduction to the world of violence takes
place in the fifth story, "The Battler," which has already
been commented upon. It is, appropriately, in this last of
the first group of stories having to do with Nick Adams
that the initiation takes place, and Nick's symbolic gesture
of pocketing the sandwich stands for the acceptance of his
encounter with the former boxing champion and his companion,
Bugs. An earlier story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,"
is really a key story because it reveals that Hemingway is
concerned not only with a truthful depiction of the world's
violence and moral dislocation but also with an individual's
search for truth in just such a world; Hemingway here re
veals his moral concern as explicitly as his implicit method
3 3
of storytelling would permit. The story is about Nick's
father who gets Dick Boulton, an Indian halfbreed, to cut
33
See Aerol Arnold, "Hemingway's 'The Doctor and the
Doctor's Wife,'" Explicator, XVIII (March 1960), item 36.
Arnold says that the "central idea of the story is that a
man must face the truth and tell it." I think that he is
closer to the real "theme" of the story than is Carlos Baker,
who thinks the story has to do with the theme of "fathers
and sons" (see Baker's Hemingway, pp. 133-134), or Phillip
Young, who believes the story deals with the "solidarity of
the male sex" (see Young's Hemingway, New York, 1952).
80
some logs that have drifted onto the shore of the lake.
Sometimes, evidently, lumbermen come for the logs, but some
times they do not bother to do so. Nick's father assumes
that they will not. Dick, however, points out that Doc in a
sense had really stolen the lumber. Dick's accusation,
apparently, is motivated by an attempt to get out of work by
provoking an argument with the Doctor; Dick had, it seems,
agreed to cut the logs to pay off a medical debt. In a way,
moreover, Dick is himself a "thief," for he has "stolen" the
services of the doctor; and the moral complexities of the
world are here seen in microcosm, as one "thief" points out
the "truth" to another "thief." If "The Battler" deals with
an initiation into an irrationally violent world, "The Doc
tor and the Doctor's Wife" deals with an initiation into a
morally ambiguous one.
Like the other stories and vignettes in In Our Time,
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is unobtrusively rich in
symbols. The driftwood lumber itself is an apt symbol for
the kind of truth so elusively difficult to locate in our
time; the lumber that drifts from place to place on the lake
and finally onto shore is symbolic of the truth that seems
to shift from place to place depending upon one’s point of
view. The room with the blinds drawn, the room in which his
wife lies, seems to symbolize the wife's complete isolation
from the moral complexities of the world; a Christian Scien
tist, she cannot believe that Dick Boulton would deliber-
ately provoke the Doctor in order to avoid working off his
debt: "1 Dear I don't think, I really don't think that any
one would really do a thing like that'" (p. 30). But the
point is, of course, that in a real world, the world which
Hemingway inhabits and into which Nick is maturing, people
are quite capable of doing what Dick, quite evidently, has
done. The room with the blinds drawn is, then, an apt sym
bol for the wife's total inability even to initiate a search
for the truth; she lies in darkness. The Doctor, who lives
in the world, is made uneasy by the truth; but he seeks to
avoid the world's moral complexities by going off to hunt in
the hemlock woods; the hemlock woods thus become a symbol
for the ways in which a man can avoid the moral ambiguities
of life--escape from the uneasiness which arises from a con
frontation with the apparently unambiguous truth that seems
occasionally to emerge from life's moral ambiguities. But
the hemlock woods represent an escape that is of the world,
not apart from it as is the wife's "escape"; and when Nick
tells his father "I want to go with you," he is in a sense
saying symbolically that he is beginning to accept the world
as it is, together with the concomitant necessity to search
for the truth as well as the necessity to rest from that
search every now and then. Three major symbols thus help to
give effectiveness to the story: the lumber, the darkened
room, and the woods. Without these symbols the story would
lose much of its force.
82
Hemingway's Early Symbolism: A Summary
Other stories in In Our Time also, of course, contain
symbols that work closely with all the other elements of
Hemingway's rhetoric of fiction to sustain meaning. John
Hagopian, for example, interprets "Cat in the Rain" as a
story rich in symbols; and he is fairly persuasive in doing
34
so. It would be impossible, given the limitations of
this dissertation, to analyze each story adequately. One
purpose of this chapter has been to show that Hemingway
early in his career relied on symbolism to convey meaning.
The symbolism Hemingway utilized demanded a rigorous process
of selection and emphasis to achieve effectiveness. And the
symbols, of course, worked closely with other elements of
his rhetoric to convey the sort of meaning fiction can con
vey; Hemingway's symbols are always related to the meaning
or meanings he wanted to convey.
Another purpose of this chapter has been to trace the
development of Hemingway’s symbolic method. This chapter
has discussed the process by which the "real thing" evolved
into the symbol. It has discussed the influences that may
have affected Hemingway's use of the symbolic method. And
with In Our Time, it has analyzed briefly the ways in which
Hemingway used symbolism early in his writing career. In
Our Time, for instance, revealed that Hemingway used symbols
34
"Symmetry in 'Cat in the Rain,'" College English,
XXIV (December 1962), 220-222.
at specific places in his stories to illumine particular
points in the development of the meaning or meanings inher
ing in his stories; it also revealed how Hemingway used
recurring symbols to unify his vignettes and stories and to
inform them with his peculiar view of the world. Moreover,
both uses of the symbols can be found incorporated into a
kind of symbolic sub-structure.
CHAPTER III
SYMBOL AND RHETORIC IN
THE SUN ALSO RISES
In order to understand how symbols function, one has
first to realize the meaning or meanings embodied in a par
ticular work of fiction. One has, really, to understand the
author's plot, for plot comprehends meaning. Plot involves
an arrangement of the elements of fiction to support mean
ing; and since the symbol is a fictional element, one has
certainly to understand the meaning or meanings that inhere
in a work of fiction before one can begin to understand just
how its symbols help to sustain that meaning. To understand
the nature of Hemingway's symbols in The Sun Also Rises, one
must thus posit a meaning, a theme, which is basic to its
plot. Many critics have commented, of course, on the mean
ing of The Sun Also Rises; and it will be useful to recall
some of the meanings that they have seen in that novel.
To Mark Spilka, the theme of the novel concerns the
"death of love"; and in keeping with his view of the theme,
the characters in that novel assume their proper symbolic
meanings. Jake and Brett become "two lovers desexed by war";
Robert Cohn stands for the "false knight who challenges
84
85
their despair"; and Pedro Romero, the bullfighter, symbol
izes the "good life which will survive their failure.""*"
Once he has decided upon his view of the novel's theme,
Spilka is almost forced to choose appropriately symbolic
roles for the main characters of the book. Other critics,
too, have had to metamorphose the characters into symbols
reflective of their views as to what the novel means. Thus
to Richard P. Adams, the novel's meaning arises from its
mythic structural principle, the myth of the Fisher King;
and to Adams, accordingly, Brett embodies the "pagan fertil
ity myth," Pedro Romero stands for "primitive unspoiled
virility," and Robert Cohn becomes the "grail knight" and
Mike Campbell the "unworthy knight." Accordingly, also, the
2
San Fermin Festival becomes a ritual of purgation. To
Robert 0. Stephens, the novel's meaning involves a "basic
conflict between the Robert Cohn complex of values and that
of Jake Barnes"; Cohn stands for Don Quixote and Jake for
3
Sancho Panza. To Paul B. Newman, The Sun Also Rises em
bodies a kind of "Grail Quest" in which Jake is a character
^""The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises" in Heming
way: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), p. 127. Reprinted from
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro
(Detroit, 1958).
2
See "Sunrise Out of the Waste Land," Tulane Studies in
English, IX (1959), 119-131.
3
"Hemingway's Don Quixote in Pamplona," College English,
XXIII (December 1961), 216-218.
86
who searches for "unity of being" and in which all the
characters of the novel's first book have "been wounded in
one way or another," their scars being "symbols of a pro
gression toward a passive state of mind in which the unity
4
of thought and passion has been lost." Appropriately, too,
Newman finds "phallic symbols of the Grail and Spear" in the
novel. Only by analyzing the story and plot can one begin
to understand the novel's meaning or meanings and thus to
understand its symbols.
The "Story" of The Sun Also Rises
The "story" of The Sun Also Rises is simple. Jake
Barnes, a newspaperman in Paris, is in love with Lady Brett
Ashley. Robert Cohn, a writer, falls in love with Brett and
has a brief affair with her. After some scenes in Paris,
Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, and
Mike Campbell, Brett's fiance, go to Pamplona for the San
Fermin Festival and for the bullfights; on the way, Bill and
Jake stop off at Burguete in the Pyrenees for some trout
fishing. At Pamplona, Brett falls in love with Pedro Romero,
a bullfighter; and Cohn, whom Mike Campbell dislikes in
tensely, beats up first Jake and then Pedro Romero. Brett
runs off with the nineteen-year-old Romero but later termi
nates the affair; and Jake goes to Madrid to comfort her.
4
"Hemingway's Grail Quest," University of Kansas City
Review, XXVIII (Summer, 1962), p. 297.
87
The "story" seems to consist of a rather casual relation of
events; and one cannot explain the impact of the novel on
the basis of "story" alone. The plot, however, does help to
explain the impact of the novel; for the plot comprehends
characters, point of view, and an arrangement of events to
produce an effect or to sustain a theme or a set of themes.
"Events" include not only scenes and actions but also
thoughts, internal, monologues, descriptions, sections of
dialogue, and, of course symbols. In order to understand
plot (and eventually the symbols functioning within the
plot) one must have a clear idea of its various aspects:
theme or meaning, employment of characters, and an arrange
ment of events. The relevance of point of view to plot and
symbolism will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
The Plot: Theme as Aspect of Plot
In proposing another meaning for The Sun Also Rises,
one runs the risk of being superfluous. Certainly one has
to justify one's proposal; and the justification must neces
sarily involve an analysis of its plot. However, even
before one embarks upon just such an analysis, he can point
to several passages in the novel to support his statement of
the novel's meaning. There are, in this respect, several
passages in The Sun Also Rises that are worthy of note, and
four of them have to do with the question of values in life.
In Chapter VII of Book I, for example, a Count Mippipopolous
tells Brett and Jake the secret of his ability to enjoy
88
everything so well: "That is the secret. You must get to
5
know the values." In Chapter XIV Jake thinks about his
relationship with women in general and with Brett in par
ticular; "I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the
woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or
punishment. Just exchange of values" (p. 148). And in
Chapter XV of Book II, Jake thinks about the effect of the
San Fermin Festival on the peasants who came into town to
celebrate it:
They had come in so recently from the plains and the
hills, that it was necessary that they make their shift
ing in values gradually. . . . Money still had a defi
nite value in hours worked and bushels of grain sold.
Late in the fiesta it would not matter what they paid,
nor where they bought. (p. 15 2)
The evidence of these passages would tend to support the
idea that Hemingway is concerned about values, about a
search for values, about a search, perhaps, for order,
direction, or meaning in life. In the interior monologue
dealing with his relationship with Brett, Jake Barnes, the
main character, indicates that he has been involved in just
a search: "The world is a good place to buy in. It seemed
like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will
seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've
had." Jake continues to think in the following vein:
Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I
did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to
5
The Sun Also Rises (New York, 1925), p. 60.
89
know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how
to live in it you learned from that what it was all
about. (p. 148)
Clearly, Jake is in search for direction and meaning in
life; and the fact that the narrative is in the first person
makes that search immediately and poignantly felt by the
reader. E. M. Halliday says that the first-person method of
narration in The Sun Also Rises is effective because it
"implements and reinforces the theme" of the novel by pro
ducing "an effect of singularity," the theme being that of
the "moral atrophy" reflected in Jake's emotional isola-
tion. Certainly, the first-person point of view supports
the communication of the idea that Jake has progressed to a
kind of emotional isolation; in the last book of the novel,
he has, in effect, separated himself from his friends. But,
in reality, that isolation represents progress of sorts in
his search for meaning; for it reflects the fact that Jake
has cut himself off from the Bohemians of Paris's "lost
generation" who have no values by which to guide themselves.
Point of view thus supports Jake's search for values.
The hypothesis is that the theme of The Sun Also Rises
embodies a search for the meaningful as opposed to the mean
ingless life. That the contrast between the meaningful and
the meaningless is a central concern of The Sun Also Rises
can be seen in the two quotations which preface the novel:
^"Hemingway's Narrative Perspective," Sewanee Review,
LX (Spring 1952), 203-204.
90
"You are all a lost generation" (Gertrude Stein in conversa
tion) and "One generation passeth away, and another genera
tion cometh; but the earth abideth forever" (Ecclesiastes).
The "lost generation," of course, stands for the meaningless
life and the abiding earth, then, for the meaningful life.
That search for the meaningful life is given dramatic
force by sets of contrarieties that inform the novel and
govern the arrangement of events: sanity versus vanity,
order versus disorder, the enduring versus the temporal, the
truth versus the kind of lie which, according to Conrad's
Marlow in The Heart of Darkness, is tainted with mortality.
According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway wrote in 1926 that The
Sun Also Rises is "not meant to be a hollow satire, but a
7
damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero."
Now the important point about the earth is that it "abides";
and perhaps one can take the earth to be symbolic of the
abiding qualities other than its durable materiality; the
truth, which unlike the "lie" is not tainted by mortality;
order, which of its very nature is the "normal" and abiding
relationship of people and things; and the meaning of life
itself, which is "abiding" because it derives its meaning in
relation to standards which are not temporal. Truth, beauty,
and the meaningful life are related to each other in that
7
Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Prince
ton, 1952), p. 81. Baker quotes in part from a letter writ
ten by Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins.
91
they, like the earth itself, will endure when all the eva
nescent vanities of any particular segment of society are
forgotten. The earth, indeed, is like the Gulf Stream
Hemingway describes in Green Hills of Africa:
. . . those that have always lived in it are permanent
and of value because that stream will flow, as it has
flowed after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the
British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans
and all the systems of governments, and the richness,
the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venal
ity and the cruelty are all gone. . . .8
In short, those who associate themselves with the earth find
permanence, value, and, by implication, a meaningful life.
But how does Hemingway embody the contrast between the
two kinds of life, the meaningless and the meaningful? He
certainly does not write a series of extended essays
explicitly stating his views. Rather, he employs all the
elements of his rhetoric of fiction to embody that contrast
which gives so much force to Jake's search for the meaning
ful life. And of course a subtle species of symbolism is an
element of that rhetoric which helps to make the contrast
immediately felt and effective. And of course, too, symbols
having to do with the earth itself will form a part of the
substructure of symbolism standing for the meaningful life
as opposed to the meaningless life.
®(New York, 1935), pp. 149-150.
92
The Plot: Meaningful Characters
as Aspects of Plot
Supplying a context in which the search for meaning
takes place, many characters of the novel are deracinated
individuals who, for the most part, have "liberated" them
selves from traditional codes of conduct- Robert Cohn is a
dilettante writer and a one-time editor of a "little" maga
zine in Carmel and in Provincetown. Lady Brett Ashley is a
near-nymphomaniac and drunk who, in the course of the novel,
beds with three men. Mike Campbell, Brett's fiance, is also
a drunk. Only Jake Barnes, it seems, has an intimation that
life is more than a frantic search for the fleeting plea-
9
sures of drink and sex. And the plot of the novel focuses
on Jake's groping toward a meaningful existence. The plot
of the novel is arranged to give force to that search; it is
arranged to juxtapose the sets of contrarieties previously
noted. The juxtaposition of events sharpens the dramatic
conflict informing the novel and gives impetus to Jake's
groping toward discipline, order, and the kind of beauty
which, according to Keats, is synonymous with truth.
Most of the characters are rootless individuals; they
are, in addition, apparently symbolic of the meaningless
9
S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway {New York, 1961),
p. 44. Sanderson indicates that the "focus of character" is
on Jake; "But Jake has been able to find some sort of way
of coping with his sickness, in contrast to such other sick
characters as Brett Ashley and Mike. He is by no means
cured, but he is curing himself, holding on to sanity in
quiet desperation."
93
life which supplies the context in which Jake's search takes
place. It should be noted, too, that the symbolic aspects
of the characters are made doubly effective in an effective
manner. Many of them, really do not conform to the stereo
types one has of the groups to which they belong. One
does not, for example, think of an English lady as being a
nymphomaniac and a drunk. Robert Cohn "was a nice boy, a
friendly boy, and very shy" (p. 4), but the stereotype of
the Jew is that of an overly aggressive individual. Mike
Campbell is a spendthrift bankrupt and an irresponsible
individual, hardly one who conforms to the stereotype many
people have of the dour and thrifty Scotsman. A Count
Mippipopolous, whom one meets in Book I of the novel, wears
an "elk's tooth on his watch-chain" (p. 28), and conforms
hardly at all to one's concept of nobility. Romero, the
bullfighter, by his own admission, is not the "typical bull
fighter" ; he speaks English, which he has learned as a
waiter on Gibraltar, and bullfighters are not supposed to
speak English. Two newspapermen whom one meets only briefly
in Chapter V of Book I have the souls of suburbanites,
hardly the picture one cherishes of the adventurous foreign
^See James Schroeter, "Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises,"
Explicator, XX (November 1961), item 28. Schroeter comments
on Hemingway’s "consistent combination of opposites within
a given character . . . in such a way as to violently oppose
the stereotype." But Schroeter does not relate this tech
nique to the novel's central concern— a search for meaning
in a chaotic world.
94
correspondent. The contrast between the real human being
and the stereotype is effective because it serves to under
line one of the central concerns of the novel, that of show
ing that the old ways of viewing the world, the values of
another era, are now invalid. By showing dramatically that
stereotypes, which by definition imply widely held, even if
erroneous, views of people, events, and ideas, are invalid,
Hemingway seems to comment on a world in which all the old
ways of thinking, all the old values, are possibly inopera
tive. As symbols, the characters are thus doubly effective
elements in the rhetoric of Hemingway's fiction. They sym
bolize the meaningless life from which Jake tries to free
himself. They also symbolize the "shifting of values" which
occurred not only with the peasants at the San Fermin Festi
val but also with the members of the "lost generation."
Plot: Symbolism and the Arrangement of Events
The novel is divided into three sections. Book I deals
with the meaningless sort of life led by the "Wastelanders"
(Carlos Baker's term) in Paris. In Book II. the two kinds of
lives, the meaningful and the meaningless, come into dra
matic conflict; there is in this book a complex juxtaposi
tion of events and characters which dramatizes that con
flict. In Book III, a resolution of the novel's thematic
and "story" conflict brings the novel to a close.
In a scene symbolic of the theme of Book I, a prosti
tute whom Jake picks up at the terrace of the Napolitain,
95
says, "Everybody's sick. I'm sick too" (p. 16). Jake is
also "sick"; he has been wounded in the war so that he is
incapable of sexual intercourse, although he still feels
desire and retains all his masculinity. Jake's wound, like
the image of the wall in In Our Time, seems symbolic not
only of "sickness" and a kind of impotence; it also recalls
the image of the wall symbolizing obstacles to human happi
ness in In Our Time. Here dialogue ("I'm sick, too") ex
plicitly reinforces the symbolic aspects of the Jake-
Georgette confrontation; the confrontation of the willing if
"sick" prostitute and the incapacitated Jake becomes sym
bolic of the malaise of a certain segment of society. Jake's
wound becomes symbolic of characters in a society who, in
having lost their old values and in leading aimless lives,
are unable to find any purpose or direction in their lives.
And the events of the first book are selected and arranged
to reveal a kind of sickness which is akin to the anarchic
mode of existence adopted by the "lost generation."
The novel, for example, opens with an exposition of
Cohn's life and character, a life marked by a sense of indi
rection and vitiated by a character incapable of achieving
the strength of self-knowledge.'*''*' Rather than having
ordered the circumstances of his life, he has let circum-
^Melvin Backman, "Hemingway: The Matador and the Cru
cified, " Modern Fiction Studies, I (August 1955), p. 4.
Backman writes of Cohn in the following terms: "Cohn lacked
true identity. His personality was without core. ..."
96
stances govern the course of his existence. He becomes a
boxer not because he likes boxing but because he wants to
"counteract a feeling of inferiority" (p. 1). He marries a
girl who has been nice to him, and he has three children by
her before she leaves him for a "miniature painter" (p. 4) .
His career as an editor, as a writer, seems to have been
governed by impulse, by circumstance, and by romantic illu
sions got second hand rather than by a seriously profes
sional regard for literary endeavor. In short, Hemingway,
in opening the book with an exposition of Cohn's life, adum
brates one of the novel’s central concerns: Cohn is sym
bolic of the meaningless life. When Cohn asks Jake (dia
logue again works with symbol), "Do you know that in about
thirty-five years more we'll be dead?" (p. 11), the question
is ironic in that a central concern of the novel, an
achievement of the enduring and the meaningful within the
limits of the temporal, is enunciated by a character who is
incapable of doing anything about the fact of man's mortal
ity; he lacks the discipline to achieve the meaningful life
that is, in a sense, a kind of immortality gained in combat
with mortality. Cohn is a sick individual in a moribund
segment of society: "We're all sick."
After an introduction to the life and character of
Robert Cohn, the rest of Book I contains a seemingly random
succession of events, the very randomness of which, however,
reveals the disorder indicative of sickness and decay. Here
97
Hemingway arranges events so that the very structure of this
section of the novel is made to be symbolic of his vision of
society; juxtaposition, an important element in Hemingway's
rhetoric, serves thus to transform scenes and the succession
of scenes and events into symbols of a disordered segment of
12
society. Since, almost literally, every scene, every bit
of dialogue, every encounter is made to carry its burden of
meaning, each scene, each bit of dialogue, and each chance
encounter becomes symbolic; and they become symbolic in
relation to what Hemingway wants to say, in relation to the
thematic movement of the novel.
At the beginning of Chapter III, Jake Barnes meets the
sick prostitute, Georgette, at the terrace of the Napoli-
tain. He takes her by taxi to dinner at a restaurant, where
he meets the Braddocks (an expatriate Canadian couple),
Cohn, and Frances Clyne, Cohn's mistress. From there the
scene shifts to a dancing club, a bal musette, to which
Brett Ashley comes with a group of homosexuals. Jake and
Brett then go to the Select, where they meet Count Mippi-
popolous and, again, the Braddocks. Jake then goes home,
where, later that night, he again encounters Brett with the
Count in tow. In Chapter V, Jake meets Krum and Woolsey,
12
Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel
(New York, 1952), p. 372. Wagenknecht writes of the impor
tance of juxtaposition in Hemingway's writing: "in his
pages juxtaposition is very important. He rarely interprets
his juxtaposition for us." According to Wagenknecht Heming
way is "intensely implicational."
98
fellow journalists, at the Quai's d'Orsay. Later in the
same chapter, he meets Cohn, who seems to have fallen in
love with Brett. In Chapter VI, Jake meets Cohn and Frances,
who are on the verge of a break-up. In Chapter VII, Brett
and Count Mippipopolous turn up again at Jake's quarters.
In all the foregoing, there is seemingly no real causal
concatenation of events. If, however, one examines each
scene, each event, in relation to the novel's central con
cern-keeping in mind that the very randomness of the suc
cession of events relates them thematically to the novel's
central concern— then one sees that, indeed, each scene is
pregnant with meaning; each scene, that is, tends to become
symbolic.
At the dining club, a bal musette, for example, one
meets characters who in themselves seem to symbolize a sort
of social and moral anarchy. Brett comes to the club with a
crowd of young men— homosexuals— and "she was very much with
them" (p. 22). Her hair is "brushed back like a boy's"
(p. 22). In the "boyish" Brett and the effeminate young
men, one sees a blurring of clearly demarcated sexual cate
gories. Of course, Brett is very much a woman, yet Heming
way does make the point that her appearance approximates
that of the young men, that "she was very much with them."
In the description of Brett's hair "brushed back like a
boy's," one also notices the effectiveness of Hemingway's
focusing on the "real thing" which, somehow, serves to
99
capture the essence of what one has once felt about a
person, a situation, a scene, or an action. Brett's hair
becomes more than "the real thing," however; in the context
of the bal musette scene, her hair-do becomes symbolic of a
world in which old values have disintegrated. Immediately
after arriving, the homosexual young men begin dancing with
Georgette, the prostitute, in mockery of a ritual which, one
would suppose, is based primarily upon an attraction between
the sexes; and thus dancing seems to symbolize a society in
which even old rituals have become empty of any true mean
ing .
The scene at the club itself becomes symbolic of a
world in disorder mirrored in a series of jarring contrasts:
Georgette the professional prostitute and Brett the amateur
one; "boyish" Brett and the effeminate young men; virile
Jake Barnes incapable of sexual relations with Georgette and
the homosexuals capable but unwilling. At the bal musette,
Jake meets a young American writer with "some sort of
English accent." Besides being homosexual, the novelist is
also a poseur. This, then, is the vain and meaningless life
in which Jake is caught, and his comment on the spectacle at
the bal musette is, "This whole show makes me sick" (p. 21).
As a symbol of a chaotic and meaningless life, the bal
musette scene serves its rhetorical function exceedingly
well; this i_s the meaningless life out of which Jake must
100
13
exit to achieve a meaningful life. One notices, moreover,
that other elements of Hemingway's rhetoric have worked
together to help make the scene symbolic: juxtaposition of
characters who in themselves are to an extent symbolic; dia
logue ("the whole show makes me sick"); the focusing upon
"real things," like Brett's hair and the American writer's
English accent. Of course, Hemingway had, in In Our Time,
learned about the uses of the "real thing," juxtaposition,
description, and dialogue; and he had learned his lessons
well.
The brief scene with Woolsey and Krum seems irrelevant
if one does not keep in mind the plot of the novel at its
stage of development in Book I; the scene, like the bal
musette scene, is symbolic of an aspect of the meaningless
life in which Jake finds himself and which conditions his
search for meaning. The point of the scene is that the
journalists represent the world of the working newspaperman,
a world that represents a kind of order and discipline, but
one that precludes an awareness of values transcending his
well-regulated life. Krum, with a wife and children, says,
"Some day I'm not going to be working for an agency. Then
11 11 have plenty of time to get out in the country, 1 1 and
Jake answers, "That's the thing to do. Live out in the
13
Alfred J. Levy, "Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises,"
Explicator, XVIII (February 1959), item 37. According to
Levy the very juxtaposition of characters in the Paris
scenes are evocative of a meaningless world.
101
country and have a little car" (p. 36). Of course, Heming
way does not elaborate on Jake's comment, but one feels that
it is an ironic comment on the sort of life Krum represents,
with his wife, children, and trips to the country. Krum's
kind of ordered existence is not for Jake Barnes. Krum,
14
too, is sick; but he m unaware of his sickness. In rela
tion to the novel's plot, the bal musette scene and the
scene with Krum become symbolic in force and effectiveness.
In the final big scene of Book I, Jake, Brett, and
Count Mippipopolous are at Jake's quarters (pp. 53-61).
Mippipopolous, who has offered Brett money to go off with
him, has been through seven wars and four revolutions; and
he has earned the right to enjoy himself. Because he has
"lived very much," he is able to "enjoy everything so well"
(p. 60). To Hemingway, Mippipopolous must have been a sympa
thetic character; but at the same time, he is not wholly an
admirable one. He is, certainly, in contrast to the ama
teurs around him, a professional in the pursuit of pleasure.
He comments that the secret of enjoying "everything so well"
lies in "getting to know the values," and he has, without
doubt, excellent taste in wine, women, and food. His values
are, however, those which can guide him in his hedonistic
14
David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern Day World
(Chicago, 1960), p. 9. Evidently Krum is not a "true"
Hemingway hero. Daiches says that most of Hemingway's
novels deal with a "small community . . . of men who can
impose meaning on the empty nothingness of social conven
tions and pretensions."
102
approach to life."^ A knowledgeable professional in the
pursuit of pleasure, his hierarchy of values, together with
his money, enable him to get what he wants when he wants it.
There is, surely, an order and a discipline in the pursuit
of pleasure, a sense of "style" that is lacking in Cohn, in
Mike Campbell, and, perhaps, to a lesser extent, in Brett
and Jake. But Mippipopolous's sense of order and discipline
seems not to comprehend any meaningful and enduring values,
values as enduring as the abiding earth, for instance. His
"values" are those which are relative to an enjoyment of
ephemeral pleasures, not those which are "good for all
time." As he pours wine for Brett, he comments, "There, my
dear. Now enjoy that slowly, and then you can get drunk."
The trouble with the Bohemians in Paris is that they get
drunk without really enjoying the wine, that they run from
place to place without really seeing the scenery, that they
engage in endless activity without gaining real competence
or real pleasure. As is the case with the homosexuals’
dancing with Georgette, their activities are essentially
devoid of real meaning. Mippipopolous is symbolic of the
highest achievement of which Bohemianism is capable; but
that achievement is not of a very high order. In a sick
15
Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1963), p.
149. According to Rovit the Count is a "tutor," a man who,
in being what he is, can teach the hero something about
life. It seems to me that the Count does "teach" Jake a
certain approach to life, but that approach is not one that
will lead to the achievement of real meaning.
103
society, he has gained a sort of immunity; he has been
through four revolutions and seven wars, and he has even
been wounded by an arrow in Ethiopia.
And Mippipopolous1s wound, of course, is as symbolic as
is Jake's. The fact that the Count's wound has been cured,
both literally and, more important, figuratively, is sym
bolic of a sort of limited efficacy that Mippipopolous's
style of life represents. Within the confines of the type
of life represented by Paris, he has achieved a kind of
stable modus vivendi. The fact, too, that he is a central
figure in the last big scene of Book I reveals just how
carefully symbolism is related to the thematic structure,
the plot, of the novel. Jake, in this last scene, confronts
a prime symbol of the best in Paris Bohemianism; but he does
not find in the Count, whose wound has been cured, a satis
factory representative of the meaningful life. In the sec
ond Book he does find a man symbolic of that life— Romero,
the bullfighter; and the two symbolic figures thus represent
a sort of logical progression from a limited kind of meaning
to a more nearly unlimited kind of meaning. Jake's wound is
still festering; the Count's is cured. Jake at the end of
Book I, is still searching; the Count has achieved his
vision of life and his particular code of conduct. The
wounds serve thus to differentiate the two men. "Everything
is sick"; everyone is, in a sense, wounded, physically or
psychically. Jake's wound and the Count's symbolize the
104
sickness of the society represented in the Paris scenes. In
a way, Jake's wound, too, is like the symbolic wall that
recurs in the sketches of In Our Time; it seems to symbolize
the obstacles that confront man in his pursuit of happiness.
Like a true symbol, it is dynamic; it has implicit within it
a multitude of meanings, but all the meanings are related to
the central concern of the plot: Jake's quest for meaning
in a seemingly chaotic world. The wound symbolizes both the
obstacles that confront Jake in his search for meaning and
also the sick society in which that search necessarily takes
place. The scene with Jake, Brett, and Mippipopolous it
self becomes symbolic in relation to the central concern of
the novel.
In theme, structure and symbolism, Book I depicts a
society of Eliot's "Hollow Men," of his wastelanders who
lead lives of quiet and unquiet desperation. Beneath the
surface gaiety, the individuals are troubled and desperately
unhappy. Cohn is bothered by dreams having to do with his
intimate sex life: "God what a rotten dream!" (p. 3). And
Brett comments to Jake shortly after their leaving the bal
musette, "Oh, darling, I've been so miserable" (p. 24).
Through a happy coalescence of dialogue, internal monologue,
thought, and a juxtaposition of scenes and characters,
Hemingway creates a Paris symbolic of the meaningless life.
105
Book II of The Sun Also Rises
Hemingway, in Book I, has taken sixty-five pages to
delineate the meaningless life of the Bohemian expatriates
in Paris. In terms of music, he has set the "theme" of his
plot. With Book II a counter-theme develops, that of the
meaningful life. In Book II, the plot takes on the aspects
of a fugue, during the course of which first one theme pre
dominates and then the other; and at time both themes work
against each other in a kind of intricate counterpount, a
counterpoint in which symbolism plays an important part.
Besides setting the "theme" of his plot, Book I has also
initiated the complication of what Forster terms "story";
Brett is scheduled to marry Mike Campbell, Cohn has become
infatuated with Brett, and Brett loves Jake, who is physi
cally incapable of sexually satisfying her. The opening of
Book II continues the "story" aspect of the novel. Mike
Campbell arrives from England; Bill Gorton gets back to
Paris from Vienna; and they all decide to go to Pamplona.
The contrapuntal play of theme against theme begins in
Chapter IX (p. 84) with Bill and Jake's boarding of the
train for Pamplona.
On the train, the first tentative appearance of the
counter-theme, that of the meaningful and good life, occurs
with Jake's description of the countryside seen from the
train; "grain . . . just beginning to ripen," green "pas-
tureland," "fine trees," "big rivers," and "sandy pine
106
country, full of heather." These fleeting glimpses of the
landscape become symbolic of the earth which, according to
Hemingway, is the real "hero" of the novel, the earth which,
furthermore, stands for the meaningful, the good, the endur
ing aspects of life."^ And the symbolic glimpses of the
earth, one feels sure, must be kept in mind as background
for, as comments upon, the human beings on the train. As
previously noted, Hemingway was very explicit in his admoni
tion that one must be conscious of the background in a
painting by Francesco Francia, the foreground of which was
occupied by a small boy with long hair and a cloak: "We
always have this in when we write." In effect, the juxta
position of the earth symbolism with the people on the train
could represent, to an extent, a contrasting of the meaning
ful life with the meaningless one. The glimpses, moreover,
are similar to Hemingway's "real thing" which serves to re
create authentic feelings; for these glimpses are essential
to the specific atmosphere of the train, and they subtly
condition the reader's responses to the humans on the train.
On the train, for instance, Jake and Bill encounter an
American couple, tourists who are seeing Europe for the
first time. Like Krum, they represent a sort of ordered
16W. M. Frohock, "Violence and Discipline," in Ernest
Hemingway: The Man and His Works, ed. and with introd. by
John K. M. McCaffery (Cleveland, 1950), p. 269. Frohock
says that there is "a general increase in awareness and a
livening of the senses" as they approach the Pyrenees.
107
existence, but it is an existence based upon a radical
ignorance of the full resonance of life. Listening to these
tourists talk, one feels certain that their well-ordered
lives will remain hermetically sealed off from experience,
and one even doubts that they are, like Jake, really seeing
the countryside through which the train is passing: "That's
what you want to do. Travel while you're young" (p. 85);
"You know how the ladies are. If there's a jug along, or a
case of beer, they think it's hell and damnation"; "That's
the way men are" (p. 86); "It certainly shows you the power
of the Catholic church." Through a subtle coalescence of
the rhetorical means of dialogue and juxtaposition, as well
as through an intimate relationship to the thematic develop
ment, the central concern of the novel, the couple becomes
symbolic of the meaningless life itself, or at least a spe
cies of it.
While the train is travelling through the countryside
symbolic of the good life, Jake and Bill encounter a group
of pilgrims from Dayton, Ohio, who are on a pilgrimage to
Biarritz and to Lourdes (a curious combination); besides
mirroring Jake's own journey toward a meaningful existence,
the pilgrims represent, of course, the order and discipline
of an organized church, an institutionalized faith of which
Jake is incapable. Jake is groping toward meaning, but he
cannot quite accept the kind of meaning the pilgrims evi
dently represent. Jake's faith is contrasted with that of
108
the pilgrim's when, after arriving in Pamplona, he attempts
prayer in a church. He can't pray:
I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for,
and I thought I would like to have some money, so I
prayed I would make a lot of money. . . . I was a little
ashamed, and regretted I was such a rotten Catholic, but
realized there was nothing I could do about it. . . .1
only wished I felt religious. (p. 97)
Again we have, in this scene, a search made dramatically
forceful by a series of contrasts opposing aspects of the
meaningful life to aspects of the meaningless life. The
order and discipline of the sort of "public" faith the pil
grims have achieved is contrasted to the "private" faith
toward which Jake is groping. The faith of the pilgrims is
possibly too certain, uncritical, whereas Jake's "faith,"
with no exterior discipline to support it, is simply too
weak to sustain him.^^
In an article on the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot
wrote of the "dissociation of the sensibility" that took
place in English poetry during the time of Dryden. Perhaps
there is a similar dichotomy of intellection and emotion in
Jake's search for belief. D. H. Lawrence, in 1923, wrote of
a similar kind of "dissociation" as being central to an
understanding of Moby Dick, the whale representing "the
deepest blood-being of the white race" and Ahab the
17
Baker, p. 93. Baker says that one of the sets of
contrarieties the novel encompasses has to do with "paganism
and orthodoxy." He recognizes, that is, the importance of
religious symbolism in the novel.
109
18
"maniacal fanaticism of . . . white mental consciousness."
Seen in the light of Lawrence and Eliot, Jake may be, in
deed, symbolic of the condition of modern man; and of course
the other characters of the novel assume symbolic dimen
sions, too. Even the seemingly unimportant characters in
The Sun Also Rises become symbolic in relation to its essen
tial plot concept: Jake's search for a meaningful life. As
symbols, characters like Krum, Mippipopolous, and the Ameri
can couple serve a rhetorical function; they help to embody
Jake's quest for meaning. It would be difficult to account
for these relatively minor characters except in relation to
a plot which has as its essence a kind of search for meaning
or values. Characters acquire symbolic dimensions in rela
tion to theme and rhetoric.
As previously noted, Lillian Ross quoted from an
intriguing conversation with Hemingway: "I learned to write
19
by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum m Paris."
At any rate, if the first sixty-five pages depict a Paris
infested with "sick" people engaged in meaningless activi
ties, he immediately contrasts that Paris with Burguete, at
which place the ritual of fishing for trout becomes symbolic
18
Studies in Classic American Literature (New York,
1923), p. 173. The edition referred to is the Doubleday
Anchor Books edition.
19
This statement is from the famous article on Heming
way by Lillian Ross, New Yorker, May 13, 1950. Reprinted in
Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 35.
110
of the sane and the meaningful life. There is revealed in
this contrast, the painter's eye that strives for balance,
symmetry, and movement; and it should be noted, too, that
the juxtaposition of the two contrasting locations serves to
make both Paris and Burguete even more symbolic than they
would otherwise be. The scenes at Burguete cover about
thirty pages, enough pages, at least, to counterbalance the
opening depiction of a curiously depressed and depressing
life in the city. In terms of music, again, the Burguete
scenes may represent a first clear statement of the "mean
ingful life" theme which, in the scenes to follow at Pam
plona, will enter into a complex contrapuntal relationship
with the "meaningless life" theme. In Burguete there is a
heightening of a sensuous apprehension of the earth which,
as Hemingway once stated, is the real hero of the novel.
Jake and Bill, in the ancient, symbolic ritual of fishing,
seem to refresh themselves; and just as Hemingway contrasts
Burguete with Paris, he also contrasts the meaningful ritual
of fishing with the meaningless activities of the Bohemians
20
in Paris. The dialogue, appropriately, reveals a high-
spirited enjoyment of really clever repartee. The genuine
20
Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modern Novel m America
(Chicago, 1950), p. 95. Hoffman comments that In Our Time
ends with the ritual of fishing, which is replaced in The
Sun Also Rises by bullfighting, chiefly because "fishing is
no longer equal to the task of providing an orderly pattern
for the kind of experiences in the novel." This is true,
but fishing is still important because it adumbrates the
ritual of bullfighting which comes later in the novel. It
is important to the structure of the novel.
Ill
friendship of the two men is revealed in the atmosphere of a
symbolic Burguete and seen in relationship to the meaning
ful, the good life for which Jake is groping.
In the Burguete, furthermore, Jake and Bill encounter
an Englishman, Harris, who is also there to fish; and the
three men enjoy a good, carefree relationship. If Mippi
popolous seems to sum up the possibilities of Bohemian life
in Paris, then Harris seems to epitomize the meaningful life
of honest affection, common decency, and good comradeship
that inform the scenes at Burguete. Structurally, the two
men serve similar functions in the novel, and in serving
these functions they seem to become symbolic of the possi
bilities inherent to two modes of existence. When Jake and
Bill have to leave for Pamplona, Harris remarks, "You don't
know what it's meant to have you chaps here" (p. 129), and
he gives them some dozen flies as a parting guest. Harris
clearly represents qualities which will always inform an
enduring order of things. And it is appropriate that he is
associated with the earth symbolism of Burguete, the earth
that symbolizes just that enduring order of things that
Harris represents. Harris remains at Burguete; he would
rather continue fishing than go to Pamplona.
As befitting a symbol of the good and the meaningful
life, the landscape at Burguete, in one description at
least, takes on an almost pastoral quality:
112
We walked on the road between the thick trunks of the
old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in
light patches on the grass. The trees were big, and the
foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no
undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh,
and the big gray trees spaced as though it were a park.
(p. 117)
There were, according to Jake, "wild strawberries growing on
the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing in the
trees."
From this park-like, pastoral, and vaguely paradisal
landscape, the men descend to Pamplona. And in going back
to Pamplona from the harmony of Burguete, Jake and Bill
return to the cacophonous discord of the Bohemian set.
Chapters XIII and XIV build up gradually to Chapter XV, when
the fiesta "explodes." One has in these two chapters a con
tinuing complication of the "story" element of the plot and
also a further development of the thematic element. First a
discord, a contrast to the harmony of Burguete, cacophonous
and ugly, develops between Brett, Mike, and Cohn. Cohn, who
has slept with Brett, keeps pestering her with his unwanted
attentions; and Mike, who knows of the Brett-Cohn intimacy,
is naturally exasperated by Cohn's persistent pursuit of
her: "What if Brett did sleep with you. She's slept with
lots of better men" (p. 142). Second, thematically, a con
trast to the Brett-Cohn-Mike discord is the understanding
that Jake has formed with Montoya; they are both aficionados,
and to them bullfighting is a "very deep secret that we knew
about" (p. 131). Montoya, like Mippipopolous and Wilson,
113
symbolizes a kind of ordered and meaningful life; and it is
significant that Jake is of both worlds— that of Montoya and
that of the meaningless Bohemian set. It is significant,
too, that Mippipopolous, Harris, and Montoya (and somewhat
later, the bullfighter Romero) represent an order and a
discipline of a successively more comprehensive dimension of
seriousness and importance; Harris's kind of order and
achieved meaning is of more value than the kind achieved by
Mippipopolous, and Montoya's is of more importance than the
kind achieved by Harris. The three men are thus symbolic of
Jake's progress toward finding a disciplined order in life;
in their persons, they indicate that Jake is not only grop
ing toward but also nearing a sort of meaningful and ordered
existence.
An important internal monologue, a significant element
in Hemingway's rhetoric, makes explicit Jake's progress
toward an apprehension of a meaningful existence:
Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I
did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to
know was how to live in it. . . . That was morality;
things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must
be immorality. (pp. 148-149)
The point is that this internal monologue reflects the cen
tral concerns of the novel. The arrangement of events,
which comprehend scene, action, dialogue, thought, and in
ternal monologue, thus reflects the novel's central concern,
the groping toward meaning in an anarchic society, a meaning
which is not based on vanity and which is as abiding as the
114
earth. And symbolism, too, represents another kind of
"event" which, along with the other "events," enters into
that arrangement to further the novel’s central concerns.
Without the novel’s symbolic elements— or without the sym
bolic intensity of meaning that character, incidents,
objects, and landscapes acquire in the course of the novel—
The Sun Also Rises would lose much of its impact. If one
does not see, or intuit, the symbolic dimensions of Mippi
popolous, Harris, and Montoya (and, later, of Romero), one
is less likely to comprehend either the presence or the
direction of Jake's quest for the meaningful life.
Immediately after Jake's internal monologue in Chapter
XIV, the San Fermin fiesta "explodes" in Chapter XV. Jake
makes the pointed comment that it is "also a religious fes
tival," and throughout the fiesta there is a juxtaposition
of the meaningful life with the meaningless life. A reli
gious sense of order, discipline, and dedication is repre-
21
sented by the young bullfighter Pedro Romero. His skill
as a bullfighter comments on the frenetic and meaningless
activities of the Bohemians from Paris; in juxtaposition
with the activities of that set, his skill becomes symbolic
of the meaningful and the purposeful: "Romero's bull-
21
Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties (New York, 1955),
p. 105. "With an almost uncanny sense of the relevance of
situations, Hemingway in this novel always reduces the reli
gious suggestions, evocations, hints, to their secular
equivalents.
115
fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute
purity of line in his movements and always quietly and
calmly let the horns pass him close each time." The "purity
of line" in Romero’s movements is almost an explicit comment
on the frantic activities of the Bohemians. The ritualistic
discipline revealed by the bullfight scenes, a discipline
which mirrors the religious aspects of the San Fermin festi
val, are juxtaposed, furthermore, with scenes of the
fiesta's abandoned and "pagan" revelry, during which the
peasants, who have lived an ordered existence throughout the
year, find it necessary "that they make their shifting in
values gradually. . . . Late in the fiesta it would not mat
ter what they paid, nor where they bought" (p. 152).
In the temporary loosening of the rigid order of their
lives, Brett, in dramatic contrast to Romero who, priest
like, presides at the ritual killing of bulls, becomes a
sort of goddess to a group of peasant revellers: "Brett
wanted to dance but they did not want her to. They wanted
her as an image to dance around" (p. 155). Possibly, Brett
seems here to symbolize a sort of coalescence of the pagan
and the meaningless; and when one recalls that Cohn has
referred to Brett as a kind of Circe, one's view of her as a
pagan goddess seems not too farfetched. The essentially
pagan character of Brett is revealed when Jake accompanies
her to church. She can't stand the atmosphere: "Let's get
out of here. Makes me damned nervous" (p. 208). Earlier,
116
too, Brett's character has been revealed by one of Heming
way's characteristic devices--juxtaposition. Just before
Brett becomes a kind of image for the revellers, she has
been refused entrance to a church because "she had no hat"
(p. 155). The church, which represents a kind of meaning
and order, thus rejects Brett, who represents a sort of dis
order. The uneasiness which Brett feels in church pre
figures, of course, the failure of her affair with Romero
who, after all, is essentially religious in his approach to
the ritual of bullfighting. If one fails to see that both
the church and the bullfight are symbolic of meaning and
order, then one misses much of the rich texture of symbolic
and thematic contrasts, a kind of intricately subtle
counterpoint, that informs the San Fermin festival scenes.
The church and the bullfight arena are here central symbols
of order and discipline; and the fiesta revelry is, of
course, a symbol of the disorder that seems as much a part
of human life as is the principle of order. Meaningful
order confronts chaos, and the novel's symbolism helps to
give the fiesta scenes a power they would otherwise lack.
The single "image" dominating the fiesta scenes is that
22
of the bullfight arena. In the atmosphere of the fiesta,
22
John McCormick, Catastrophe and Imagination (London,
1957), p. 213. Of the importance to the novel of Heming
way's presentation of the bullfight "as ritual," McCormick
says the following: "Hemingway is thus able to deal with
basic themes: religion, initiation, war, death, and their
attendant ritual.
117
the bullfight is transformed, by contrast, into a sort of
ritual providing a sense of order in the general turbulence
and "shifting of values." If one knows what is going on at
the bullfight, then "it became more something that was going
on with a definite end, and less a spectacle with unex
plained horrors" (p. 167). Just as Burguete, a symbol of a
kind of meaningful life contrasts with Paris, a symbol of
the meaningless life, so do the two bullfight scenes con
trast with the petty, vain activities of the Cohn-Campbell-
Gorton trio during the fiesta scenes of the novel. At the
fiesta, the juxtaposition of contrasts, which is accompanied
by a fugue-like interplay of symbol against symbol, becomes
much closer in texture. The opening Paris section, covering
sixty pages, is balanced by the Burguete episode, covering
about thirty pages, one narrative mass contrasted to
another; but at the fiesta contrast follows quickly upon
contrast achieving an intensity which the reader senses is a
part of the developing structure of the novel. And the sen
sitive reader is aware, too, of the subtle counterpoint of
symbols that is a part of that structure and that helps to
further, together with other elements of the rhetoric, the
central concern of the novel. The plot of the novel devel
ops slowly, but not uninterestingly or statically, and grad
ually accelerates to a frenetic climax, both of "theme" and
"story," at the fiesta.
118
The thematic and the "story" climax of the plot is
really a combination of three occurrences: Cohn's pummel
ling of Jake for having introduced Brett to Romero, Cohn's
battering of Romero, and Brett's running off with the bull
fighter. Romero's confrontation with Cohn is symbolic of
the confrontation, immediate and dramatic, of the meaningful
life and the meaningless life. Brett's running off with
Romero, too, is a similar kind of confrontation. One has,
in the Brett-Romero affair, a convergence, if not a resolu
tion of the dramatic (and symbolic) contrasts which have
informed the whole plot and given it its momentum. Romero,
in the fiesta section of the novel, represents an achieved
meaning and discipline of a higher order than that achieved
by Mippipopolous in the Paris section of the novel and by
Harris in the Burguete section; and Jake's introduction of
Brett to the bullfighter is thus, in a profound sense, a
betrayal of himself in his groping toward a meaningful
existence, his search for "value," a word, interestingly,
which keeps recurring throughout the novel, just as the
words "nature," "natural," and "un-natural" recur in King
Lear. In a sense, Jake’s introduction of Brett to Romero,
then, is also a kind of thematic climax to the plot of the
novel.
The Final Booh of The Sun Also Rises
119
For much of the final book of the novel, Jake is left
to himself. In his stay at San Sebastian, one feels, though
Hemingway never says so explicitly, that Jake is achieving
a sort of tough-minded detente that will, temporarily, sus
tain him. Though there is very little explicit commentary
as to Jake's state of mind in the final book, a sort of
unobtrusive symbolism helps to provide an insight into his
23
feelings. At San Sebastian, for example, Jake goes for
two swims that seem symbolic of a ritual and purifying
abjuration of his past experience at the fiesta and of his
relationship with Brett. During the first swim, he dives
"swimming down to the bottom"; he swims with his "eyes open
and it was green and dark" (p. 225}. The depth of his dive
seems to symbolize his attempt to get as far away from his
former life as possible; and the darkness and greenness of
the bottom seem to suggest his entry into another world, a
world which seems strangely far-removed from that of the
Bohemian set. A subtle and stange sea chance, one feels,
has taken place in the depths of Jake's soul. During the
second swim the water "was buoyant and cold," and it "felt
23
Robert M. Lovett, "Ernest Hemingway," English Journal,
XXI (1932), 614. Lovett says that Hemingway, unlike the
"French Naturalists or the English Realists," uses realistic
detail so that it "invariably carries and intensifies the
emotional quality of his situation." The "realistic detail,"
of course, can also provide an insight into Jake's feelings
and, symbolically, into the situation in which he finds him
self .
120
as though you could never sink" (p. 237). Jake thinks he
would like to swim across the bay, but he is "afraid of the
cramps." Perhaps it would not be too conjectural to suggest
that the buoyant water symbolizes Jake's feeling that his
new mode of existence is strong enough to sustain him. Per
haps, too, his decision not to swim across the bay reveals a
shrewd wisdom that prevents him from going beyond his limits
in the still unfamiliar kind of life which he seems to be
making for himself. One recalls that Nick Adams, in Part II
of "The Big Two-Hearted River," the last story of In Our
Time, does not want to fish in the swamp where, "in the fast
deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic."
Nick, like Jake, has much to forget; like Jake, he has been
wounded in the war; and he has returned to his trout fishing
as a way of exorcising the bitter experiences of his immedi
ate past. Even though Nick seems to gain strength while
engaging in the ritual of fishing, he does not yet feel
strong enough to fish the swamp: "There were plenty of days
coming when he could fish the swamp" (p. 211, In Our Time).
For Nick the swamp is symbolic of the dangerous possibili
ties of a life which he feels unprepared to encounter, or
the traumatic experience of the immediate past which he
feels too weak to confront even in retrospect. And for
Jake, swimming across the bay symbolizes the very same kind
of possibilities which he feels unprepared to explore. Both
Jake and Nick are in the first stages of a tentative explor-
121
ation into new territory, and, wisely, they are very careful
not to overextend themselves.
Jake's symbolic immersion in water is prefigured by all
the bathing that takes place during the course of the novel.
Brett, for example, bathes on three occasions: "I must
bathe" (p. 83); "Haven't bothered yet. . . . Must clean my
self" (p. 74); "I must bathe before dinner" (p. 144). Jake
also bathes after the fiesta is over: "I awoke about nine
o'clock, had a bath, dressed, and went down stairs." These
ablutions are not overtly symbolic; however, one can intuit
in them a subliminal desire to purify the spirit as well as
to cleanse the body. One must be struck by the role that
water plays in the novel, particularly at Burguete and at
San Sebastian. At both places, furthermore, the water is
described as being cold, a coldness perhaps symbolic of the
distance between the chaste and ritual purity of fishing and
swimming and the passions of a society which generate much
heat but very little movement toward discipline, order, and
meaning.
In addition to the swimming episode, there is yet
another symbol which serves to reveal Jake’s state of mind
toward the novel's close. Before going to San Sebastian
just after the end of the fiesta, for instance, Jake thinks
of the pleasures associated with that Spanish town: "There
were wonderful trees along the promenade along the beach,
and there were many children sent down with their nurses
122
before the season opened" (p. 232). Evidently he looks
forward to seeing children; and once in San Sebastian he
does see them, sees them in an atmosphere of a pristine and
vernal freshness:
Everything was fresh and cool and damp in the early
morning. Nurses in uniform and in peasant costume walked
under the trees with children. The Spanish children were
beautiful. (p. 237)
Why does Jake want to see children? And why does Hemingway
finally arrange to have Jake see them? Children, of course,
are symbolic of innocence and of a stable, meaningful order
24
of things. The children can also be symbolic of Jake's
search for a way back to or forward to another and more
meaningful order of existence. In the Fiesta scenes the
symbols represented a kind of contrapuntal interplay of the
meaningful life theme versus the meaningless life theme. In
San Sebastian the symbols, apparently, represent a sort of
subdued resolution of the novel's dialectical movement. And
yet so subtle is Hemingway's art that one feels the perva
sive power of the symbols without being necessarily aware of
them. His symbolism is, in short, an inextricable part of
his total strategy. To some degree, analysis destroys sym
bolism of this sort; but, in compensation, analysis also
24
Hoffman, The Twenties, p. 104. It is interesting to
note that Hoffman speaks of the Burguete interlude as a
"temporary return to an idyllic childhood experience."
Jake's desire to see children at San Sebastian, then, is a
recurrence of a theme first sounded at Burguete.
123
enhances one's appreciation of Hemingway's artistry. His
symbolism is an inextricable part of his rhetoric.
When Brett says, "Oh Jake . . . we could have had such
a damned good time together," Jake answers, in the last line
of the novel, "Yes . . . isn't it pretty to think so?" And
one feels behind Jake's answer the irony and the pity toward
which the whole weight and momentum of the novel have been
directed. It is in its power, very much like Kate Croy’s
last line in Henry James' The Wings of the Dove: "We shall
never be again as we were!" Indeed, Jake and Brett, too,
will "never be again" as they were. For Jake, one feels,
has changed; his quest for certainty has not, perhaps, con
cluded; but he has, at least, cut himself off from the past,
from the Bohemians. An unobtrusive symbolism has helped to
indicate Jake's isolation from the past. And a kind of
symbolism is operative, too, even in the last scene of the
novel, a symbolism that sharpens even more the effectiveness
of the last lines of the novel. Daiches' term "symbolic
realism," which he applies to aspects of Hemingway's prose,
aptly denotes the kind of symbolism at work in the closing
scene of the novel. Jake and Brett are in a taxi, from
which vantage point Jake sees that, "It was very hot and
bright, and the houses looked sharply white." And, surely,
the scenery becomes symbolic of a very real and solid world
which Jake chooses to see just before Brett comments, "Oh
Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time
124
together." The very solidity and brightness of the real
world seems here to represent Jake's awareness of his having
glimpsed a new and more enduring order of meaning; he sees
not only the world clearly but also himself in relation to
that world and to society. In a sense, then, the earth,
which Hemingway termed the "real hero" of his novel, becomes
a third party silently commenting upon the evanescent pas
sions of men and women in general and of Jake and Brett in
25
particular. The earth itself, in the form of a subjec
tively glimpsed scenery, comments on the futility of Brett's
"could have had such a damned good time together." And
Jake's comment, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" seems exactly
to translate the implicit commentary of the symbolically
glimpsed scenery into explicit dialogue. Again symbolism,
dialogue, description, and juxtaposition, aspects of Heming
way's rhetoric of fiction, work inextricably together to
give the last scene of the novel its undeniable impact.
Through a fairly close analysis of Hemingway's plot,
one begins to see that his symbolism is an important element
in his strategy, that unless one is aware of the symbolic
meanings that inhere in characters, events, juxtapositions,
25
Saul Bellow, "Hemingway and the Image of Man," Parti
san Review, XX (1953), 342. Bellow makes a rather cryptic
comment on the importance of Nature in Hemingway’s writing:
"He tends to speak for Nature itself. Should Nature and
Hemingway become identical one or the other will have won a
total victory." In this scene (pp. 241-247) nature does in
a sense "speak" for Hemingway.
125
objects, and descriptions, one cannot begin to understand
what Hemingway has been trying to say. What more can be
said of his symbolism? For the most part his symbolism is
natural, thoroughly in keeping with his realism. It
emerges, in fact, from the sharply realistic,descriptive and
narrative passages for which he is justly famous; and the
danger is that the gem-like clarity of his realism may per
suade the reader that something so well accomplished must
have been accomplished largely for its own sake. Nothing
could be further from the truth; from the very beginning of
his career, Hemingway had been in quest of the "real thing,"
the "real thing" that tended to become symbolic in the con
texts of his short stories and novels. Furthermore, in
examining the symbols themselves, one sees that many of them
fall roughly into two categories: "isolated" symbols that
serve primarily to further the plot at any specific point in
its development and recurring symbols that relate to the
plot in its overall aspects, that form, really, a kind of
sub-structure of symbolism.
"Isolated Symbols"
There are numerous examples of "isolated" symbols, most
of which relate to the novel's central concern. An excel
lent example of this kind of symbolism occurs in Chapter III
when Jake and the prostitute Georgette are together in the
horse-cab. The cab passes the New York Herald bureau "with
the window full of clocks" (p. 15), and Georgette asks,
126
"What are all the clocks for?" Jake answers, "They show the
hour all over America," to which Georgette's reaction is,
"Don't kid me." On one level of meaning, of course, Jake's
answer is exactly to the point. But on another level,
Georgette's reaction ("Don't kid me") reveals the possibil
ity of other interpretations as to what the clocks mean.
Perhaps the clocks, each indicating a different hour, re
flect a society so disordered, chaotic, and lost that even
time has lost its function as a regulator of meaningful
activity. The disorder is so radical that for this genera
tion, at least, even the sun does not rise and set at its
appointed hour. For Georgette, to whom "Everybody's sick"
(p. 16), the clocks obviously have some meaning aside from
the obvious fact that they "show the hour all over America."
And perhaps the reader, too, in being aware of Georgette's
confusion about the clocks, senses that they are symbolic of
a society so radically disordered that time itself has lost
its meaning. In one sense, the clocks are the "real thing"
that would re-create the genuine emotion experienced in the
past. In the context of the story, however, the "real
thing" not only recreates the genuine emotion; it also
2 6
helps, as a symbol, to create meaning.
26
See R. W. Stallman, "The Sun Also Rises," in The
House that James Built (Lansing, Mich., 1961), p. 84. On
the meaning of the clocks, Stallman comments shrewdly that
"In both The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises moral con
fusion equates with temporal confusion."
127
Still another example of an "isolated" symbol is that
of the stuffed dog in Chapter VIII. Bill Gorton, just back
from Vienna, where he had witnessed a boxing match in which
a Negro boxer had been unjustly deprived of his purse, asks
Jake if he wants to buy a stuffed dog. In front of a taxi
dermist's shop, Bill says of the purchase of a stuffed dog,
"Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give
you a stuffed dog" (p. 7 2). The Negro fighter had done his
part in a crooked fight, but the management refused to pay
him his share of the purse. He had, in other words, given
real value, in return for which he was given, symbolically,
a "stuffed dog." However, the stuffed dog symbol relates
not only to the episode of the Negro fighter but also to the
novel's central concern, Jake's search for meaning, for
value. He searches in a world, that is, in which there are
all too many stuffed dogs given in return for real effort.
Jake, like the Negro boxer, has been cheated. He has been
wounded; and the wound was entirely unmerited. It was, as
the Italian colonel told him, a bit of bad luck: "Che mala
fortuna" (p. 31). "Bad breaks" are, then, very much a part
of this world; and they very much complicate one's search
for values. Brett, too, has had bad luck in her first mar
riage to a British naval officer, and she too, in a sense,
has been wounded.
There are also minor but telling examples of the "real
thing" that verge upon the symbolic. Subtly, Hemingway has
128
Jake Barnes note seemingly incidental details which help to
illuminate a situation or a state of mind. The empty barges
epitomizing Jake's feelings after Brett fails to meet him at
the Hotel Crillon have already been noted (Chapter V, p. 41).
Other similarly effective uses of the telling detail, the
"real thing," can be noted in the novel. For example, after
Brett leaves Jake's flat in Chapter IV, Jake notes "an empty
glass and a glass half-full of brandy and soda" on a table.
The fact that one glass has been emptied and the other only
half emptied indicates, surely, that Brett and Jake have not
achieved a fulfilling intimacy in their brief meeting; if
she had really wanted contact with Jake on an intimate
basis, she would have remained long enough, one would think,
to empty her glass. Instead, she goes off with Count Mippi-
popolous, who is waiting for her with a chauffeur and car
"just up the street." Certainly, the sight of the two
glasses would be just the sort of "real thing" actually
noticed by a disappointed Jake. She has not even stayed
long enough, he would feel, to finish her drink. It would
not be too conjectural, moreover, to read into the image of
the two glasses a symbol of the relationship existing be
tween Brett and Jake. Jake loves Brett, and Brett loves
Jake; but the point is that she does not in the least let
her love prevent her from having affairs with other men.
She is always rushing off with other men before, figura
tively, she can finish her drink with Jake.
129
Empty glasses also point up another episode. At the
end of Chapter XVI, after Romero goes off with Brett, Jake
notes that "three empty cognac glasses were on the table"
(p. 187). And the end of his relationship with Brett is
symbolized by what happens to the glasses: "A waiter came
in with a cloth and picked up the glasses and mopped off
the table." One feels in the waiter's action a sense of
finality more convincing than any explicit commentary could
achieve; for it is Jake who sees the empty glasses and the
waiter's action, and it is obviously Jake, also, who feels
them important enough to matter, feels them because they
mirror so poignantly the inward state of his being. Not
empty glasses but the state of emptiness plays a symbolic
role in still another section of the novel. After the
fiesta is over, Jake notices the emptiness of the square
devoid of people: "The square was empty and there were no
people on the streets" (p. 227). The emptiness of the
streets, obviously, stands for the state of Jake's spirits;
he too has been purged of his emotions, and like the square
itself he is empty, empty of the passions aroused during the
San Fermin Fiesta scenes of the novel.
Recurring Symbols
Besides these isolated details that serve to explain
how Jake feels at any moment in the story or that verge on
the symbolic by illuminating situations and relationships,
there are also recurring symbols ("emptiness" mentioned
130
above does, to an extent, recur) that help to reveal and to
reinforce the thematic structure of the novel. Rituals, for
one, play important symbolic roles in the novel. Count
Mippipopolous of Booh I, for example, makes almost a ritual
of drinking champagne. "'The wine is too good for toast-
drinking, my dear,'" he tells Brett and adds admonishingly,
"'You don't want to mix emotions up with wine like that.
You lose the taste.'" The Count, furthermore, pours the
wine "very carefully" and tells Brett to "enjoy" it "slowly."
The quality of carefully measured slowness apparent in the
Count's ritual pouring and enjoyment of the wine is also
apparent in the ritual of bullfighting as practiced by Pedro
Romero: "Romero went on. It was like a course in bull
fighting. All the passes he lined up, all completed, all
slow, templed and smooth. There was no brusqueness" (p.219).
The difference between the two rituals, one occurring near
the beginning of the book and the other toward the end, is
that one ritual is much more meaningful (at least to Jake)
than the other. And the difference between the two rituals
serves to indicate Jake's progress toward the achievement of
a meaningful life. Between the ritual pouring of the wine
and the ritual killing of the bull, there occurs, of course,
the ritual of fishing; and, appropriately, the ritual of
fishing, as symbolic of a meaningful ordering of experience,
occupies a point somewhere between the two other rituals.
Associated with the three kinds of rituals are three
131
important characters who become symbolic in their relation
to Jake's search for the meaningful life: Mippipopolous,
Harris, and Pedro Romero, the bullfighter. Each character
represents an achieved life style that has, in varying
degrees, managed to make experience meaningful. Mippipopo
lous 1 s purposeful hedonism is, of course, essentially mean
ingless. Harris's way of life is more substantial in that
it bases itself on the human values of friendship and gener
osity. Romero's way of life represents the achievement of
art which will endure long after the present, and lost,
generation has passed away; it achieves meaning outside the
bounds of the temporal, the evanescent, and, accordingly, it
is close to what Jake has been groping to attain. Like the
earth, art endures; and Jake in his fishing and in his pas
sion for bullfighting reveals his concern for enduring
values.
Related to the symbolism of rituals is the symbolism
having to do with religion. Jake goes to church during the
course of the novel; he also encounters the pilgrims on the
train. And at Burguete the symbolism of religion merges
with that of the earth when Gorton, no doubt facetiously,
says, "Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-
of-doors. Remember the woods were God's first temples. Let
us kneel" (p. 122). Like the symbolism of the rituals, the
symbolism having to do with religion is also related to the
novel's main concern, Jake’s quest for meaning in a dis-
132
ordered world. Jake wishes he were religious, even though
he finds that he can't pray in church. His reply to Brett's
contention that feeling good after "deciding not to be a
bitch" is "what we have instead of God" is a flat state
ment: "Some people have God. . . . Quite a bit" (p. 245).
Jake, evidently, does not find in religion the meaningful
life for which he quests; but just as evidently, religion,
like the earth and bullfighting, serves to reveal the nature
of his search. Accordingly, the symbolism of religion also
serves a rhetorical function in the novel. Like the symbol
ism of rituals and like the symbolic characters, the reli
gious symbolism is intimately related to the novel's the-
27
matic structure, to its plot.
Finally, the earth itself becomes symbolic of the
meaningful life and, as a recurring symbol, helps to embody
the novel’s central concerns, helps, that is, to support the
thematic structure of the novel. The earth is everywhere in
the novel. It is there in Jake's views of Paris; it is
there at the festival; it is there, of course, at Burguete;
and it is there, finally, at San Sebastian when Jake goes
swimming. And everywhere, furthermore, it either comments
upon the meaningless life of the Bohemians or, as at Bur
guete, becomes almost explicitly symbolic of the meaningful
27
Stallman, pp. 185-186. Stallman sees in the Palace
Hotel in Madrid a religious symbol: "The Palace Hotel sub
stitutes for a church with Brett making confession to Jake-
as-priest."
133
28
life. At Paris a sort of urban landscape represents, pos
sibly, a coalescence of the earth and of man's art, whereas
at Burguete the earth is in its relatively pristine state;
but the point is that the earth is always there, as enduring
as the gulf stream of which Hemingway wrote in Green Hills
of Africa. The earth is the "real hero" of the novel; and,
appropriately, it comprehends all the other recurring sym
bols in The Sun Also Rises; in its abiding presence it
serves as a kind of common denominator for all the other
recurring symbols. Taken together the recurring symbols
form a symbolic sub-structure directly related to the cen
tral concern of the novel.
The Effectiveness of the Last Scene
It is partly because of the subtly symbolic use of
characters, actions, and scenes that the novel achieves its
power to move the reader. The cumulative effect of the
novel's symbolism makes itself felt particularly in the last
scene with Brett and Jake in the taxi. In that scene, two
ways of encountering life are expressed. Brett, evidently,
thinks that one's feeling good after having done something
is a measure of the moral rightness of one's actions; that
feeling is what the "lost generation" has in place of God.
28
Harlan Hatcher, Creating the Modern American Novel
(New York, 1935), p. 230. Relative to The Sun Also Rises,
Hatcher speaks of "The contrast between the natural elements
unspoiled by war and the maladjusted group of war-wrecked
people deprived of all purpose."
134
Jake says flatly, as mentioned previously, that "Some people
have God. . . . Quite a bit." Jake's answer indicates that
he has arrived at a crucial stage in his search for meaning.
He has, in effect, affirmed the possibility of order and
meaning in the universe independent of an individual's feel
ings about the matter; a dependence upon feeling as a basis
for moral evaluations is a species of solipsism that can
lead to the moral anarchy exhibited by the Bohemians of
Paris.
But Jake's "message," understated and brief, would lack
its power to move the reader if he had not "felt" the sym
bols that inform the novel. The symbolic use of rituals, of
key characters, of the earth, of religion, and of Jake's
wound have given depth to his search for a meaningful view
of the world; and the effect of that use carries over into
the last scene to give force to Jake's brief "message."
Brett's "message" has been prefigured in Mippipopolous's
purposeful hedonism; and thus the opposition of the two
"messages" at the very end of the novel represents the cul
mination of a development that has been carefully prepared
and that has been central to the movement of the novel's
thematic structure. An artful use of symbolism has given
force to Jake's quiet statement that "Some people have God."
This is not to say that he now believes in God any more than
he had at the beginning of the novel; it is to say that he
is convinced that there is a meaningful order inhering in
135
our lives and that God, the earth, and a civilization
evolved through the centuries (that of the Spanish peasants,
for example) reflect that order. The reader feels Jake's
message. Jake really does not have to expatiate at any
29
great length about the results of his quest.
That the quest for meaning in an apparently meaningless
world seems to be the central concern of the novel's plot
can be to a great extent substantiated, then, by a fairly
close analysis of the novel. Hemingway employs his rhetoric
of fiction to embody that quest. His use of symbols becomes
meaningful in relation to the plot of the novel. On the
other hand, for example, the contention that the novel is
based upon the myth of the Fisher King, with Jake as the
mythic king, cannot accommodate all the novel's particulars.
What does one make of Krum, for instance? What role does he
play in the myth? What of Harris, of Mippipopolous, of the
American couple on the train?
What Hemingway has accomplished in The Sun Also Rises
is notable. He has, in a sense, said what he has wanted to
say without sacrificing realism. Unlike the characters in
the novel of ideas, his characters do not talk interminably
29
James B. Colvert, "Ernest Hemingway's Morality in
Action," American Literature, XXVII (November 1955), 376.
Colvert illuminates the central concern of The Sun Also
Rises when he says the following of the Hemingway hero:
"Cut adrift from his moral moorings the Hemingway hero
appears in desperate struggle with the awful problem of
finding a new value orientation."
136
about those ideas. His dialogues retain the illusion of
real speech, yet they work together with other elements of
his rhetoric of fiction to convey with poignant immediacy
the "meaning" of the novel, the meaning which is inex
tricably a part of the novel's impact. In conveying that
"meaning," both "isolated" and recurring symbols become an
organic part of the novel's structure.
CHAPTER IV
MOUNTAIN, PLAIN, AND ROAD IN
A FAREWELL TO ARMS1
The "story" of A Farewell to Arms is quite simple.
Lieutenant Frederick Henry, an American in the ambulance
service of the Italian army, meets Catherine Barkley, an
English nurse who is stationed at a hospital in Gorizia;
and he tries, cynically, to make a sexual conquest of her.
While at the front he is wounded; and Book I ends with his
being sent to a hospital in Milan. In Book II, he again
meets Catherine at the Milan hospital, and he realizes that
he loves her; he is in Milan with Catherine through the
winter, spring, and summer (1916-1917). In Book III, having
left Catherine for the front in the fall of 1917, he becomes
involved in the Caporetto retreat and deserts when he finds
himself about to be executed as a German spy. In Book IV,
Henry returns to Catherine, who is now pregnant, a result of
their having made love at the hospital in Milan. And in
Book V, Henry and Catherine Barkley, having been warned of
his imminent arrest, escape to Switzerland where, after an
"^Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York, 1929).
137
138
idyllic time together, Catherine dies in childbirth.
After its publication in 1929, A Farewell to Arms
became almost immediately a popular success; and it has
retained its popularity to this day. It is easy to see the
reasons for its popular appeal; it deals with the always
attractive themes of love and war in vividly real terms.
Although the romantic aspects of an idealized love achieving
an idyllic isolation from society serves to explain much of
the novel's success, its realism is an even more basic rea
son for its popularity; for it is the novel's realism that
2
makes its romanticism palatable. Ascribing the popularity
of the novel primarily to its realistic depiction of love
and war not only explains its immediately achieved popular
ity; it also accords with the early view of Hemingway as
primarily a realist. Later, however, some critics began to
look below the surface of Hemingway's lucid prose and dis
covered that there were myths, rituals, archetypes, and sym
bols lurking in the shadows close to the bottom; and part of
2
See William A. Glasser, "A Farewell to Arms," Sewanee
Review, LXXIV (April-June 1966), 469. Glasser says that the
novel "is not simply a love story, nor is it simply a war
story, for these two topics are subordinated to the develop
ment of Frederick's growing awareness of life." Glasser, I
think, here touches upon the basic central concern of the
novel: Henry's quest for meaning. I shall later discuss
this concern that underlies the development of A Farewell to
Arms. When I say that Hemingway's realism is a basic reason
for the immediate popularity of A Farewell to Arms, I am not
suggesting that it is the only or even the chief reason for
its lasting success.
139
the appeal of the novel, according to these later critics,
is based upon Hemingway's skillful use of symbols, arche
types, rituals, and myths that are not immediately discern
ible below the surface realism of his prose. In short,
Hemingway's realism cannot alone explain the peculiar appeal
of A Farewell to Arms.
The controversy between Carlos Baker and E. M. Halliday
on Hemingway's use of symbolism serves to dramatize con
trasting views of Hemingway. Baker believes that Hemingway
is, to a great extent, a symbolist who has created a kind of
symbolic sub-structure for A Farewell to Arms, whereas
Halliday contends that Hemingway remains primarily a real-
3
ist. In analyzing the presence of a basic recurring symbol
(that of the symbolic road) this study will assume a posi
tion closer to Baker's view of Hemingway than to Halliday's.
Before proceeding to explore the possibility of still
another recurring symbol (in addition to the mountain-plain
symbolic polarity) which enters into the sub-structure of
the novel, one must briefly discuss the context in which
that symbol functions.
3
See E. M. Halliday, "Hemingway's Ambiguity and Irony,"
in Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert
P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), p. 71. Halliday
states unequivocally that Hemingway "with all his skillful
use of artistic ambiguity . . . remains the great realist
of twentieth-century American fiction." Baker, on the other
hand, thinks Hemingway is, to a great extent, a symbolist.
140
The Rhetorical Context
Although this chapter deals in the main with the sym
bolic aspects of A Farewell to Arms, particularly with the
concept of a symbolic sub-structure of symbolism, one should
constantly keep in mind the fact that symbols occur in con
text and must be explained in context; symbolism is only one
4
aspect of Hemingway's strategy. Neither Baker nor Halliday
deal much with the rhetorical context in which symbols func
tion; and this is an oversight that weakens their respective
analyses of the nature of symbolism in A Farewell to Arms.
To understand the nature of symbolism in that novel in rela
tion to the rhetoric of fiction, one must begin with the
central concern or concerns which that rhetoric supports.
Like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms to a great
5
extent embodies a search for values or for meaning. That
4
See Norman Friedman, "Criticism and the Novel; Hardy,
Hemingway, Crane, Woolf, Conrad, Antioch Review, XVII (Fall
1958), p. 344. Friedman, who appears to be a species of
Neo-Aristotelian critic, contends that one must understand
the "plot" of a novel primarily, "symbolic patterns and
meanings only secondarily." I cannot argue with his conten
tion, for the concept of "plot" is allied to the concept of
a rhetoric of fiction. The rhetoric of fiction is employed
to enhance the peculiar power latent in the "plot."
5
See Robert Penn Warren, Introduction to A Farewell to
Arms in Three Novels of Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1962),
p. xxx. Warren says that a central concern of A Farewell to
Arms is "the quest for meaning and certitude in a world that
seems to offer nothing of the sort." John McAleer,Jr., in
"A Farewell to Arms; Frederick Henry's Rejected Passion,"
Renascence (Winter 1961), p. 89, sees a "grail quest" in the
novel. James F. Light, in "The Religion of Death in A Fare
well to Arms," Modern Fiction Studies, VII (Summer 1961) ,
p. 169, thinks that the novel involves a sort of quest
141
search is made explicit in certain key interior monologues
in the latter novel:
There were many words that you could not stand to hear
and finally only the names of places had dignity. . . .
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow
were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the
number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and the dates. (p. 191)
If people bring so much courage to this world the world
has to break them, so of course it kills them. (p. 258)
You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told
you the rules and the first time they caught you off
base they killed you. (p. 338)
Moreover, these key interior monologues represent a movement
toward a completely nihilistic fatalism, a fatalism which is
revealed in a key metaphor dealing with ants burning to
death on the log of a campfire (p. 338). And it is this
nihilism and this fatalism which seems to be what Henry
finally discovers to be the ultimate "meaning" of life. It
is this process of discovery, of quest, which Hemingway's
rhetoric supports.
As with The Sun Also Rises, juxtapositions of charac
ters and scenes, for example, play an important part in
furthering the theme of a quest for meaning implicit in A
Farewell to Arms. The priest and Rinaldi, Henry's surgeon
friend in the army, thus present contrasting views of the
defined by four ideals of service: "The Priest, Gino,
Catherine, and Rinaldo do, however, live by the ideal of
service, and the dramatic tension of the novel is largely
based on Henry's wavering toward each ideal and eventual
rejection of all four." Many critics, in short, see the
theme of quest as central to the novel.
142
world: alternative views for Henry to accept, reject, or
merely confront. Rinaldi and Catherine also present con
trasting views of the world. Accordingly, when Hemingway
juxtaposes scenes in which Rinaldi and the priest make suc
cessive appearances (as they do, for instance, in Chapters X
and XI), he seems implicitly to confront Henry, the first-
person center of consciousness, with two contrasting views
of life. In Chapter II, two opposing ways of life are
dramatically depicted in the scene in the officers mess,
where the priest provides an obvious contrast to the irreli
gious, irreverent, and obscene banter of a lieutenant, a
captain, and a major; and when the major tells Henry to go
to the "centres of culture and civilization," whereas the
priest invites him to visit Abruzzi, both the contrast be
tween two ways of life and also the theme of a quest for
meaning are made almost explicit early in the novel (pp. 8-
9). Thematic contrasts, such as the "aware" versus the
"unaware," "Home" versus "Not-Home," or "war" versus "peace,"
emerge naturally from the structure of the novel because of
Hemingway's use of juxtapositions; and these thematic con
trasts are directly related to Henry's quest for meaning.
In the light of these many juxtapositions of characters and
scenes, juxtapositions which predispose one to think, or
See Warren, pp. xxxiv-xxxv. Warren thinks that the
world of A Farewell to Arms is divided into two groups, "the
initiate and the uninitiate, the aware and the unaware, the
disciplined and the undisciplined."
143
perhaps to "feel," in terms of contrarieties, both mountain
and plain take on contrasting symbolic meanings during the
course of the novel. Both the central concern of the novel
and also the many meaningful juxtapositions, which further
that concern, incline one to attach contrasting meanings to
mountain and plain. Hemingway's rhetoric shapes his symbol
ism; symbols emerge from his rhetoric.
Furthermore, the narrative perspective of a first-
person narrator in A Farewell to Arms telling of his expe
riences in retrospect would also serve to give specific
meanings to various persons, scenes, dialogues, and actions.
The first-person narrator in A Farewell to Arms looks back
ward in time, and in looking back he also imposes a meaning
ful pattern on his past experiences. The symbolic sub
structure would then seem to stem naturally from the nar
rator 's imposition of meaning upon the past. One should
realize, too, that the narrative perspective is closely
related to other aspects of the rhetoric of fiction, espe
cially of juxtaposition and emphasis; for the mind of the
narrator arranges the past in order to give meaning and
order to his life, and arrangement, in terms of fiction,
includes the elements of juxtaposition and emphasis.
It should be clearly emphasized that symbolism func
tions as an element of Hemingway's rhetoric, and that it is
clearly related to other elements of that rhetoric. Point
of view, juxtaposition, emphasis, dialogue, internal mono-
144
logue, description, choice of characters— all are elements
of his rhetoric; and all are closely related to his symbol
ism. One must always view Hemingway's symbolism in relation
to his total strategy.
If one keeps in mind the rhetorical context in which
symbols occur, the mountain and plain which Henry observes
in the very first paragraph of the novel takes on some
degree of symbolic importance. The mountain, certainly, is
a "traditional" symbol, but this fact does not necessarily
preclude its use in a kind of symbolic structure. And per
haps, too, the road, also depicted in the first paragraph of
the novel, is relevant and meaningful in terms of the cen
tral concern of the novel: Henry's quest for meaning.
The Road
Traditionally the symbolic road of life implies chiefly
an orderly and meaningful progression toward some goal. As
will be seen, however, Hemingway uses the road imagery in a
7
number of effective ways m A Farewell to Arms. And his
employment of the symbolic road is foreshadowed in his pre
vious works. In In Our Time, the image of the road, along
with that of the wall, helps to hold together what appears
to be a rather tenuously related series of sketches and
stories. In The Sun Also Rises, the symbolic road and
7
No critic, really, has discussed the extent and impor
tance of road symbolism in A Farewell to Arms.
145
symbolism associated with the road also play a noticeable
role: the wandering from place to place (symbolic of a
meaningless existence) in the opening Paris section of the
novel? Jake's taxi ride with the prostitute; Jake and Bill's
train ride with the pilgrims (clearly associated with a sort
of symbolic road); Jake and Bill's ride up the mountains to
go fishing; and finally Jake and Brett's aimless, direction
less taxi ride in the last chapter of the novel, a ride
which seems explicitly symbolic of the situation in which
Jake, Brett, and the "lost generation" find themselves.
Hemingway's comment on the "odor" of courage in Death
in the Afternoon would indicate that he was conscious of the
symbolic import of at least one kind of road:
If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the
smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or
the smell of the sea when the wind rips the tops from
the waves.®
The relevance of this passage from Death in the Afternoon to
an interpretation of A Farewell to Arms becomes fairly obvi
ous with one's reading of the two instances of frozen road
imagery in the novel. The image first occurs when Lieuten
ant Henry thinks about the highland country of Abruzzi to
which the priest, symbolic of the meaningful life, has in
vited him: "I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to
no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where
it was clear, cold and dry" (p. 13). The image recurs when
^Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1932), p. 263.
146
Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley are in Switzerland,
living in a "brown wooden house in the pine trees on the
side of a mountain":
Outside, in front of the chalet a road went up the moun
tain. The wheel ruts and ridges were iron hard with
frost and the road climbed steadily through the forest
and up and around the mountain to where there were
meadows. . . . (p. 299)
Clearly, the two allusions to a symbolic frozen road
serve to link the priest's Abruzzi with Henry and Catherine
Barkley’s idyllic stay in the highland country of the Swiss
Alps; and the fact that the frozen road outside the "brown
wooden house" is an ascending one to even higher country is
significant in that the road symbolism has thus, in this
instance, merged with the symbolism associated with altitude
and highland country. Furthermore, the symbolic road in
both highland countries, those of Abruzzi and of the Swiss
Alps, seems to imply that those two areas are symbolic in a
specific sense of love: the priest's love of God and human
ity and Catherine's and Frederick's love for each other.
But beyond that specific meaning, of course, those two areas
could also stand for those enduring human values that make
life meaningful; and thus Henry, in thinking of the high
country of Abruzzi and in finally reaching the Swiss Alps,
reveals one of the basic concerns of the novel: the
quest for values and for meaning in a chaotic world. In
Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway associates the frozen road
with courage; and although the specific meaning of the
symbolic frozen road in A Farewell to Arms has to do with
love, a more general meaning of the symbolic frozen road in
A Farewell to Arms would also comprehend a kind of courage.
The priest, in addition to loving mankind, exhibits great
moral courage in meeting the savage ridicule of the officers
at the mess (see pp. 6-10); and Catherine, in her love for
Henry, exhibits great courage also. In a retrospective pas
sage, previously mentioned, on the meaning of Catherine's
death, Henry inextricably links love and marriage when he
states that the world inevitably kills or breaks people who
are too courageous. Later still, Catherine, dying in child
birth, indirectly reveals the courage that has sustained her
love for Henry: "'I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm
broken. They've broken me. I know it now'" (p. 333). In a
larger sense the frozen road, along with the highland coun
try which those roads traverse, are symbolic of enduring
human values in general, those values which are so difficult
to locate in a dislocated world at war. The priest embodies
those values, Catherine embodies them; and Henry is in
9
search of them,
g
See Clinton Keeler, "A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway and
George Peele," MLN, LXXVI (March 1961), 623. Keeler says
there is an ironic contrast between the courtier of George
Peele's poem "A Farewell to Arms," who has recourse, fin
ally, to the "changeless values, duty, faith, and love"
(from the lines of Peele’s poem, "Beauty, strength, and
youth, flowers fading been / Duty, faith, and love are
roots, and ever green") and Frederick Henry, who cannot:
"The very structure of the novel follows Henry’s experience
of 'duty, faith, and love.' Each in turn fails to yield any
universal meaning."
148
But there are other hinds of roads in A Farewell to
Arms; and in fact the novel is filled with road symbolism
that has directly to do with the development of the novel.
In the very first paragraph containing the mountain-plain
symbolic contrast so important, according to Carlos Baker,
to the structure of the novel, there is also the symbolic
road which is just as pervasive:
. . . and we saw troops marching along the road and the
dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling
and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare
and white except for the leaves. (p. 3)
In the fall of that year, furthermore, troops who "marched
as though they were six months gone with child" are moving
on the same road, which is now muddy. The point to be made
is that the dusty road, "bare and white," seems symbolic of
man's mortal state. The falling leaves combined with the
evanescent quality of the troops' first appearing and then
disappearing, leaving the road "white and bare" and abso
lutely devoid of life, would seem to make that road even
more symbolic of the mortality of life. Dust in itself
would be symbolic of death. And that dusty road of the
first paragraph recurs in Chapter VII when Henry meets an
American in the Italian army, a straggler from a passing
regiment, by the side of the road. The American, who has
slipped his truss to induce a rupture, sits down "beside the
road" which Henry describes as "white and dusty." The man's
sitting beside the road is symbolic both of man's mortal
state, his human weaknesses and derelictions of duty, and
149
also of a "farewell to arms" prefiguring Henry's later
desertion.
The symbolic road, moreover, demarcates important sec
tions of the novel. Before he is wounded, Henry drives his
ambulance along an ascending road, from which he sees the
"third range of mountains, higher snow mountains, that
looked chalky and white" (p. 48), mountains which Carlos
Baker finds particularly worthy of note in supporting his
concept of a mountain-plain symbolic polarity in the struc
ture of the novel.^ Later the Caporetto retreat, which
embodies an extended and elaborate road symbolism, results
in Henry's desertion from the army. And later still Henry
and Catherine Barkley's crossing the lake over to Switzer
land, where the idyllic last scenes of the novel take
place, represents a kind of road symbolism that has, in
fact, been adumbrated by the figures of the soldiers "six
months gone with child" marching on the muddy road depicted
in the short opening paragraph of the novel.
In addition to serving as symbolic demarcations, a
kind of road symbolism also serves to sum up certain spe
cific feelings, thoughts, or attitudes at specific places in
the novel. Thus the leisurely, bitter-sweet, idyllic qual
ity of Henry's convalescence, together with his love affair
with Catherine Barkley in Milan, is captured in the image
^See Baker, p. 103.
150
of carriage rides in the park:
We had a lovely time that summer. When I could go out
we rode in a carriage in the park. I remember the car
riage, the horse going slowly, and up ahead the back of
the driver with his varnished high hat, and Catherine
Barkley sitting beside me. (p. 116)
Later, that pleasant image of their taking slow carriage
rides through the park takes on new meaning when, on their
last night together, Henry hears a motor car honk and is
moved to quote from Marvell: "1 But at my back I always
hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near.' Symboli
cally the carriage ride has accelerated to represent not
leisure but the inexorable passage of time. The leisurely
carriage rides through the park could symbolize the quality
of life in a saner, peaceful world. Perhaps, too, the
motor car, in contrast to the image of the slowly moving
carriage, could represent not only war itself but also the
radically anti-romantic mechanization of a war in which val
ues that once inhered in abstract words like "glory, honor
or courage" have lost all meaning. Catherine, one recalls,
had thought that her fiance would get wounded in a romanti
cally picturesque way: "'With a saber cut, I suppose, and
a bandage around the head. Or shot through the shoulder.
See Donna Gerstenberger, "The Wasteland in A Farewell
to Arms, MLN, LXXVI {January 1961), 24-25. Donna Gersten
berger sees in the juxtaposition of a motor car horn and the
poem by Marvell an allusion to the lines from Eliot's The
Waste Land: "But at my back from time to time I hear / The
sound of motors." In a sense, then, Hemingway's novel could
concern a search for meaning in the wasteland of modern
society.
151
Something picturesque.’" Instead Catherine's fiance had
been killed horribly in an impersonal, mechanized war: "He
didn't have a saber cut. They blew him to bits" (p. 20).
The slow carriage rides in the park thus seem to become,
appropriately, symbolic not only of a poignant and rather
gallant stand against inexorable time but also of a stubborn
adherence to certain anachronistic values associated with a
romantic view of life. In an indirect way, A Farewell to
Arms is a radically romantic novel: "When I saw her I was
in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me"
(p. 95).
Yet another example of road symbolism employed to sum
up a feeling, thought, or attitude occurs in Chapter XX, at
the San Siro race track. Here, Catherine and Lieutenant
Henry bet on a crooked race, hoping to win at odds of
thirty-five to one; but at the last minute the odds are re
duced to two to one, and they do not win the small fortune
they had expected. Afterwards, they back a horse that
finishes fourth in a field of five, and Catherine announces
she feels "so much cleaner" for having bet on an apparently
honest race:
We backed a horse name Light For Me that finished fourth
in a field of five. We leaned on that fence and watched
the hoofs thudding as they went past, and saw the moun
tains off in the distance. (p. 138)
In this instance of a species of road symbolism, one finds
elements of competition and beauty, just as one finds them
in real life. And Catherine's feeling much cleaner after
152
losing, although a bit hypocritical after their having bet
on what they suspected to be a crooked race, indicates her
belief that honor and honesty should not be casualties in
the frenetic competition on the "road of life11--a road
which, in this instance at any rate, is circular and which
thus brings one back exactly to where he has begun. Accord
ingly they forget about the fortune that has failed to
materialize and are content just to watch the horses racing
by and the eternal mountains beyond, mountains which one
associates with the values inhering in a meaningful life.
There are, of course, other instances of road symbolism
used to sum up an attitude or state of mind. When, for
example, Henry goes to a restaurant to eat after staying for
a while at the hospital where Catherine is soon to die in
childbirth, Hemingway has him walk "down the empty street to
the cafe." Later, after eating, Henry sees refuse cans lin
ing the street: "Outside along the street were the refuse
cans from the houses waiting for the collector" (p. 325).
Obviously the "empty" street and the refuse lined street are
very much like "isolated" symbols that reveal Henry's feel
ings at a particular moment. After again going out to eat,
he finds, while returning to the hospital, that "The street
was all clean now" (p. 329). And the clean street here
seems prelusive of Catherine's death, which, in fact,
occurs just a few pages later; the clean street implies,
that is, a death which completely obliterates the possibil-
153
ities of life with Catherine, which brings to an irrevocable
conclusion a period in the life of Henry.
Road Symbolism in the Depiction
of the Caporetto Retreat
It would serve no useful purpose to mention all the
instances of road imagery in A Farewell to Arms. However,
a brief analysis of how road symbolism functions in a par
ticular section of the novel would reveal that road symbol
ism is indeed important.
The Caporetto retreat takes place in Book III, which
opens with an allusion to a symbolic road: "Now in the fall
the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy" (p. 169).
The retreat itself is described in Chapters XXVII, XXVIII,
XXIX, and XXX; and part of the effectiveness of its depic
tion is due to the road symbolism that informs both the
novel as a whole and that depiction in particular. In the
very first chapter of the novel, the soldiers who march by
the "house in the village" on the dusty road, "bare and
white," and then on the muddy road prefigure the Caporetto
retreat. The retreat itself, reminiscent of the retreat in
12
In Our Time, becomes a sort of road symbol. That the
12
See H. K. Russell, "The Catharsis in A Farewell to
Arms," Modern Fiction Studies, I (August 1955), 27. Russell
thinks that the retreat is a symbol of a "world order," the
discovery of which is instrumental in effecting the cathar
sis peculiar to the impact of the novel. Warren thinks that
the "confused world" appears as a symbol in the "routed army
at Caporetto" (see his introduction to A Farewell to Arms,
pp. xxxiv-xxxv). It is Hemingway's use of road symbolism,
154
retreat takes place during an almost continuous fall of
rain and on muddy roads seems to symbolize the difficulties
of life and the horrors of war. The road symbolism inform
ing the depiction of the Caporetto retreat helps, moreover,
to make concrete the picture of a society in utter chaos.
That the road symbolism helps to make the description
coherent and effective can be readily seen in a close exam
ination of the pertinent chapters. As if to emphasize the
importance of road symbolism to his depiction of the re
treat, Hemingway begins three of the four chapters dealing
directly with the retreat with allusions to some sort of
road: "As we moved out through the town it was empty in the
rain and the dark except for columns of troops and guns that
were going through the main street" (p. 201, the first sen
tence of Chapter XXVIII); "At noon we were stuck in a muddy
road about, as nearly as we could figure, ten kilometres
from Udine" (p. 210, the first sentence in Chapter XXXIX);
"Later we were on a road that led to a river" (p. 216, first
sentence in Chapter XXX). And in Chapter XXVII, the fifth
sentence, if not the very first, has an allusion to a "new
steep road" (p. 187). Moreover, the two chapters which
close Book III, Chapters XXXI and XXXII, begin with allu
sions to species of road symbolism. Chapter XXXI begins
however, that helps to make the Caporetto retreat so effec
tively symbolic of a chaotic "world order" or of a "con
fused world."
155
with Henry in the currents of the Tagliamento River. Chap
ter XXXII opens with Henry on the flatcar of a railroad
train to Milan: "Lying on the floor of flat-car with the
guns beside me under the canvas I was wet, cold and very
hungry" (p. 240). Furthermore, six of the seven chapters of
Book III, chapters which lead up to the Caporetto retreat,
describe the retreat itself, and then center on Henry's per
sonal retreat from the war, have opening sentences which
allude to some kind of road symbolism.
Just as Huck1s journey down the Mississippi serves to
give coherence to Huckleberry Finn, so does road symbolism
serve to unify the action depicted in the Caporetto retreat
section of A Farewell to Arms. However, the achievement of
a merely structural coherence is not the only reason for the
effectiveness of the symbolic road. Hemingway's use of the
road symbolism underlying the depiction of the retreat is
effective partly because it takes artistic advantage of the
traditional connotations of that symbolism. That is to say,
Hemingway juxtaposes the traditional implications of road
symbolism with his own implications. The result is a par
ticularly effective counterpoint of traditional associations
and private, personal associations inhering in the identical
13
image of the road. Hemingway thus succeeds in imparting an
13
See William Glasser, "Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, "
Explicator, XX (October 1961), item 18. Glasser makes the
interesting point that Hemingway plays upon the traditional
associations of the four seasons in order to reveal man's
156
apparently pristine vigor to an old, shopworn symbol. Tra
ditionally the symbolic road of life implies, as stated
earlier, a meaningful progression toward some goal. For his
depiction of the Caporetto retreat, however, Hemingway uses
road symbolism to express ideas in direct contrast to its
traditional associations: chaos rather than order; meaning
less rather than meaning.
How does Hemingway accomplish this rather admirable
feat? One realizes, first of all, that rain has been used
14
in the novel as a symbol of death and futility. In fact,
in the very brief first chapter of the novel Hemingway
introduces not only a symbolic mountain and a symbolic road
but also a symbolic rain: "At the start of the winter came
the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But
it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it
in the army" (p. 4). Later, Catherine tells Henry that she
doesn't like the rain because she sees herself dead in it:
"'All right. I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see
"chaotic world of love and war": "His spring becomes the
beginning of death; his summer, a flourishing death; his
fall, a waning death; his winter, a dull anaesthetized life,
waiting for the renewal of death." This is an interesting
point which I shall later develop relative to other aspects
of Hemingway's "traditional" symbolism.
14
Glasser, p. 28. Glasser says, "Rain is the most
obvious symbol in the novel." Baker sees rain as a "symbol
of disaster" (Hemingway, p. 95). Cowley, too, has written
that "in A Farewell to Arms the rain becomes a conscious
symbol of disaster" (see "Nightmare and Ritual," in Heming
way: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 46).
157
me dead in it'" {p. 131). And it is raining when Henry
leaves Catherine for the front. One cannot say much that is
original about the uses of rain in the novel; the rain is
rather obviously symbolic. At any rate, when that lugubri
ously symbolic rain is combined with the symbolic road in
the description of the Caporetto retreat, the traditional
connotations of road symbolism cannot help being greatly
modified. The muddy roads throughout the Caporetto retreat
represent a coalescence of symbolic rain and symbolic road.
Within the context of the road symbolism informing the
depiction of the Caporetto retreat, there occur, moreover,
incidents and scenes which contrast with the traditional
connotations of that symbolism. The disorder that exists on
Hemingway's road, as opposed to the meaningful order chiefly
implied by the traditional road, is made apparent, for
example, in his juxtapositions of the two kinds of women, or
girls, whom Henry encounters on the road: prostitutes and
virgins. In GoriziaHenry and his crew of ambulance men come
upon the evacuation of a brothel: "As we came up the street
they were loading the girls from the soldiers' whorehouse
into a truck" (p. 195). A few pages later, in Chapter
XXVIII, Henry and his crew pick up two virgin sisters, one
of whom "looked about sixteen" (p. 202). In his artful jux
taposition of whores and virgins, Hemingway seems implicitly
to express the disorder and chaos of the retreat, of war, or
perhaps of modern life itself. And he makes, moreover, an
158
explicit comment on the disorder caused by war when he has
Henry think, "A retreat was no place for two virgins. Real
virgins. Probably very religious. If there were no war we
would probably all be in bed" (p. 204). And as if to empha
size the point about the disorder and chaos of war, Heming
way has Henry allude, in the form of a stream-of-conscious-
ness interior monologue, to an anonymous English lyric of
the sixteenth century: "Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well,
it blew and it wasn't the small rain but the big rain down
that rained. . . . Well, we were all in it" (p. 204). Here
Hemingway seems to be saying that tradition, order, and
peace, as symbolized by that lovely lyric, no longer exist;
the benign "small rain" of more tranquil times, of tradi
tion, of peace, or order, has become the "big rain" of dis
ease, disorder, and death. And "everyone," according to
Henry, "was caught in it and the small rain would not quiet
it." That is to say, old beliefs, old traditions (the
"small rain") are no longer viable, no longer effective, no
longer cohesive in a society so radically chaotic. The
benign "small rain" has turned into its opposite in much the
same way that the traditional road symbol has taken on new
and contrasting meanings.15
15
See Charles Anderson, "Hemingway's Other Style," MLN,
LXXVI (May 1961) , 439. Anderson views the distinction be
tween the "big rain" and the "small rain" in the following
way: "there is . . . a great distinction between the 'big
rain' symbolizing the general destruction of war and the
'small rain' that merely plagued their love without
159
One also notices that within the context of road sym
bolism— the Caporetto retreat itself is a road symbol— Henry
encounters scenes which in themselves are brilliant images
of a disordered society:
In the night many peasants had joined the column from
the roads of the country and in the column there were
carts loaded with house-hold goods; there were mirrors
projecting up between mattresses and chickens and ducks
tied to carts. There was a sewing machine on the cart
ahead of us in the rain. . . . On some carts the women
sat huddled from the rain. . . . There were dogs now in
the column. . . . The road was muddy. ..." (p. 205).
These brilliantly etched vignettes depicting the chaotic
conditions of the retreat contrast sharply with the tradi
tional associations of the symbolic road. The context of
road imagery helps to unite the individual scenes; and the
very brilliance of the scenes, obviously, make vivid the
picture of a dislocated society implicit in that imagery.
There is still another way in which Hemingway modifies
the traditional connotations of the "road of life"; he does
so by allusions to symbolic "side roads" that lead off from
the main road of the retreat. Seeing that the main road has
become impassable, Henry plans to leave it: "I knew we were
going to have to get off the main road some way and go
across country if we ever hoped to reach Udine" (p. 205);
dampening it." This interpretation strikes me as valid;
however, it does not necessarily invalidate my interpreta
tion of the distinction between both kinds of rain. Ander
son, of course, points out that Hemingway alludes, in this
passage, to an English lyric of the sixteenth century.
160
and he searches for a side road:
I got down from the car and worked up the road a way
looking for a place we could take across country. I
knew there were many side roads but did not want one
that would lead to nothing. (p. 206)
But when Henry and his crew find a side road to take, he
discovers, ironically, that the road does lead to "nothing";
and, even more ironically, Henry finds eventually that all
his experiences lead to "nothing." After becoming stuck in
a "muddy road" ten kilometres from Udine, Henry finds him
self taking other "side roads," a bewildering maze of side
roads that lead eventually to the death of Aymo, whom Henry
"had liked . . . as well as anyone," and his own close
escape from death by execution. The main road is impassable,
but the side roads, too, are difficult to negotiate. By
contrasting the futile "main road" of life with the equally
futile "side roads," Hemingway underscores that much more
the utter hopelessness of life on that "main road."
Henry's choice of the side road is meaningful, and the
roads themselves are meaningful. And Hemingway, in his con
stant references to side roads, often in direct contrast to
the main road, skillfully defines and develops the symbolic
force latent in the image of those side roads: "I knew
there were many side-roads. . . . I could not remember them
because we had always passed them bowling along in the car
on the main road and they all looked much alike" (p. 206);
"I looked back down the road . . . and saw the road, the
hedges, the fields and the line of trees along the main road
161
where the retreat was passing" (p. 207); "we had heard
planes coming and had heard them bombing on the main high
road. We had worked through a network of secondary roads
and had taken many roads that were blind" (p. 210); "When we
came to the road which led back to the main highway, I
pointed it out to the two girls" (p. 213); "To the north was
the main road . . . to the south there was a small branch
road. . . . We could avoid the main line of the retreat by
keeping to the secondary roads. . . . I knew there were
plenty of side-roads across the plain." And when, in fact,
Hemingway feels moved to express in explicit terms the utter
chaos of the retreat, he does so by having Henry comment on
a world so confused that it is unable to distinguish between
the main road and a secondary one: "The whole bloody thing
is crazy. Down below they blow up a little bridge. Here
they leave a bridge on the main road" (p. 218). The sheer
number of allusions to side roads, branch roads, and sec
ondary roads would alone lead one to suspect that those
roads have symbolic dimensions. But when Hemingway artfully
juxtaposes side roads and main road, revealing both to be
futile, chaotic, and "blind," then one can, perhaps, feel
justified in suggesting that the novelist has employed road
imagery in a meaningful way, as symbols of a "confused
world" (Warren's term for the symbolic meaning of the
Caporetto retreat).
162
Relative to the novel as a whole, Henry's getting off
the "main road," moreover, looks back to the American sol
dier sitting by the side of the dusty road in Chapter VII
and looks forward to his total alienation from society in
Switzerland with Catherine. In deserting the army and going
off to Switzerland, Henry goes off on a side road, away from
the mass of people on the main road; but he finds, figura
tively speaking, that even the side road is futile and that
even individual efforts at salvation apart from the mass are
fruitless. Switzerland, in a figurative sense, is a side
road, too; and this side road, like the ones in the Capo
retto retreat, leads to "nothing" and is "blind." The
frozen road in Switzerland (the road symbolic of love, cour
age, and perhaps of all "enduring" values), with its appear
ance of durability, has eventually to melt and become a
muddy road like the ones Henry encountered on the Caporetto
retreat.
Finally, the two variations on the road of life symbol
in the Caporetto retreat section of the novel, the river and
the railroad flatcar, subtly emphasize the impotence of men
and thus, implicitly, the futility of life; for in both the
river, in which one is moved along by the current, and on
the flatcar, one has lost, to a great extent, the ability to
direct one's physical movements. One has become passive,
permitting current or rails to determine one's goals. Book
III ends with Henry in a prone position on the flatcar, a
163
position symbolic of his impotence. If the mountain-plain
symbol is indeed a part of the symbolic sub-structure of A
Farewell to Arms, certainly the symbolic road (the dusty
road, the muddy road, the main road, the side road, the
secondary road, the blind road, and the frozen road) is just
as intrinsically a part of that sub-structure. And when
Henry wants to describe his feelings after Catherine's
resumption of night duty at the Milan hospital, the road
symbolism implicit in the "sub-structure" of the novel sud
denly emerges in the form of explicit statement: "It was as
though we met again after each of us had been away for a
long journey" (p. 115). The road symbolism is implicit, one
notices, in the original conclusion of A Farewell to Arms,
in which Henry speaks of "going on with the rest of life--
which has gone on and seems likely to go on for a long time"
and in which, in the very next paragraph, he continues to
say, "Everything blunts and the world keeps on. It never
stops. It never stops for you." One has, in the original
conclusion, a sense of the futility of life expressed in
terms of motion directed toward no meaningful end.
In one sense, then, what Henry learns at the end of his
symbolic road is a kind of nihilistic fatalism. In another
sense, though, he learns the meaning of values like love,
faith, and courage, that without these values life loses
whatever meaning it may be capable of sustaining. At the
beginning of the novel, Henry comments upon what the priest
164
"had always known": "He had always known what I did not
know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to for
get. But I did not know that then, although I learned it
later" (p. 14). When Henry sees the corpse of Catherine on
the last page of the novel, his reactions reveal the impor
tance of the spiritual as opposed to the material dimensions
of life: "It was like saying good-bye to a statue" (p. 343).
Without the spark of life which creates values, the human
being is meaningless, a statue. And it is, at least in
part, the spiritual dimensions of life about which he learns
in the course of the novel. But Henry, although he has
begun to realize the importance of the spiritual as opposed
to the material dimensions of life, learns also that life
can be meaningless and irrational; for even a person like
Catherine Barkley, who has exemplified the values of love
and courage, dies a totally unmerited and, in a sense, an
"irrational" death. And thus, together with his realization
of the importance of spiritual values, Henry also learns of
the futility, the precariousness, of the life that sustains
those values. Catherine dies when he has begun to realize
the importance of the values she embodies; hence his sense
16
of complete devastation at the close of the novel.
16
See Robert W. Lewis, Jr., Hemingway on Love (Austin,
1965), pp. 50-54. Lewis suggests (I think I am accurately
summarizing the burden of his argument) that what Henry
learns "later" is the perniciousness of romantic love: "Her
death carries the hope with it of the destruction of her
destructive love that excludes the world, that in its very
165
Because this chapter has dealt for the most part with
the kind of recurring symbol that enters into the sub
structure of a novel, it slighted the "isolated" symbol.
However, a good example of a species of "isolated" symbol,
good in that it seems to sum up Henry's feelings toward the
close of the novel, is the well-noted metaphor of the ants
on a burning log:
Once in a camp I put a log on top of the fire and it
was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants
swarmed out and went first toward the centre where the
fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When
there was enough on the end they fell off into the fire.
Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went
off not knowing where they were going. But most of them
went toward the fire and then back toward the end and
swarmed at the cool end and finally fell off into the
fire. (p. 338)
The ants behave very much as Henry and his crew behaved
on the side roads of the Caporetto retreat. This metaphor
denial of self possesses selfishly" (p. 54). This view has
much to recommend it. However, it also seems to me that
much of the impact of the novel would be lost if this is
indeed what Henry learns. Henry, that is, feels the futil
ity of life toward the end of the novel precisely because he
has lost Catherine Barkley, an embodiment of love, faith,
and courage; part of what Henry learns involves a movement
from lust to "true" love. It is only fair to point out,
though, that Lewis views A Farewell to Arms in the context of
an interplay between the concepts of romance, eros, and
agape, which implies the "renunciation of narcissistic
satisfactions and the final stage of an ever-increasing ca
pacity for love" (Lewis, p. 5). According to Lewis the body
of Hemingway’s fiction reveals a movement away from romantic
love toward the achievement of agape on the part of the
Hemingway hero in the novelist's later works. Henry's learn
ing about the perniciousness or romantic love would thus
accord with Lewis's view of a movement in Hemingway's fic
tion toward the achievement of agape on the part of the
novelist's successive protagonists.
166
would be rather obvious and trite were it not for the fact
that Hemingway has shown that the "side-roads" of the
Caporetto retreat section of the novel have led, finally,
to "nothing." Moreover, the metaphor of the ants reinforces
the symbolic dimensions of the road imagery in the Caporetto
retreat; those roads indeed symbolized futility. Heming
way's use of road imagery in the Caporetto retreat in great
measure helps to create a picture of a "confused world." If
the Mountain and the Plain define the symbolic context, the
symbolic boundaries, within which Henry's quest takes place,
the image of the road symbolizes the quest itself in all its
various aspects.
Hemingway's Early Period
Many readers of A Farewell to Arms have recognized the
power and the brilliance of Hemingway's description of the
Caporetto retreat, but few are aware of the subtle use of
road symbolism that helps to make that description so coher
ent and effective a piece of writing. Hemingway, in his
early period, manipulates his symbols in just such subtle
ways. The reader is rarely aware of Hemingway's symbols,
for they work invariably on subliminal levels of the mind.
Part of the effectiveness of Hemingway's unobtrusive symbol
ism, moreover, is due to his sustained and consistent use of
traditional symbols to further the central concerns of his
novels. Just as Hemingway implicitly contrasts the real
characters of Brett Ashley, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero with
167
the stereotypes of the national, religious, or professional
groups to which they belong, so does he skillfully juxtapose
traditional associations of symbols with associations pecul
iar to his artistic purposes. Thus the mountains are tra
ditionally symbols of majestic calm, of peace, of glorious
isolation, and Hemingway uses these associations in fairly
direct ways in A Farewell to Arms; but he reveals, too, that
these mountains, symbolic of the good life, can be violated:
that fighting can occur in the mountains; that even the
Alps, the final refuge of Frederick Henry and Catherine
Barkley, are not barriers to the radical disorder and vio
lence of society; and thus that these mountains, on a deeper
level of one's consciousness, can also be symbolic of a
world in chaos. As has been pointed out, a juxtaposition of
traditional associations and of associations peculiar to the
needs of Hemingway's rhetoric inhere also in the road sym
bolism informing A Farewell to Arms. And one observes, too,
that Hemingway's use of these "traditional" symbols does not
17
usually clash with the surface realism of his prose.
17
See Caroline Gordon, "Notes on Hemingway and Kafka,"
Sewanee Review, LVIII (April-June 1949), 226. In comparing
Kafka and Hemingway, Caroline Gordon comments upon one of
the strengths of Hemingway's art, which she thinks lies in
his use of "natural symbolism" (p. 220). She then goes on
to comment upon what she considers a weakness in Hemingway's
kind of symbolism as opposed to Kafka’s: "In his stories,
as in Kafka's, action is often symbolic, that is, symbolism
provides another plane of action. But this plane of action
is for him a slipping sub-stratum glimpsed intermittently."
But the strength of Hemingway's symbolism, really, is that
168
In his early period Hemingway achieves a nearly perfect
integration of all the elements of his rhetoric of fiction.
Internal monologues, descriptions, point of view, emphasis,
choice of characters, juxtaposition of scenes and charac
ters— all work together to make explicit Jake Barnes' quest
for values and Frederick Henry's search for meaning. In his
early period, his symbolism is unobtrusive and directly re
lated to his central concerns. Using traditional symbols
in new ways, for example, reveals in the very use a concern
for finding new meanings and values in a world cut off from
its traditional heritage. Using traditional symbols in jux
taposition to the disorder of society (the use of the sym
bolic earth in The Sun Also Rises, for instance) can also be
directly related to the search for values or meaning in a
chaotic world.
It should be mentioned, finally, that the first-person
point of view, in which both novels of Hemingway's early
period are written, is closely related to the other elements
of Hemingway's rhetoric and to his central concerns. The
effective functioning of the first-person point of view in
his early novels will be more clearly illustrated relative
to analyses of To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell
Tolls, novels in his middle period in which Hemingway experi
ments with multiple points of view.
it doesn't have necessarily to be "glimpsed" at all--even
intermittently; it is there, and it is felt by the reader.
CHAPTER V
SYMBOL AND RHETORIC IN THE MIDDLE PERIOD:
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
If Jake Barnes' situation at the end of The Sun Also
Rises was that of an alienation from a society represented
by the Paris Bohemian set, Frederick Henry's situation at
the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms was that of an even
more profound alienation from all society. Henry, indeed,
felt himself at odds not only with society but also with a
seemingly indifferent universe in which the lives of men are
as meaningless, doomed, or subject to capricious chance as
are the lives of ants trapped on the burning log of a camp
fire (A Farewell to Arms, pp. 338-339). Henry, at least
tentatively, felt himself completely alienated from the im
personal "they" that had destroyed Catherine Barkley. In
the first period of Hemingway's career as a novelist, his
heroes thus adopted a stance in opposition to society, an
opposition which can be discerned even in Green Hills of
Africa (1934), a work published approximately five years
after the publication of A Farewell to Arms:
If you serve time for society, democracy, and the
other things quite young, and declining any further en
listment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you
169
170
exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for
something you can never feel in any other way than by
yourself. (p. 100)
Despite the seemingly adamant isolation from society on
the part of both Hemingway and the Hemingway hero in the
novelist's early period, that hero, in the succeeding middle
period, moved back toward society and "the comforting stench
of comrades."'*' For reasons which will be discussed later,
despite the heroes' praiseworthy recognition of society, the
two novels of the middle period, To Have and Have Not and
For Whom the Bell Tolls, are probably not as artistically
successful as the two novels of the early period. To Have
and Have Not is an interesting failure, and For Whom the
Bell Tolls is an ambitiously conceived and complex work that
does not quite achieve the greatness which its conception
demands. This chapter and the succeeding one will suggest
reasons for the flaws in both novels.
Although critics may not be in complete agreement on
the reasons for the failure of To Have and Have Not, they do
tend to be in general accord as to its theme or themes.
Carlos Baker believes that Hemingway conceived the theme of
the novel to be the "decline of the individual." He also
suggests that the novel, like A Farewell to Arms, is a
^See Ray West, "Ernest Hemingway: Death in the Evening,"
Antioch Review, IX (1944), 576. West suggests the meaning
of the movement back into society in the following terms:
"The suggestion is, then, that Hemingway has found some
value in Robert Jordan's death that was not present in the
death of Catherine, an idea that was neglected by the lost
generation."
171
"study in doom," that its protagonist Morgan represents "the
type of the old self-reliant individualist confronted by an
2
ever-encroachxng social restraint." In his study of
Hemingway, Robert Lewis suggests that the theme of the novel
is that "man alone, the loveless man, has no chance, and
3
further that eros, the love of a woman is not enough."
Phillip Young is generally in accord with Baker and Lewis as
to the theme or "message" of the novel, and he goes on to
suggest a weakness in the novel: "The contrast between the
Haves and the Have Nots in the novel, which is really struc
ture and support for the whole book and message, is uncon-
, , 4
vincing.
What Young suggests, to this reader at any rate, is
that Hemingway was confused as to the controlling central
concern of his novel, that Hemingway employed his strategy
to build up a contrast between the Haves and Have Nots at
the expense of obscuring the "message" of the novel; and
this "message," according to Young, is embodied in Morgan's
last words about a man alone having "no bloody chance" (see
Young, p. 71). What Young does not state explicitly is that
the contrast he mentions may be unconvincing because it is
not closely enough related to the "message." That is to
2
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (New York, 1952),
pp. 204, 211.
3
Hemingway on Love (Austin, Tex., 1965), p. 116.
4
Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952), p. 72.
172
say, structure does not support meaning; rhetoric does not
sustain the theme of the novel.
"Story" and Plot of To Have and Have Not
The "story" of To Have and Have Not deals with a year
in the life of Harry Morgan, a charter-boat fisherman who,
because of economic necessity, involves himself successively
in the illegal transportation of Chinese from Cuba to the
United States, in the smuggling of liquor, and finally in
the transporting of Cuban revolutionaries from Key West to
Cuba. During the last adventure, Morgan kills the revolu
tionaries, who have just robbed a bank in Key West; but one
of the Cubans, before he dies, mortally wounds Morgan. As
opposed to the simple "story" of Harry Morgan, the plot of
the novel represents an attempt to make manifest the central
concern of the novel: Morgan's realization, just before he
dies, that "a man alone ain't got no bloody chance.A
weakness in the novel is that Hemingway does not clearly see
that a quest for meaning has to be the overriding and cen
tral concern of the novel; it has to be the central concern
because Morgan's final awareness of the individual's need
for society almost demands such a concern. The obscuring of
this central concern is a radical weakness in the novel.
Although the novel contains passages that are as good
as anything Hemingway has written, it is, finally, a failure
~*To Have and Have Not (New York, 1937), p. 225.
173
because the novelist has not succeeded in integrating the
various elements of his rhetoric of fiction to sustain the
central concern of the novel: Morgan's realization that a
sort of frontier individualism is now an anachronism. Be
cause Hemingway has lost sight of what should be the central
concern of his novel, he is not able to integrate the ele
ments of his rhetoric in a meaningful way; and he fails, as
a result, to achieve that unity of plot in which theme,
character, and an arrangement of events have coalesced to
form an organic, artistic whole.
The Defects of To Have and Have Not
Unlike his two earlier novels, which were written en
tirely and consistently in the first person point of view,
To Have and Have Not is written from varying points of view:
first person, third person with unity of focus, and third
person with shifting focus. Thus events in Part One ("Harry
Morgan--Spring") are narrated by Morgan in the first person;
events in Part Two ("Harry Morgan— Autumn") are narrated in
the third person; and events in Part Three ("Harry Morgan—
Winter") are narrated in a combination of the third and
first persons, Chapter IX, for example, being narrated in
the first person by Albert, Morgan's friend. If Hemingway’s
purpose is solely that of enhancing the stature of Morgan,
g
he has to a degree succeeded. After presenting an inside
0
See S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1961),
p. 81. Sanderson says of Hemingway's use of varying points
174
view of Morgan in Part One by means of the first-person nar
rative, Hemingway, in subsequently employing shifting points
of view (in both the first and third persons), manages not
only to present a rounded picture of his central figure but
also a semi-heroic one. His stature as a "Have" in contrast
to the "Have Nots" is clearly defined.
The shifting third person serves to enhance the hero's
stature in Part Two when Henry Morgan, wounded badly in one
arm, returns with a load of liquor and a shattered boat from
Cuba. After having described the action through the limited
third-person view of Morgan, Hemingway suddenly shifts the
narrative focus to Captain Willie Adams who, with an impor
tant politician on board his boat, notices Morgan's boat
moored close to the shore. Adams, who later refuses to help
the important politician apprehend Morgan, thinks of Morgan
in the following terms: "That boy's got cojones. Damned if
I'd cross on a night like last night. He must have got that
whole blow. . . . Damned if I'd ever run liquor from Cuba"
(p. 78). In addition to learning that Morgan has been
smuggling liquor, the reader learns also of what Adams
thinks of Morgan. Still another instance of the way in
of view: "By presenting Harry Morgan from these multiple
viewpoints he adds dimensions and complexity to our knowl
edge of the hero." Sanderson does not point out, however,
that Hemingway's use of various points of view works against
the furthering of the central concern of the novel:
Morgan's learning that "a man alone ain't got no bloody
. . . chance."
175
which a shifting point of view serves to enhance Morgan’s
stature occurs in Chapter IX, narrated in the first person
by Albert. After Albert tells of Morgan's attempt to per
suade him to become a partner in an illegal passage to Cuba
(the transporting of the Cuban revolutionaries), he presents
another view of Morgan's character: "He was mean talking
now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity
for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either"
(p. 98). Finally, in a first-person inner monologue that
verges on the stream of consciousness technique Marie Morgan
thinks of her dead husband; and in her thoughts she reveals
still another view of Morgan: "Him, like he was snotty and
strong, and like some kind of expensive animal. It would
always get me just to watch him move" (p. 258).
Hemingway, in short, succeeds in enhancing the stature
of Morgan, but an element of the rhetoric of fiction to
which he has recourse in doing so (the employment of varying
points of view) works against a clarification of the central
concern: Morgan's realization that "a man alone ain't got
7
no bloody . . . chance." To sustain a central concern of
that sort, the first-person point of view, or the third-
person with unity of focus (the point of view James employs
7
Sanderson, p. 81. Sanderson realizes that Morgan's
last words represent one of the central concerns of the
novel: "From here it is but a step to John Donne's seven
teenth Devotion, on the individual's involvement in man
kind. . . ."
176
with great success in The Ambassadors), would probably have
been more appropriate and effective, for either point of
view would have made vivid and immediate the process by
which Morgan achieves his sudden illumination as to the
relationship between the individual and his society; and it
would have provided, furthermore, a continuous focus upon
that process. As the novel stands, however, the reader is
hardly aware of that process because the employment of vary
ing points of view serves to obscure rather than to clarify
it. And when, as a result, the "message" of To Have and
Have Not is announced by the dying Morgan, one feels, some
how, that it rings false, false because it is unexpected.
When Strether, in The Ambassadors, admonishes Bilham to
"live," the admonition is, unlike Morgan's final statement,
effective, and it is effective in part because James has
employed a narrative method which has kept the reader in
continuous contact with Strether1s thoughts.
Of the novels that do embody a kind of quest for mean
ing resulting in the achievement of a certain stance, atti
tude, awareness, outlook, or philosophy (one thinks immedi
ately of The Heart of Darkness, The Ambassadors, The Por
trait of the Artist as a Young Man, or The Catcher in the
Rye, among others), one discovers that many are written
either in the first person or in the third person with unity
of focus. In fact, Hemingway's two novels of his early per
iod, which incorporate as central concerns a kind of quest
in
for values or meaning, are written from the first-person
point of view. And consequently one "lives" continuously
with Jake Barnes and Frederick Henry as they search for
value and meaning in life. Jake Barnes personally confronts
characters who represent alternative ways of apprehending
life: Cohn and Romero, Campbell and Mippipopolous, Bill
Gorton and Lady Brett Ashley. A symbolic Paris, further
more, is vividly contrasted with an equally symbolic Bur-
guete; and the contrarieties which inform the novel, and
which Jake and the reader feel and experience give an impe
tus to the quest for meaning, an impetus which would have
been diminished if the novel had not been written in the
first person. In A Farewell to Arms, too, Frederick Henry
confronts characters who symbolize differing ways of appre
hending life: the priest, Rinaldi, Count Greffi, and
Catherine. And the effectiveness, moreover, of the
mountain-plain symbolism stems, in great measure, from the
first-person point of view; for it is Henry who sees and
experiences the mountains and the plain, and it is Henry who
feels the symbolic force of these contrasting symbols which
are so important in supporting the central concern of the
novel. In The Heart of Darkness, too, Marlowe feels the
symbolic force of the jungle in much the same way. The em
ployment of varying points of view, which serve to shift the
focus from person to person, does not support a kind of cen
tral concern dealing with a quest for meaning on the part of
178
the chief character; and that employment explains in part
the defects of To Have and Have Not. Later, in For Whom
the Bell Tolls, Hemingway does employ the third person with
shifting focus with a great degree of success; but in the
later novel the third-person narrative supports the theme of
human interdependence. And if Hemingway's use of the third
person does not completely support the corollary theme of
Jordan's growing awareness of the oneness of mankind, it
also does not entirely obscure it.
Related to the weaknesses inherent in the employment of
various points of view in To Have and Have Not are the weak
nesses inherent in Hemingway's use of what amounts to adven
titious juxtapositions and contrasts to give emphasis, or
rather over-emphasis, to the points he wants to make. Un
like his artful use of juxtaposition and contrast in his
previous novels, Hemingway's employment of these devices in
To Have and Have Not is, by comparison, awkward and obtru
sive. An example of his awkward use of contrast occurs when
Richard Gordon encounters Marie Morgan, who is on her way
home from the sheriff's office after learning that her hus
band has been badly wounded by Cuban revolutionaries. Al
though he knows nothing of Marie, Gordon, in a "flash of
perception,” imagines her to be a type of woman completely
different from the woman she actually is:
Her early indifference to her husband's caresses. Her
desire for children and security. Her sad attempts to
simulate an interest in the sexual act that had become
actually repugnant to her. (p. 177)
Even an egregiously insensitive reader is capable of dis
cerning the obtrusive irony of Hemingway's having Gordon
think in such terms of Marie, who has a rich and vividly
depicted sex life with her husband; and of course that
reader would also be aware of the obviously ironic contrast
between Gordon's failure as a lover and Morgan's success.
But Hemingway, apparently thinking the obvious contrast
inadequate to his purposes, further underlines the intent of
the passage by means of a comment which is meant, one sup
poses, to be telling: "The woman he had seen was Harry
Morgan's wife, on her way home from the sheriff's office"
Q
(p. 177). The writer of The Sun Also Rises would have re
frained from being so clumsily obtrusive. Moreover, the
restraint imposed upon him by the first-person point of
view would have prevented his being too obtrusive.
The most spectacular example of juxtaposition that does
not quite succeed in its purposes occurs in Chapter XXIV of
the novel. The dying Harry Morgan, whose boat is being
towed home by a coast guard cutter, passes a group of yachts
moored in a yacht basin. In what is probably an attempt to
contrast the heroic Morgan with the unheroic people on the
yachts, Hemingway describes the people and the scenes on
board each boat that his dying protagonist passes; and the
g
Sanderson, p. 80. Sanderson says, "We are aware of
awkwardly managed coincidences in the author's attempts to
shape his novel around the ideas he wanted to get across."
180
scenes, in themselves, are effective and well written. On
the first yacht, there is a homosexual couple; on the second
a sixty-year-old alcoholic broker who is worried over the
activities of investigators from the Internal Revenue
Department; on the third a secure, happy family whose way of
life is based on the sales of a patent medicine "which costs
three cents a quart to make for a bottle in the large (pint)
size" (p. 240); and on the fourth a Hollywood director's
wife who, her lover having failed her, resorts to masturba
tion. As graphic as these scenes are, they fail in their
purposes, for they do not, really, have anything to do with
Morgan's sudden discovery that a "man alone ain't got no
chance." If the people on board the boat represent society,
perhaps Morgan could do very well without them, and as a
matter of fact Morgan alone has almost succeeded in killing
all the Cubans; it is really only an accident that he is
wounded. Moreover, Morgan, unlike Henry and Barnes, who
actually confront characters representing various styles of
life, is not even acquainted with the people on the yachts;
and, consequently, they cannot exert any influence upon the
direction of his thoughts. That is, the yacht scenes, vivid
and immediate, are not organic to the central concern of
Hemingway's novel.
Relative to the overall structure of the novel, much of
the third part of the novel (Chapters XV, XVI, XIX, XXI, and
XXII) exemplifies a kind' of juxtaposition; this section
181
deals in large measure with the experiences and thoughts of
the writer, Gordon, who represents a contrast to Morgan.
Perhaps Gordon represents the "Have Not" of the novel's
title as opposed to Morgan's "Have"; but beyond that rather
obvious contrast, the story of Richard Gordon has little
relevance to the story of Morgan's achieving an awareness
that a man alone is, in a real sense, impotent. Gordon's
inability to satisfy sexually either his wife or Helene
Bradley, a rich nymphomaniac, an inability which is made
vividly dramatic in Chapter XXI, is in implicit opposition
to Morgan's sexual capabilities. When Gordon's wife, dis
gusted with his philandering, his love-making, and his poli
tics, declares that "Love is just another dirty lie. . . .
Love is that dirty-aborting horror that you took me to.
. . . To Hell with love," her declaration represents a
direct contrast to Marie Morgan's declaration concerning
Morgan's sexual abilities: "You're the best" (pp. 184-185,
113). Good though the contrasts and juxtapositions may in
themselves be, they are adventitious to the extent that they
are unrelated to the central concern of the novel. In The
Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, the juxtapositions,
the contrasts, the sets of contrarieties are directly re
lated to the heroes' quests for value or meaning in life.
Partly because of the failure of juxtaposition and contrast
to further the central concern of To Have and Have Not, the
symbolic force of character, scene, action, and thought is
182
attenuated; and thus the symbols, too, fail to relate them
selves intimately to the novel's central concern.
Defects in Character and in Symbol
If Hemingway is unfortunate in his choice of narrative
points of view, he is perhaps even more unfortunate in the
selection of his central character; for although the choice
of Morgan has a certain validity insofar as he is symbolic
of an individual confronting a society in which the values
peculiar to frontier individualism are anachronistic, that
very same choice militates against furthering the central
9
concern of the novel. A comparison of Morgan with
Frederick Henry and Jake Barnes can be instructive in re
vealing the weakness of Morgan’s character in the light of
that central concern. Both Henry and Barnes, one may be
surprised to recall, are in their ways "intellectuals" with
a modicum of sensitivity. Barnes, a newspaperman, reads
Turgenev; and Henry, who had been studying architecture in
Italy before the outbreak of the war, can quote lines from
Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" with telling effect. Be
cause Barnes and Henry are the kind of men they are, one can
believe in their quests for meaning in life; and one can
9
Sanderson, p. 82. Sanderson thinks that "Harry Morgan
embodies the independent and self-reliant virtues of the
American pioneer." But Sanderson does not point out that
Morgan is not the kind of man who would be likely to achieve
an awareness of the individual's necessary relationship to
his society.
183
believe, too, in their finally having achieved a personal
awareness of life. Morgan, on the other hand, reveals very
little sensitivity of the sort leading him even to suspect
that a species of anarchic individualism is ineffective and
moribund in modern society. Barnes, in a real sense, appre
ciates the cultures of France and Spain not only with intel
lect but also his intestines; he is aware of the injustice
of a Negro boxer being deprived of his justly earned purse;
and he is sensitive to the peculiarities of human character,
a sensitivity which is apparent in his description of Cohn's
character in the opening passage of The Sun Also Rises.
Both Barnes and Henry manifest a degree of sensitivity that
permits them to encounter sympathetically both individuals
and societies.
With his virulent prejudices (he doesn't think much of
Negroes and Chinese), Morgan seems the very antithesis of
Barnes and Henry. Morgan is not the sort of man who would
be likely to achieve even an awareness of a meaningful view
of society. His very strength as a symbol of assertive
individualism works against his achieving that awareness
which is central to the novel. In one sense he is, as a
symbol, both vivid and strong; but in another sense he is
defective simply because his character, again as a symbol
(the symbol of a man in quest), is not germane to the
novel's central concern. Hemingway would have to take great
pains to reveal the process by which a character with
184
Morgan's qualities achieves awareness; and Hemingway, partly
because of the multiple points of view he employs, fails
adequately to illuminate that process. Morgan does achieve
awareness, but his achievement of it is not quite convinc
ing. Morgan, it is pertinent to note, seems more like the
"tutor" figure that Earl Rovit discusses in his book on
Hemingway. Like Mippipopolous in The Sun Also Rises,
Brennan in "Twenty Grand," the bullfighter in "The Unde
feated, " and Wilson in "The Short Happy Life of Francis
McComber," he has already achieved a way of life, and one
cannot quite picture his changing in any basic way. Henry
and Barnes, like Nick Adams, are Hemingway heroes who,
typically, are "pupil" figures (Rovit’s term) who are open
to change.
Consequently, even if the point of view were limited to
the first person or the third person with unity of focus,
one doubts that Morgan, as a "center of consciousness,"
could make one believe in any process by which he achieves
an awareness of the nature of society; Morgan is neither a
Barnes nor a Henry, much less a Strether. The alternative
ways of life which would help to define that process are
represented in To Have and Have Not, but they do not come
into sharp focus because Morgan, unlike Strether, for
example, is unable to give form and direction to those
alternatives. Thus the symbolic contrast between the "radi
cal" Cuban revolutionaries and the authoritarian "fascist,"
185
Frederick Harrison, who says pompously "I'm one of the most
important men in the U.S." (p. 80), lacks meaning not only
because Morgan does not confront Harrison but also because
he is, one would believe, too unaware to make something of
that contrast. The reader may, but Morgan doesn't; and the
reader cannot do Morgan's work.
When one of the Cuban revolutionaries tries to explain
his cause to him, Morgan thinks, "What the hell do I care
about his revolution. F his revolution" (p. 168). And
although Morgan is shrewdly aware of the absurdities of
political doctrine--as when he comments on the death of
Albert, "That's a working man he kills. He never thinks of
that" (p. 168)--he does not, as far as the reader can dis
cern, evolve a view of politics and society based upon his
limited awareness of the alternatives of right and left, or
the area in between the two extremes. He does not neces
sarily have to choose one of the other, but certainly the
alternatives, if they are to be germane to the central con
cern of the novel, must be more intimately related to
Morgan's life and thus help to give meaning and force to
Morgan's final view that "a man alone ain't got no chance."
But because of Hemingway's failure in the handling of vary
ing points of view and because of his unfortunate choice of
Morgan as his central character, the alternatives and con
trasts are not, as they should be, intimately related to the
formulation of Morgan's final view of things. Standing as
186
he does above the other men in the novel, Morgan, one feels,
cannot be much blamed if he does not find in other men or in
groups of men valid possibilities for action; and his very
eminence, enhanced by Hemingway's narrative points of view,
would seem to militate against his achieving his final
awareness of the individual's relationship to society.
That Hemingway is perhaps confused as to the nature of
his central concern is revealed in his choice of Richard
Gordon as a contrast to Morgan. Gordon is, as has been
indicated, a contrast to Morgan, but as a contrast he does
not further what one would suppose is the central concern of
the novel. If that concern were merely the depiction of two
men, one who has and another who has not certain basic qual
ities, then the choice of Gordon could be defended. But the
novel is not, obviously, based simply upon that contrast.
Hemingway's interest in ideology and his focusing on
Morgan's last words would seem to preclude that simple con
trast as the sole or main concern of the novel. Moreover,
as one of the concerns, that contrast works against what
should be the main concern of To Have and Have Not;
Morgan’s achievement of a certain view of life and of
^°See Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
(Princeton, 1952), p. 213. Baker says that "Strong esthetic
grounds exist for the belief that the novel would have been
better without the figure of Gordon." Baker feels this is
so because Morgan, by contrast, makes Gordon a "shadowy
symbol." Morgan is not a good contrast, however, because
he does not serve the central concern of the novel.
187
society. Unlike Morgan, Gordon is dramatically depicted as
having learned something about himself, about his art, and
about life. He learns that he has not sexually satisfied
his wife (pp. 184-186); and he has begun to suspect that his
novels are absurdly at variance with reality. One charac
ter, Spellman, asks Gordon whether or not his novel has a
"beautiful Jewish agitator" in it (it does); and another, a
communist, tells Gordon what he thinks of the writer's
novels: "I thought they were shit" (p. 210). Gordon's
realization of his inadequacies and of life in general is
made possible by the "inside view" one has of him, a view
made vivid by the third-person narrative with unity of
focus. To contrast such a character with Morgan, who is not
depicted in the process of change or of achieving an aware
ness of life and of society, does not serve to advance the
central concern of the novel; for given that concern the
writer Gordon, the contrast to Morgan, has some of the very
qualities of mind that Morgan should have. One has at least
seen Gordon in the process of change, whereas one has not
actually seen Morgan undergoing change. To juxtapose the
sensitive, if weak, Gordon with the insensitive, if strong,
Morgan is thus indicative of a confusion as to the basic
purposes of the novel. As a symbol of a kind of life in
opposition to the kind represented by Morgan, the character
of Gordon is not, in short, organic to the central concern
188
of the novel."*''1 " Thus Phillip Young is essentially right
when he suggests that the structure of To Have and Have Not
does not support its "message."
In addition to the ineffective use of characters as
symbols, there are in the novel deficiencies of another sort
of symbolism: that dealing with nature. For one who has
been so sensitive to the symbolic dimensions of nature and
who has worked them so closely into the texture of his
novels, Hemingway has written in To Have and Have Not a
novel which is singularly lacking in the rich and often
subtle resonance of symbolic suggestions. As with the mal
adroit and ineffective use of contrast and juxtaposition in
that novel, with a concomitant weakening in the effective
ness of scenes, characters, and actions, the notable lack of
symbolic resonance in Hemingway's depiction of nature stems,
at least in part, from the character of Morgan and from the
employment of varying points of view. In The Sun Also Rises
and A Farewell to Arms, the first-person narrative permits a
consistent symbolism which is germane to the central con-
Baker, pp. 203-205. As Baker points out, the defects
in the novel could be explained by its provenance. Much of
the narrative dealing with Morgan was published in the form
of two short stories: "One Trip Across" in the Cosmopolitan
for April, 1934, and the "Tradesman's Return" in Esguire
Magazine for February, 1936. Only after he had decided to
enlarge the stories into a novel did he write the "companion
story of the moral misfortunes of a writer called Richard
Gordon" as a means "of throwing Harry's masculine virtues
into bolder relief." The "companion story," however,
altered the nature and direction of the story, and for the
worse.
189
cerns of the novel: the quest for meaning or value on the
part of the first-person narrator himself. Charles
Feidelson, for one, illuminates the relevance of narrator to
symbolism when he says of Ishmael:
. . . the symbolic nature of the action depends on its
being perceived. This is the reason why Ishmael is
necessary in the book, despite the fact that he and
Melville merge into one. Ishmael is the delegated
vision of Melville; he can enact the genesis of symbolic
meaning, whereas Melville, speaking solely as an omnis
cient author, could only impute an arbitrary signifi
cance .
Although Feidelson does not deal with modern American liter
ature (he doesn't, for example, allude to either Faulkner or
Hemingway), what he has to say about the relationship of
narrator to symbol is pertinent to Hemingway's work. That
mountain and plain take on symbolic force in A Farewell to
Arms is due in large measure to the fact that the questing
mind of Henry sees them as meaningful; and the reader, too,
is almost forced to apprehend them in the way that Henry
does. Symbolism is thus allied to both narrative point of
view and also an appropriate selection of a central figure,
a center of consciousness.
One is not, however, close enough to Morgan's point of
view to observe the development of a consistent and meaning
ful symbolism. And even if one were continuously with
Morgan in the first person, one feels that Morgan, unlike
12
Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953),
p. 32.
190
Ishmael or even Barnes and Henry, is not the kind of charac
ter who would be able to discern the symbolic aspects of
nature. Even in Part One of the novel, narrated in the
first person by Morgan, one is not aware of any symbolic
dimensions in Morgan's view of nature. Morgan lives and
works out of doors, as a sea-going man surrounded by an open
sea and under a wide expanse of sky, and yet neither the sea
nor the life within it assumes a symbolic dimension.
Because of Hemingway's lack of success in varying
points of view, and because of his choice of Morgan as hero,
even the more or less overt symbols of the novel fail to
register any noticeable degree of impact. The succession of
seasons, each of which is associated with a section of the
novel (Part One--Spring; Part Two— Fall; Part Three--Winter) ,
is obviously meant to parallel the decline in Morgan's for
tunes, leading, finally, to his death. But one is never
aware of the passage of the seasons, and accordingly the
symbolic succession loses any force it may conceivably have
generated. Through the questing mind of Henry one can feel
the symbolic force of nature, including the succession of
seasons and years, in A Farewell to Arms; but through the
mind of Morgan, one does not feel the impact of even the
13
obvious, overt symbols.
13
See John Glendenning, "Hemingway's Gods, Dead and
Alive," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, III
(Winter 1962), 498. Glendenning sees a light-dark symbolism
in the novel. Concerning Morgan's death, he says, "leading
191
What one learns in reading To Have and Have Not is that
Hemingway's symbolism is related to the other elements of
his total strategy. Without a sense of the novel's central
concern or concerns, without appropriate characters and an
appropriate point of view, without an unerring awareness of
the pertinence of each scene and of the arrangement of
scenes, the symbolic force of action, scene, character,
description becomes attenuated. And in turn, the symbols
thus diminished contribute little to the effectiveness of
the novel. Without a sense of the novel’s central concern,
emphasis fails to emphasize, juxtaposition juxtaposes to no
discernible effect, and symbolism, because it is intimately
related to those elements in the rhetoric of fiction, is
thus further weakened. In To Have and Have Not the elements
in Hemingway's rhetoric of fiction, for reasons which have
been noted, somehow do not cohere; and symbolism, which is
both an element of that rhetoric and also a good indicator
of its failure or success, does not have the effectiveness
it had in his two previous novels of the early period. In
his middle period as a novelist, Hemingway's artistry thus
falters.
up to this death, Hemingway presents four boat trips that
become progressively darker and more catastrophic." Neither
the reader nor Morgan, however, is much affected by the
light-dark symbolism. One is not, really, even subliminally
aware of the boat trips "becoming progressively darker."
CHAPTER VI
THE MIDDLE PERIOD:
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS1
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the various elements of
Hemingway's rhetoric achieve a working relationship lackisig
in To Have and Have Not. In both its epic scope and its
formal unity, Hemingway's novel of the Spanish Civil War
represents a vast improvement over To Have and Have Not.
To Have and Have Not, a tale of limited scope about a not
very admirable man, depicts a moribund society; For Whom the
Bell Tolls is about a man committed to a cause, an admirable
man, and in its scope it comprehends both the Spanish Civil
War and also the history of a decade. In the latter novel
there is implicit an optimistic view of man and society, of
the perfectibility of man and the progress of society. In
To Have and Have Not, there is a darkly pessimistic view of
man, a view which focuses on the petty, the vile, and the
vicious in human nature. Despite its defects, Hemingway's
Spanish War novel very nearly achieves greatness; and per
haps it does. Carlos Baker thinks it is the best of Heming
way's novels.
^New York, 1940.
192
193
"Story," Plot, and Central Concern
For Whom the Bell Tolls is about Robert Jordan, an
American fighting for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish
Civil War, whose mission it is to blow up a bridge behind
enemy lines. He must destroy the bridge to prevent fascist
forces from crossing it to meet an imminent Republican
offensive. To succeed in the demolition, Jordan needs the
cooperation of a band of guerrillas, the leader of which is
Pablo, a shrewd, cunning man, who immediately sees the dan
gers involved in blowing up the bridge; and because Pablo
would rather save himself and his band rather than help the
Republic, he is against its demolition. Pilar, Pablo's
woman, and the other members of the band, are for blowing up
the bridge; and they decide to support Jordan in his mis
sion. Jordan succeeds in obtaining the support of another
guerrilla band (that of El Sordo), but he also encounters a
number of difficulties which make his mission even more
hazardous. Pablo steals the device that serves to detonate
the dynamite; an unseasonable snowstorm blows in; and after
the storm a fascist cavalryman strays into the guerrilla
encampment. A kind of sub-plot in the novel is Jordan’s
love affair with Maria, an affair which, in the days' and
nights’ course of the action, is intense in passion if brief
in duration. Knowing that the Republican offensive is
doomed (the fascists have learned of its imminence) Jordan
still succeeds in blowing the bridge; and at the novel's
194
end, gravely wounded, he calmly awaits his death at the
hands of pursuing fascists.
Of course the "story" of any novel is likely to seem
rather bare and skeletal; and what makes For Whom the Bell
Tolls a richly complex novel is the central concern which,
together with related concerns, animates the plot and gives
it a direction and a force it would otherwise lack. A sam
pling of some of the criticism of For Whom the Bell Tolls
gives some indication as to the central concern of the
novel. To Eleanor Sickels (1941) the novel represents a
"reaffirmation of the values of the individual in an age of
2
collectivism." To Lionel Trilling (1946) the novel "cele
brates" the "violation of the individual ego in its search
for experience," not its announced theme of the "community
3
of men." To E. M. Halliday (1952) the novel has to do with
4
an "investigation of human interdependence." To Carlos
Baker (1952) the novel represents a "kind of epic study in
5
doom." To William Moynihan (1959) the "mighty theme" of
the novel is "the oneness of mankind," a theme that is based
2
"Farewell to Cynicism," College English, III (October
1941), 32.
3
"An American in Spain," The Partisan Reader, ed.
William Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York, 1946), p. 644.
4
"Hemingway's Narrative Perspective," Sewanee Review,
LX (Spring 1952), 215.
5
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, 1952),
p. 230.
195
upon "a distinct type of human being, a man willing to die
for a cause." To John Patrick Bury (1959) the novel is
about "an eternal human problem, namely man's responsibility
7
to society." And to Willard Thorp the great theme of the
novel is "the tragic sacrifice the American Robert Jordan
g
makes for a cause he knows is doomed."
In general, critics have tended to agree that the cen
tral concern of the novel has to do with the relationship of
the individual to his society, with the "oneness of mankind,"
with "human interdependence." And this view is supported by
Hemingway's choice of a passage from Donne's devotion, which
begins with "No man is an Hand, intire of itself," to sup
ply both the title of his novel and the epigraph. Both
Eleanor Sickel and Lionel Trilling, however, focus on the
individual rather than on the community of men. The some
what contrasting views of the novel, one with an emphasis
upon the individual and the other with emphases upon both
the individual and his community, are not really incom
patible; both views are valid and compatible. Trilling is
partially correct in his allusion to the "individual ego"
of Robert Jordan in search of experience, as is Eleanor
^"The Martyrdom of Robert Jordan," College English, XXI
(December 1959), 127.
7
"Hemingway in Spain," Contemporary Review, No. 118
(February 1959), 104.
g
American Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
1960), pp. 194-195.
196
Sickel in her interpretation of the novel as a "reaffirma
tion of the values of the individual." They are correct to
the extent that the novel deals explicitly with the process
by which Jordan learns about his relationship to other
people and about himself; and to the extent that the novel
bases itself on a sort of learning process, to that extent
does it necessarily have to deal with the individual him
self, with the isolated ego, with the "reaffirmation" of the
individual. But the focusing upon the individual does not
necessarily preclude the theme of a "community of men"; for
what Jordan learns, among other things, could very well con
cern the necessity, the fact, of human interdependence.
Theme and Rhetoric in For Whom the Bell Tolls
That Jordan is acquiring an education, undergoing a
process of learning, under the pressure of limited time is
made patently clear in passages throughout the novel. In
Chapter XI, after Pilar has told him of the bloody massacre
of the fascists in her town, Jordan, for example, thinks to
himself: "Well, he thought, it is part of one's education.
It will be quite an education when it's finished. You
learn in this war if you listen" (p. 175). Part of what he
learns, furthermore, is revealed when he comments that
sleeping with Maria has helped him to be more critical of
"any sort of cliches both revolutionary and patriotic"
(p. 164). His questing attitude, moreover, is suggested in
197
a passage that recalls Jake Barnes’s quest for values in
life:
You go along your whole life and they seem as though
they mean something; and they always end up not meaning
anything. . . . You think that is one thing that you
will never have. And then . . . you run into a girl
like this Maria. (p. 167)
And after Pilar has questioned Maria and him about the
earth's moving during their sexual union, Jordan thinks,
Nobody knows what tribes we come from nor what our tribal
inheritance is nor what the mysteries were in the woods
where the people lived that we came from. All we know
is that we do not know. (p. 175)
Here, it seems, Jordan is ready to admit the possibility of
mysteries in life. That his learning does indeed involve a
growing, if uneasy, awareness of life's "mysteries" is made
clear in Chapter XXXVII, after he has had intercourse during
his third night with Maria, who uses the term La Gloria to
describe her experience of sexual congress:
La Gloria . . . is in Greco and in San Juan de la Cruz,
of course, and in the others. I am no mystic, but to
deny it is as ignorant as though you denied the tele
phone. . . . How little we know of what there is to
know. (p. 380)
And as if to emphasize the importance of the learning
process as a central concern of the novel, Hemingway has
Jordan continue to meditate: "Educated, he thought. I have
the very smallest beginnings of an education" (p. 381).
Another aspect of his education is revealed in a flashback
that occurs in Chapter VIII, when Jordan thinks about what
he had learned at Gaylord's, the headquarters of the Russian
198
contingent in Madrid. At Gaylord's he had learned about the
political machinations which lay behind the official propa
ganda promulgated by the Republican government during the
war, machinations by which, for example, a "simple stone
mason, " who speaks Russian, can become a military leader
from the ranks of the people: "Sure Gaylord's was the place
you needed to complete your education. It was there you
learned how it was really done instead of how it was sup
posed to be done" (p. 230). Finally, Jordan's thoughts just
before he dies reveal that central concern in fairly expli
cit terms:
I wish there was some way to pass on what I've learned,
though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end.
. . . There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.
The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours
or theirs. (p. 380)
Of course, Jordan adds, "The hell they are," but one feels
that the "message" of his final thoughts is not much quali
fied by that addition.
In addition to explicit statements (for the most part
embodied in interior monologues) concerning that learning
process central to an understanding of the novel, Hemingway
uses other elements of his strategy to support that concern.
Part of what Jordan learns is a more profound understanding
of man's interdependence: "No man is an Hand intire of
itself." Appropriately, Hemingway employs the third-person
point of view with a shifting focus to make manifest, in the
narrative method itself, Jordan's relationship to society,
199
9
to other people. Although most of the third-person narra
tive is focused on Jordan (enough to establish him as the
central figure who undergoes a kind of learning process),
there are shifts to other characters in order to point up,
in the very structure of the novel, the theme of interde
pendence. Until Chapter X of a novel consisting of forty-
three chapters, the focus is continuously on Jordan; but
with Chapter X the focus shifts temporarily to Pilar, who
tells Jordan about the beginning of the movement and about
the killing of the fascists in her home town (pp. 98-130).
In this narrative, which occupies about thirty-two pages,
Jordan participates vicariously in the brutal beginnings of
the movement and thus, in a real sense, absorbs the experi
ence into his own being; Pilar's vivid narration of the
massacre of the fascists thus serves as a bridge between
Pilar and her world and Jordan. In Chapter XIV, the focus
of the third-person narrative again shifts to Pilar; she
tells of the Matador Finito, whose mistress she had been
(pp. 182-190), and in telling of him she gives further depth
to her life and to the present action. In Chapter XV, more
over, three shifts in focus take place: to the old man
Anselmo, who despite a snowstorm, dutifully remains at his
post to observe the fascist sentries guarding the bridge; to
9
See E. M. Halliday, "Hemingway's Narrative Perspec
tive, " 211. Halliday comments that "the third person method,
which Hemingway did choose, is very well suited to the
investigation of human interdependence."
the fascist sentries; and then to Jordan, who comes to re
lieve Anselmo of his duties. Later, there are important
shifts in focus to El Sordo and his band in their last stand
against fascist cavalry and then against fascist airplanes.
Later still, in Chapters XXXIV, XXXVI, XL, and XLII, the
focus shifts to Andres, whom Jordan has sent through the
lines to warn General Golz that the fascists have learned
m
of the impending Loyalist attack, to the various characters
whom Andres encounters in his mission, and to the characters
responsible for acting upon Jordan's intelligence: to some
anarcho-syndicalist guards (p. 375); to Gomez, a barber
turned commander in the Republican army (p. 396); to Andre
Marty, a political commissar attached to the International
Brigades; to Karkov, a Russian journalist who intercedes on
behalf of Andres and Gomez, whom Marty has jailed; and to
General Golz, who, unable now to halt his doomed offensive
or to ground his airplanes roaring overhead, can only say
with resignation, "Nous ferons petit possible" (pp. 429-430).
The importance of Andres' mission is that it provides a link
between Golz's situation and Jordan's, between the overall
strategy for the offensive and Jordan's part in it.
Jordan can also do only what it is still possible to
do: demolish the bridge. And the effect of Golz's remark,
together with the shifting of the narrative focus to Pilar,
to Anselmo, and to Andres, who also do what they must do,
serves to relate Jordan and his mission to other people and
201
to the larger issues involved in the war. Finally the
bridge itself, in conjunction with the shift of narrative
focus from person to person and from place to place, becomes
a symbolic center for an ever-expanding series of concentric
circles that, in their far reaches, comprehend all of man
kind. And, in fact, shifting the narrative focus between
Jordan and Andres, as the latter proceeds through the lines,
gives the effect of a series of concentric circles, of
Andres' traveling ever farther from Jordan without relin
quishing the ties which bind him to the very center of those
circles--the bridge itself. Point of view, one of the ele
ments in the rhetoric of fiction, thus helps to determine
the symbolic character of the bridge.
In Pilar's narrative of the massacre of the fascists
and of her life with Finito the bullfighter, one has another
aspect of interdependence: the union of past and present.'*'*"1
If, for the most part, the shifts in focus serve to empha
size the interdependence of men in spatial terms, Pilar's
narratives serve to emphasize the relationship of people in
temporal terms. The long stretches of Jordan's interior
monologues, some of which are flashbacks, serve also to link
past and present and, in doing so, to expand the seventy
hours' duration of the action into the past and, toward the
"^See Baker, p. 250. "What Hemingway allows us to know
of Pilar's past . . . enriches, activates, and deepens our
sense of her vital performance in the present."
202
end of the book, into the future. All of mankind, past and
present, are thus involved in Jordan's mission; and the
bridge becomes not only a spatial center of action that
radiates outward to involve the whole world but a temporal
center as well. The first flashback takes place even before
Jordan arrives at the guerrilla encampment, a flashback to
Golz's headquarters, where the general briefs Jordan on the
business of the bridge (pp. 4-8). Other flashbacks, pre
viously noted, concern Jordan's experiences at Gaylord's
(pp. 228-248), where some of his idealism had been tempered
by political realities. Still other flashbacks deal with
his grandfather, who had been in the American Civil War, and
with his father, who had committed suicide (pp. 335-339).
And by means of these interior monologues the action extends
back even into pre-history, as when Jordan thinks of the
Spanish attitude toward killing: "It is their extra sacra
ment. Their old one that they had before the new religion
came from the far end of the Mediterranean" (p. 286). A
sense of the past bearing on the present is reflected in an
interior monologue previously quoted: "Nobody knows what
tribes we come from nor what our tribal inheritance is"
(p. 175). The action, moreover, is projected into the
future when Jordan thinks, just before his death, of the
importance of the Spanish Civil War and of his part in it:
"If we win here we win everywhere" (p. 467). In short, by
203
using the interior monologue Hemingway manages to reveal the
oneness of past and present.
By means, then, of the third-person narrative with
shifting focus, by means of a judicious shifting of scenes
which that sort of narrative permits, by means of interior
monologues and flashbacks, and by means of a symbolic
bridge, the effectiveness of which is largely the result of
his "narrative perspective, " ^ Hemingway is able to give
body to some of the concerns of the novel: the interdepend
ence of people near and far; the relationship of one event
to another; and the union of past and present. That Jordan
has learned the lesson of interdependence is revealed toward
the end of the novel when, lying wounded, he says to Maria:
Listen. We will not go to Madrid now but I go always
with thee wherever thou goest. . . . Thou will go now.
. . . But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us
there is both of us. (p. 463)
The Use of Contrasts
Much of the effectiveness of the novel, as has been
suggested, stems from Hemingway's use of contrasting con
cepts and values. In fact, the various sets of contrari
eties informing the plot are essential because part of what
Jordan learns involves a sort of reconciliation of contrast
ing elements. The novel, more specifically, is based in
part upon a process of integration which occurs within the
"^The term is E. M. Halliday's.
204
character of Jordan; and this process is directly related to
the learning process by which Jordan gains a more profound
awareness of the interdependence of men. At the beginning
of the novel Jordan is seen as a man who is, or perhaps
tries to be, coldly rational in his adherence to duty. When
Golz asks Jordan, "Look, do you have many girls on the other
side of the line?" the American answers, "No, there is no
time for girls" {p. 7). Golz, a wiser and more experienced
man, answers, "I do not agree. The more irregular the serv
ice, the more irregular the life" (p. 8). The Russian gen
eral's comment suggests that man, in order to function
effectively, must live a full life in which all elements of
his personality can come into play; he can thus achieve a
sort of inner integration of various elements in his person
ality. Later in the novel when Jordan tells Pilar that the
only thing he fears is "not doing my duty as I should," she
comments, "You are a very cold boy. . . . In the head you
are very cold" (p. 91). One element in Jordan's personality
is thus a kind of cold rationality; and contrasted with this
element, and existing rather uneasily with it, is an intui
tive, instinctual, or imaginative element. At the very
beginning of the novel, for example, Jordan appears to
exhibit an intuitive approach to life, an approach that is
sensitive to supernatural phenomena, to omens and to "mys
teries" beyond the comprehension of the rational faculties
of the mind. Thus when Jordan has forgotten Anselmo's name,
205
he thinks to himself, "It was a bad sign . . . that he had
forgotten" (p. 2).
The theme of the supernatural, as a matter of fact,
pervades the novel, providing both a sort of preternatural
ambience for the action and also an objectification of the
12
intuitive, instinctual element in Jordan's personality.
In Chapter II, Pilar reads Jordan's palm and sees his death
there; and when she says, "I saw nothing in it," Jordan
replies, "Yes you did. I am only curious. I do not believe
in such things" (p. 33). And in Jordan's remark one dis
cerns an ambivalent attitude concerning the preternatural
dimensions of life. That he does believe, to some degree at
least, in the efficacy of a sort of intuitive apprehension
of life is indicated toward the end of the novel when,
wounded, he thinks again about Pilar's reading his palm:
"She was afraid maybe I believed it. I don’t though. But
she does. They see something. Or they feel something.
. . . What about extra-sensory perception?" (p. 467).
Surely this passage reveals Jordan's belief in the possibil
ity, at least, of a supernatural dimension in life; and it
indicates, too, that Jordan, whom Pilar describes as "cold"
at the beginning of the novel, has been changed by his expe
riences. That is to say, the rational and the intuitive,
12
See Baker, pp. 252-253. Baker touches upon the ele
ment of the supernatural in the novel, but he does not sug
gest its relationship to Jordan's character and to the cen
tral concern of the novel.
206
the "mind" and the "heart," have been brought into a more or
less stable equilibrium or union. Toward the end, after
Jordan has thought about much of j^hat he had experienced,
Hemingway comments:
He was completely integrated now— and he took a good
look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. . . .
He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles
where he lay and touched the bark of the pine trunk that
he lay behind. {p. 471)
Once "integrated," he feels, symbolically, one with the
earth, with the sky, with the pine needles, and with the
bark of the tree. There is revealed here a mystical unity
with nature, a unity which has been preceded, however, by an
integration of contrasting elements in Jordan's personality;
and, in fact, nature at the end becomes symbolic of Jordan's
achievement of an integrated personality.
The basic contrast in the novel is that existing be-
13
tween the rational and the intuitive in Jordan’s character.
13
See Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated
Youth in American Society (New York, 1965), p. 250. Jordan
is, in a sense, representative of modern technological soci
ety, and it is thus interesting to note what Keniston has to
say about just such a society: "One of the consequences of
the shattering of community has been the growing division of
society into two non-overlapping spheres— a public sphere
whose demands are primarily cognitive, and a private sphere
which remains the sphere for feeling, devotion, faith, and
reverence." Jordan, it seems to me, embodies just such a
division. Later (p. 252), Keniston comments that in other
societies "The favored instruments of knowledge . . . are
those we consider non-rational: prayer, mysticism, intui
tion, dreams, inspiration, 'possession.'" And this sort of
society bears a striking similarity to that of Pablo's guer
rilla band, especially as represented by Pilar, and perhaps
that of the Spanish peasantry as a whole. The point I am
trying to make is that Jordan, a man from a modern, techno-
The theme of the supernatural, for one, is allied to that of
the intuitive apprehension of life; a man sensitive to
supernatural phenomena intuits a meaning in his confronta
tion with the physical world, a meaning that he cannot dis
cern solely by rational thought. The theme of the preter
natural, the mystic, is apparent in the earth's moving when
Jordan and Maria make love (p. 159); in Pilar's famous
description of the smell of death (p. 251); in explicit
statements, as when Jordan says, "We know nothing about what
happens in the night" (p. 176); and in the use of the number
three. Hemingway's use of that number is all-pervasive:
three fascist airplanes fly over while Jordan sketches the
bridge (p. 38); again, three airplanes fly over the guer
rilla encampment in Chapter VIII (p. 75); Pilar says that
the earth "never moves more than three times" in one's life
(p. 174); Anselmo observes three officers in a fascist gen
eral staff car (p. 191); Jordan sees three crows alight on a
pine tree close by as he prepares for an expected attack by
fascist cavalrymen (p. 275); it is "three o'clock in the
afternoon before the airplanes" fly in to destroy El Sordo's
band (p. 320); and, finally, the action of the novel covers
14
three days and three nights. Perhaps Hemingway’s intent
logical society, is changed by his living with the guerrilla
band. The division within him is to a great extent healed.
14
See Baker, p. 253. "Hemingway's linking of the
modern bombers with the ancient magic-symbol of number three
greatly enhances the emotional effectiveness of the plane-
208
in using the number three is to provide a minatory and pre
ternatural ambience for his novel. Furthermore, the number
three, together with the other manifestations of the super
natural, serves possibly as correlatives of the intuitive
and instinctual elements in Jordan's personality. And the
theme of the supernatural could thus be germane to the novel
because it is Jordan's integration of the intuitive and
rational in his character which underlies the structure of
the novel, which serves, that is, to unify its various
thematic elements.
In addition to the theme of the supernatural, the novel
deals with other themes that are associated with the intui
tive, imaginative approach to life. Jordan's love affair
with Maria is, of course, the most prominent. Other themes
have to do with Jordan's private fantasy life which is so at
variance with his public life dedicated to an almost fanati
cal adherence to duty; he has often dreamed, for example, of
Garbo and Harlow's coming to sleep with him: "He'd slept
with them all that way when he was asleep in bed. He could
remember Garbo still, and Harlow” (p. 137). Still other
themes deal with a sort of mystic apprehension of "forever"
15
time in "now" time, of the way m which all the past and
message." Baker, inexplicably, does not allude to all the
other occasions in which the number three plays a role.
Indeed the use of the number three becomes so excessive as
to be obtrusive.
15
See F. I. Carpenter, "Hemingway Achieves the Fifth
209
much of the future is united in the present moment; the
crystallization of times past, present, and future in his
own life is expressed in more naturalistic terms when Jordan
thinks, "There is nothing else than now. . . . There is only
now. . . . There is only now, and if now is only two days,
16
then two days is your life" (p. 169). In essence, more
over, the apprehension of all time in the single moment, of
the eternal in the temporal, is an intuitive experience; and
the feeling of "time having stopped" (p. 159) is essentially
a mystical experience during which, suddenly, the individual
personality dissolves and becomes one with the infinite. In
love, Jordan's "oneness" with the infinite is immediately
manifested in his "oneness" with Maria; and just before he
dies, he feels a "oneness" with the universe.
Another aspect of the intuitive-rational contrast in
the novel is reflected, as above noted, in the rhythmic
alternation between public duty on the one hand and private
pleasures on the other. Thus periods of action alternate
Dimension," in Hemingway and his Critics (New York, 1961)
p. 193. Carpenter, alluding to P. O. Ouspensky’s concept of
the "perpetual now," thinks that Hemingway's reference to
the fifth dimension achievable in prose involves the rela
tionship of the present moment to all time.
16
See Earl Rovit, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1963),
p. 128. Rovit, among others, has commented on Hemingway's
concept of time; "Hemingway's metaphysics of time, then,
will be an attempt to squeeze the moment into that distilled,
charged essence of felt emotion which, as we have seen, gave
him a feeling of immortality." Rovit does not, however,
relate Hemingway's concept of time to the central concerns
of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
210
with periods of introspection during which Jordan, in a kind
of free associational play of ideas and feelings, gives rein
to the imaginative proclivities of his mind. Whereas public
duty and action are ordered or conditioned by rational
thought and the exigencies of a logically consistent, real
world, the inner world of the private man is shaped by an
imaginative freedom in which the mind is freed from the
limitations of time and space. An important aspect of the
private world, as opposed to the public world of a fanatical
adherence to duty on the part of a man "cold in the head,"
is Jordan's love for Maria. Jordan has tried to keep sepa
rate the two aspects of his personality (the intuitive-
private aspect and the rational-public aspect); but toward
the close of the novel, after he has worked toward an inte
gration of his personality, he thinks, in the very midst of
action, of Maria: "He had never thought that you could know
there was a woman if there was battle; nor that any part of
17
you could know it, or respond to it" (p. 456). Surely,
Jordan, at this point in the novel, has "learned" something;
and what he has learned involves an integration of contrast
ing aspects of his personality. Not only, in short, does
17
See Lloyd Frankenbert, "Theme and Character in
Hemingway's Latest Period," Southern Review, VII (1941-1942),
p. 776. Frankenbert comments that "One of Hemingway's most
persistent themes has been that war and love don't mix."
The fact that Jordan now sees love and war as compatible
argues for the view that the novel is based on a process
involving an integration of various elements in Jordan's
character.
211
interdependence involve a relationship between people; it
also involves a necessary union of the elements in one's
personality. In fact, the two kinds of interdependence are
intimately related; without achieving an integration of
one's personality one cannot, that is, achieve a real rela
tionship with all people. Anselmo, for one, recognizes the
necessity of a sort of "inner" transformation, if not an
integration, prerequisite to the achievement of the brother
hood of man (of interdependence) when he thinks of the need
for penance:
If we no longer have religion after the war then I think
there must be some form of civic penance organized that
all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will
never have a true and human basis for living. (p. 196)- ' ■ 8
In a real sense, the sets of contrarieties in the novel
(action and introspection, public and private, past and
present) reflect, almost become symbolic of, the central
concern of the novel: Jordan's learning about the true
meaning of interdependence through the achievement of an
integrated personality, through an inner transformation,
through a merging, really, of rational and intuitive.
18
See W. H. Mellers, "The Ox in Spain," Scrutiny, X
(June 1941), 95. Mellers thinks that Anselmo is a "central
figure" in the novel: "Anselmo, torn from his Catholic God
and finding no other salvation, is in a sense the central
figure, whose significance is summarized in any of his re
flections on the moral implications of the war." But
Anselmo's insistence upon an inner transformation of men is
directly related to Jordan's inner transformation. And
Anselmo thus is not, as Mellers suggests, simply one of a
chorus of characters that "seems to indicate the attitude of
a disintegrating society."
212
Symbols of Integration and Interdependence
Much of the effectiveness of For Whom the Bell Tolls
depends upon Hemingway's use of symbols (in addition to
other elements in the rhetoric of fiction) to support the
related themes of learning and interdependence. Further
more, unless one understands the ways in which the symbols
are related both to the theme of Jordan's learning about
himself and about life, a process which involves an integra
tion of contrasting elements in his make-up, and also to the
theme of interdependence, one cannot really understand
either the symbols themselves or the complex richness of the
novel.
The symbolism in the novel has already been touched
upon. Pilar's reading of Jordan's palm and the pervasive
use of the number three are surely symbolic of certain ele
ments in the psychic make-up of men, and particularly that
of Jordan. Moreover, interior monologues, actions, descrip
tions, noted above in relation to the themes of time, the
supernatural, and public versus private life, tend to become
symbolic in the context of the novel's central concerns.
There are, moreover, other symbols which bear directly upon
the central concerns of the novel: the contrast between the
intuitive and the rational, which Jordan succeeds, to an
extent, in integrating, and the concomitant theme of inter
dependence. A case in point is the symbolism of the earth's
moving while Jordan and Maria make love. The earth becomes,
213
in this instance and in others, a symbol of the unity of
life, of the interdependence of men and women. Pilar says,
"When I was young the earth moved so that you could feel it
shift in space" (p. 174); and here the moving of the earth,
intuited rather than rationally experienced, becomes sym
bolic of the relationship of past to present, of Pilar's
past love to Jordan's present love for Maria. The earth,
by implication, is always there, immortal, providing a link
between the generations; men pass but the earth abides. It
is symbolic, too, of the enduring nature of a love which in
itself provides a sort of immortality analogous to that of
the earth: "As long as there is one of us there is both of
us" (p. 463). And it is symbolic of an intuitive response
to life which is complementary to a rational knowledge of
the physical world. Jordan's intuition of the earth's sym
bolism suggests the process of integration which is central
to the structure and meaning of the novel.
The earth moves again when El Sordo's band is annihi
lated by airplanes. Joachim, a young man in El Sordo's
band, feels that the earth "rolled under his knees" and,
later, that the "earth rolled under him" and "lurched under
his belly" (p. 321). And just as, according to Pilar, one
feels the earth move just "three times in a lifetime"
(p. 174), so does El Sordo's band, in death, "experience"
the earth move three times: "The planes came back three
times and bombed the hilltop but no one on the hilltop knew
214
it" (p. 321). In addition, then, to providing a tie between
Maria and Jordan, the moving earth, linked to the number
three, also provides a tie between the lovers and El Sordo's
band--between, that is, love and death; all aspects of life
are thus related. That earth symbolism joins Jordan's love
for Maria and El Sordo’s death is made fairly explicit.
Jordan, for instance, thinks of Maria in terms of earth sym
bolism: "With the sun shining on her hair, tawny as wheat"
(p. 158). And El Sordo thinks of the earth in similar terms
just before he dies: "Dying was nothing and he had no pic
ture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a
field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill"
(p. 312). In the symbolism of the earth and of the earth's
moving, one has thus a revelation of the essential unity of
life, an intuition of the enduring nature of the basic
experiences and instinctual responses of mankind. Through
the course of the novel the earth becomes symbolic not only
of the abiding and the immortal but also of the intuitive
and the instinctive faculties of men.
In the opening sentence of the novel, one finds Jordan
"lying flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest"
(p. 1), and in the very last sentence of the novel one finds
him again in the same position: "He could feel his heart
beating against the pine needle floor of the forest" (p. 471).
Between the first and last sentences of the novel, moreover,
he has undergone both a process of integration and also a
215
process of learning about his relationship to other people;
and accordingly when Jordan's heart is described as "beating
against the pine needle floor of the forest," one feels that
Jordan has become one with the earth. One feels, further
more, that his oneness with the earth is here symbolic of
the themes of integration and interdependence, themes cen
tral to the meaning and structure of the novel. Three para
graphs previously, in fact, Hemingway says explicitly, as
has been noted, that Jordan is "completely integrated now
and he took a good look at everything" (p. 471). And with
this integration, Jordan reveals in his actions that he is
poignantly aware of the earth of which he will soon become
an intrinsic element: "Then he looked up at the sky. . . .
He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles
where he lay . . . he touched the bark of the pine trunk"
(p. 471). There is revealed in this passage a mystical
apprehension of the oneness of man and universe; and this
awareness of oneness is central to the novel, for both inte
gration and interdependence are aspects of both the oneness
of man and society and also of the elements within man him
self. The opening and closing sentences add to the struc
tural unity of the novel; they provide, in addition, a mea
sure of the change that has taken place in Jordan’s iso
lated, "individual ego in search of experience."
The earth itself and the symbolism associated with the
earth are thus used to reveal the experiences common to all
216
men. Just before he dies, Jordan, for example, "Looks up at
the sky" (p. 471). Earlier in the novel El Sordo, knowing
that he is about to die, also looks up to the sky: "He
looked up at the bright, high, blue early summer sky. . . .
He was fifty-two years old, and he was sure this was the
last time he would see that sky" (p. 312). The sky thus
seems to serve as a symbolic tie between men and women and
their experience of life and death. During Jordan's second
intercourse with Maria, when the earth moves for the first
time, the life-giving sun becomes a part of the love-making:
Then there was the smell of heather crushed . . . and
the sun bright on her closed eyes . . . and for her
everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun, and
it was all that color. (p. 159)19
Later, the same sun shines on a mortally wounded Fernando:
"His head was in the shadow but the sun shone on his plugged
and bandaged wound. . . . His legs and feet were also in the
sun" (p. 442). And still later, Jordan, gravely wounded,
his sub-machine gun "in the crook of his left arm," waits
for the fascist Lieutenant Berrendo to reach a certain spot
19
Melvin Backman, "Hemingway: The Matador and the
Crucified," Modern Fiction Studies, I (August 1955), 6.
Backman says that "The sun dominates the novel." He further
relates the sun both to Maria and to life itself. One
doubts that the sun "dominates" the novel. Associated with
the symbolic earth, however, it does serve to relate the
matic elements in the novel: love and death, for example.
Backman does comment that the sun "is curiously mixed with
death" (p. 7), but he does not suggest that this is an
important function of symbolism in the novel, the function
of integrating contrasting elements in order to emphasize
the oneness of life.
217
before pulling the trigger: "He was waiting until the offi
cer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the
pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow." Obvi
ously, too, the "sunlit place," which represents a transi
tional area between forest and meadow, can be symbolic of
the passing from life to death on the part not only of
Lieutenant Berrendo but also of Jordan. Symbolically the
two enemies are joined in their final experience of life;
and as Jordan becomes symbolically one with Berrendo, he
also becomes symbolically one with the earth; for this is
when he becomes aware of his heart beating against the pine
needle floor of the earth.
Besides the sky and the sun, there is still another
20
earth symbol which is used to relate people: snow. To
Jordan the snowstorm is unlike other kinds of storms,
including the windstorm "that blows through battles but that
was a hot wind" (p. 182):
But a snowstorm was the opposite of that. In the snow
storm you came close to the wild animals and they were
not afraid. . . . In a snowstorm you rode up to a moose
and he mistook your horse for another moose and trotted
forward to meet you. In a snowstorm it always seemed,
20
See Bern Oldsey, "The Snows of Ernest Hemingway,"
Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, IV (Spring-
Summer 1963) , 17 9. Oldsey says that "both love and death
imagery mingle in the snow imagery of For Whom the Bell
Tolls.1 1 Oldsey, in other words, sees snow as a symbol inte
grating two contrasting ideas. He does not, however, see
snow, particularly in the passage in which Jordan describes
his feelings about snowstorms, as a symbol obliterating the
distinctions between people.
218
for a time, as though there were no enemies . . . it
blew a clean whiteness . . . and things were changed.
(P- 182)
In addition to presaging doom, the snow, like the sky and
the sun, here serves also to unite men, even enemies, in a
21
common humanity. Jordan's description of a snowstorm
reveals, furthermore, what seems to be a desire on his part
for both a profound interdependence of men and also an inner
transformation that would permit him to accept that inter
dependence .
Opposed to the natural elements associated with the
earth is the symbol of the machine. If the fascists are
associated with machines, both El Sordo's and Pablo's guer
rilla bands are associated with the earth. Pablo's love of
horses and El Sordo's thoughts of the earth just before his
death ("Living was a horse between your legs . . . and a
valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of
the valley and the hills beyond," p. 313) reveal their close
affinity with the earth. As if to emphasize the contrast
between the "natural" peasants, associated with the earth
symbolism, and the machines of the fascists, Hemingway has
21
See Richard Freedman, "Hemingway's Spanish Civil War
Dispatches," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, I
(Summer 1959), 175. Freedman quotes a passage from a
Hemingway dispatch from the Guadalajara Front, March 23,
1937. This dispatch is interesting. It reveals that
Hemingway, even as a correspondent, was interested in the
role which weather plays in symbolically united men in a
sort of common humanity: "Hot weather makes all dead look
alike."
219
the members of both guerrilla bands exhibit a fear of air
planes as of a naturally and profoundly antipathetic ele
ment, as of something completely alien. Even Jordan, who
shares this revulsion for the airplanes, views the fascist
aircraft as "mechanized doom" which, unnaturally, "move like
nothing there has ever been" (p. 87). Pilar, appropriately
too, feels defeated by the sight of the fascist airplanes:
t
"We are nothing against such machines" (p. 89). The gypsy
Rafael sees the airplanes as contrary to the very principles
and processes of life itself. When Jordan asks him to take
matters seriously, Rafael replies:
When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a
quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward
to all unborn grandsons including cats, goats and bed
bugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in
your mother's breasts as they pass darkening the sky
. . . and you ask me to take things seriously. I take
them too seriously already. (p. 79)
And even the brave El Sordo fears the airplanes: "but when
he thought of the planes coming up he felt as naked on the
hill-top as though all of his clothing and even his skin had
been removed" (p. 310).
Allen Guttman, in an interesting and perceptive article,
saw the essential conflict embodied in the novel in the fol
lowing light: "Hemingway's interpretation of the fight
against fascism was dramatized, particularized, as the
22
struggle of men against machines." Later in the article
22
"Mechanized Doom: Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish
Civil War," Massachusetts Review, I (May 1960), 543.
220
he elaborates upon his understanding of the nature of the
conflict:
Clearly, then, for Hemingway the Spanish War was drama
tized as, among other things, a struggle waged by men
close to the earth and to the values of a primitive
society against men who had turned away from the earth,
men who had turned to the machine and to the values of
an aggressive mechanical order. (p. 547)
Certainly, this is an important aspect of the novel. But
much more can be said about the man-machine dichotomy in the
novel. Seen in the context of the learning process, and the
associated process of an integration leading to a profound
awareness of interdependence, that dichotomy can be symbolic
of a split in the character of Jordan himself: the "cold"
man of action in his fanatical adherence to duty as opposed
to the imaginative man who intuits "bad omens," who has a
rich fantasy life, who explicitly recognizes the possibility
of the preternatural operating in the physical world, and
who, finally, is capable of loving intensely and deeply.
Somewhat like Melville's Ahab, whom D. H. Lawrence discusses
in his Studies in Classic American Literature, Jordan is a
divided man. He is the technician who prides himself on
doing his job well; and he is also the introspective man
whose mind, in its more imaginative divagations, recognizes
the presence of the mysterious and the preternatural. The
man-machine symbolic contrast is related, in other words, to
the central concern of the novel, to Jordan's learning about
himself and about life, a process which involves an integra
tion of contrasting elements in his personality. And this
221
central concern comprehends many other thematic elements in
For Whom the Bell Tolls: those dealing with the supernatu
ral, with time, with love, with death, with the symbolic
earth. Hemingway sees these thematic elements either as
contrasts to be integrated or as elements that serve to
unite men; and all these elements serve also to advance the
central concern of the novel.
If, then, the "machine" symbolizes the coldly rational
side of Jordan's character, the "man" of the man-machine
dichotomy symbolizes the intuitive and emotional aspect, the
aspect which is also associated with the earth. After he
has heard from Maria the story of her parents' deaths at the
hands of the fascists, Jordan thinks in the following terms
of essential contrast between the two approaches to life:
"I know that we did dreadful things to them too. But it was
because we were uneducated and knew no better. But they did
that on purpose and deliberately" (p. 354). That is, it is
the cold, inhuman manner of killing which Jordan finds
reprehensible. And the airplanes, of course, represent just
this kind of cold, impersonal, inhuman approach to death, an
approach which contrasts sharply with that of Augustin who,
before killing, feels "like a mare in the corral waiting for
the stallion" {p. 286) or with that of Anselmo who, after
shooting the guard at the bridge, runs "blubbering down the
bridge like a woman" (p. 442). Jordan, on the other hand,
and this fact illustrates the coldly rational element in his
222
character, kills coldly and knows that he does: "We do it
23
coldly but they do not, nor ever have" (p. 286). Clearly
the "machine" is symbolic of an element in Jordan's make-up.
And this important point is what, in an otherwise perceptive
article, Guttman does not recognize.
Toward the end of the novel, just before he feels "com
pletely integrated" in the face of death (p. 467), Jordan
seems to have reconciled the various facets (the rational
and the intuitive-instinctual) in his character. With
reference to what he had learned in Madrid from Karkov and
also to what Pilar had described concerning the smell of
death, Jordan, as has already been noted in a context rela
tive to a discussion of the educative process as a central
concern of the novel, thinks while he lies wounded:
That part is just as true as Pilar's old woman drinking
blood down at the slaughterhouse. There's no one thing
that's true. The way the planes are beautiful whether
they are ours or theirs. (p. 467)
One feels that Jordan has here achieved a state of relative
24
equilibrium or of integration. What Karkov had told him
23
See Stanley Cooperman, "Hemingway1s Blue-eyed Boy,"
Criticism, A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, VIII
(Winter 1966), 91. Cooperman comments disparagingly on the
character of Jordan: "Jordan can kill 'surgically' with a
chill detachment and cold spirituality alien (and rather
terrifying) to the very peasants whose cause he adopted."
This is perhaps unfair to Jordan in that he himself is aware
of his "cold" detachment in killing, and he gives no indica
tion, furthermore, of his being proud of being able to kill
"surgically."
24
Leo Gurko, "The Achievement of Ernest Hemingway,"
College English, XIII (April 1952), 373. A statement by
223
concerning the smell of death represents a rational appre
hension of life and of society; and what Pilar had described
concerning the smell of death represents an intuitive com
prehension of the mysterious and the preternatural in life.
And to Jordan, in his state of achieved integration, both
ways of confronting life are valid: "There's no one thing
that's true. It's all true." Finally, Jordan's thinking of
the airplanes as "beautiful" seems to symbolize the integra
tion of the rational and intuitive facets of his personal
ity. By a subtle alchemy, the imaginative and intuitive
view of society, in merging with the rational view, has
transformed the symbol of the mechanical and life-depriving
into something "beautiful."
As Guttman has noted, the bridge itself, in the demoli
tion of which both Anselmo and Fernando die, becomes not
only a structural device serving to give unity to the plot
of the novel but also a symbol of a machine age opposed to
25
the "cluster of values" represented by the guerrilla bands.
Gurko would suggest that even good and evil have been, to a
degree, reconciled or "integrated": "Good and evil, instead
of being sharply divided, are again all mixed up and about
equally distributed on both sides." On a mystical level,
perhaps, Jordan has transcended good and evil. However,
Jordan, on the level of political reality, seems to recog
nize clearly the difference between Loyalists and fascists.
25
See also Thornton H. Parsons, "Hemingway's Tyrannous
Plot," University of Kansas City Review, XXVII (Summer 1961),
261. Parsons thinks that the bridge is important in unify
ing the various elements of the novel: "This fierce con
centration upon the bridge is the great strength of the
novel, the source of unity."
224
But one really cannot understand the true nature of the
machine-men contrast in the novel unless one views it in
relation to the novel's central concern, which involves not
only Jordan's learning about the interdependence of men but
also the prerequisite integration of the rational and the
26
intuitive in his psyche. In short, the symbols, as ele
ments in the rhetoric of fiction, must be interpreted in
relation to their function in advancing and supporting the
central concern of For Whom the Bell Tolls. When one under
stands that the novel is based primarily upon, is shaped by,
a "plot-form" or plot-idea concerning Jordan's attempt to
learn about life and about himself, then and only then can
one understand completely the nature of the symbols in
Hemingway's novel.
2 6
See Robert W. Lewis, Hemingway on Love (Austin, Tex.,
1965), pp. 113-178. In accordance with his view that Hem
ingway’s fiction as a whole embodies, on one level, a sort
of dialectical play between eros and agape, with romantic
love representing a negation of both, Lewis suggests that
what Jordan learns involves the nature of love: "The con
cept of agape unifies two stories of love and war. Love is
not eros alone, Jordan has learned" (p. 178). Lewis goes on
to suggest, however, that Jordan's education is yet unfin
ished: "But agape is only potential or primitive or budding
between Jordan and Maria" (p. 178). I think that Lewis's
critique of For Whom the Bell Tolls is both valid and origi
nal. My criticism in no way invalidates Lewis's thesis.
Jordan does achieve a kind of agape in the sense of a self
less, universal love of all men. I think, however, that I
have placed more emphasis upon the process of integration
which accompanies the achievement of what Lewis terms agape.
My emphasis has been upon the integration of two elements in
Jordan’s make-up (the intuitive and the rational) prelimi
nary to what amounts to a kind of mystical apprehension of
oneness. My emphasis, furthermore, has been upon the sym
bolism associated with that process.
225
Defects of Symbol and Rhetoric in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
With a work of the complexity and richness of For Whom
the Bell Tolls, one does not relish pointing out some of
27
its flaws. There are, however, some flaws that prevent
the novel from being completely successful. When, for
example, Hemingway deals with symbols that can be felt and
intuited by the reader, he is relatively effective. The
earth, the sun, the sky, the bridge, the airplanes, the
horses, the elements of the supernatural--all assume sym
bolic qualities which one "feels," even if one does not com
pletely understand their exact meanings. With these symbols
Hemingway deals, really, with broad categories of human
experiences and responses to experiences, with human feel
ings .
When Hemingway tries, however, to come to grips with
political ideas, when he confronts ideology, he is less suc
cessful. Characteristically Hemingway tries to deal with
ideology in symbolic terms, in terms which are inherently
inappropriate to such a task. Thus the burden of Hemingway's
27
See Arthur Mizner, The Sense of Life in the American
Novel (Cambridge, 1964), p. 215. Mizner compares For Whom
the Bell Tolls unfavorably with Hemingway's two earlier
novels. He thinks that the novel suffers from a mere
"mechanical unity." Perhaps the very complexity of the
novel forces Hemingway to resort to various devices (the
bridge is one) in order to unify the various elements of the
novel. To an extent, Mizner is correct. Hemingway, given
the complexity of his novel, has to choose between a some
what coherent work and a chaotic one.
confrontation with ideology is carried by a symbolic con
trast between the cynical realism of Gaylord's, the head
quarters of the Russian contingent in Madrid, and the "puri
tanical, almost religious communism" of Velasquez 63, the
Madrid palace that had been made over into the headquarters
of the International Brigades (pp. 234-235). But a contrast
in ideology cannot be completely understood in terms of a
symbolic juxtaposition: the "cynicism" of Gaylord's as op
posed to the "idealism" of Velasquez 63. One cannot, for
instance, understand the ideological difference between them;
nor, for that matter, can one understand the basic ideology
they share. Unlike Koestler's Darkness at Noon, For Whom
the Bell Tolls does not really, in specific terms, confront
ideology; Jordan has studied Marxism (on p. 244 he tells
Karkov that he has read the "Handbook of Marxism that Emil
Burns edited," evidently a basic text, a Marxist primer),
but one learns nothing about Jordan's understanding of the
ideas of that political philosophy. Hemingway's omission is
a defect because it prevents one from knowing Jordan as com
pletely as one should. Jordan is a man who is depicted as
wanting to learn about life. In fact, one of the reasons he
would prefer not to die is that death would cut short the
process of learning: "I wish that I were going to live a
long time instead of going to die today because I have
].earned much about life in three days. . . . I wish there
were more time" (p. 380). But Jordan, evidently, has
227
learned very little about Marxist philosophy; at least
Hemingway does not deal with it in the novel. Moreover
Hemingway's failure to come to terms with ideology, except
in symbolic terms or in an inner dialogue during which
Jordan refers to himself as a Republican, tends to make
Jordan's sacrificial death less impressive. One feels that
28
Jordan dies for vaguely mystical or personal reasons.
There are occasions, too, when the symbolism becomes
unconvincing. The earth's moving while Jordan and Maria
make love is so completely at variance with reality that the
symbolism, even when one understands its relevance, tends to
verge on the ridiculous. Hemingway is at his characteristi-
cally best when symbolism coexists with reality. In A Fare
well to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, the symbolism is com
pletely natural. The symbolism of the number three in For
Whom the Bell Tolls is not, however, completely convincing
(in a sense "un-natural") in that it becomes too mechanical;
and one begins to wonder why that number is so pervasive in
the novel.
Another sort of failure in symbolism involves charac
terization. Maria, for example, strikes one as a real,
though not completely realized, girl; but she does not
28
See William T. Moynihan, "The Martyrdom of Robert
Jordan," College English, XXI (December 1959), 139. Moyni
han says, for instance, that "Robert Jordan's involvement
with mankind transcends the logic of cooperative leagues,
political or social. It is the furthest possible extension
of Hemingway's mystique of action and honor."
228
succeed as a symbol. Probably Maria is meant to symbolize
the ravished Spanish earth. Hemingway, at least, has Jordan
associate her with the symbolic earth which plays such an
important role in the novel: "Her hair was the golden brown
of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun"
(p. 22). On the next page Jordan again thinks of Maria in
terms of earth symbolism: "... he looked at her hair that
was thick and short and rippling when she passed her hand
over it . . . as a grain field in the wind on a hillside"
29
(p. 23). Maria, however, does not strike one as particu
larly symbolic of a ravaged Spain or of a despoiled earth?
and to describe her in such topographic terms seems inap
propriate. One doubts that Jordan would consistently think
of a "field of grain" when he sees Maria's hair. Jordan
sees those fields of grain when he is sexually aroused by
the sight of Maria, and such fields would seem highly im
probable. One does not immediately realize that Maria is
supposed to be symbolic, and thus those "fields of grain"
seem at best vaguely inappropriate and at worst falsely
poetic, if not ludicrous.
29
See Rovit, p. 142. "Maria becomes symbolic of
Jordan's self-realization, of the universal rightness of the
cause . . . of Spain, and . . . never-ending nature itself."
30
Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the
March (New York, 1941), p. 369. Of Maria as a symbol, Car
gill says that Hemingway's "failure to raise Maria into a
clearly-recognized symbol for Spain itself . . . is the only
failure in the novel."
229
Perhaps a more basic defect stems from the rhetorical
strategy of the novel. The use of the third-person narra
tive to support the theme of interdependence may conflict
with the theme of Jordan's education, a theme which can
probably be best developed by the use of the first-person
narrative with its concomitant focusing on the consciousness
of the narrator or by the third-person narrative with lim
ited focus. The theme of learning cannot, as a result of
the basic strategy of the novel, be developed to its maximum
effectiveness; and that theme, along with the corollary
theme of interdependence, is central to the novel. The two
central concerns (learning process and interdependence),
which are so closely and necessarily associated, are to a
degree basically incompatible. Trilling's characterization
of the novel as that of an "individual ego in search of
experience" touches upon a weakness in the novel. In having
to focus on the isolated ego, even an ego groping toward a
profound awareness of interdependence, Hemingway begins with
a difficulty which he does not completely resolve as the
novel develops. Hemingway attempts to support both the
themes of learning and of interdependence by the use of a
third-person narrative with a shifting focus; he does so by
focusing much of his third-person narrative upon the actions
and thoughts of Jordan, thus establishing Jordan as the hero
who, in undergoing a process of learning, represents the
cohesive center of the novel, who embodies the controlling
230
central concern. The shifting focus of his third-person
narrative also permits him to support the theme of inter
dependence. However, Hemingway's rhetorical strategy does
not quite succeed in uniting his two disparate themes.
Despite its flaws, some readers may well prefer For
Whom the Bell Tolls to either A Farewell to Arms or The Sun
Also Rises. The two earlier novels are, in formal terms,
more nearly perfect as works of art. But in his Spanish
novel, Hemingway tries to achieve more, to comprehend more;
and he almost succeeds in unifying the many thematic ele
ments of his novel. Even if it is not completely successful,
For Whom the Bell Tolls, with all its defects, remains a
moving work of art. It is, surely, a much better novel than
To Have and Have Not.
The Middle Period
In his earlier period Hemingway achieved a perfection
based upon a certain attitude toward life. Jake Barnes and
Frederick Henry were searching for values, for meaning, in
life. The fact that they were in quest for values and mean
ing conditioned their responses to experience; and in their
questing states of mind they naturally tended to find mean
ing in the various aspects of life which they encountered:
in people, in scenes, in objects, and in landscape. As a
consequence, what they confronted tended to become symbolic.
The symbols they discerned, moreover, tended to define the
direction of their search. Hemingway himself was in search
231
for the "real thing" that would give emotional and artistic
validity to his fiction; and Hemingway's search for a true
and a valid approach to experience by means of his writing
may very well have been reflected in the search of his char
acters for meaning in life.
With Frederick Henry the search ends in a nihilistic
view of the world, a view in which the isolated ego finds
personal values to sustain itself in a meaningless world.
In novels of the middle period, however, the Hemingway hero
attempts to rejoin society. The search has to an extent
ended. But his early novels were based upon the premise of
a quest for meaning or values; his symbolism, too, was
associated with the premises of a first person narrator's
quest for meaning and values in life. Thus in To Have and
Have Not, Hemingway, when he first makes a tentative move
back toward society, finds himself on uncertain grounds; and
the failure of his rhetoric and of his symbolism, an aspect
of his rhetoric, is in part a reflection of Hemingway's
uncertainty. With For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has
adjusted his rhetoric to his altered view of life; and con
sequently For Whom the Bell Tolls is incomparably a better
work of art than To Have and Have Not. Paradoxically, in
managing to regain a great degree of control over his fic
tional material, Hemingway reverts to a central observer
who, very much like Barnes and Henry, is in search for mean
ing in a life, a meaning, however, that involves the rela-
232
tionship between the individual and his society on one level
and between the individual and all of life (the universe
itself) on another. The "isolated" ego is trying to find
31
its way out of its isolation.
And the "isolated" ego, as has been suggested, becomes
both a strength and a weakness. The use of the third person
with shifting focus serves to break the "isolated" ego out
of its isolation and to support the theme of interdepend
ence; but with the adoption of the third person, the symbol
ism in For Whom the Bell Tolls, though effective, is not as
"natural" nor as convincing as the unobtrusive, effective
symbolism associated with the first person in both The Sun
Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. With For Whom the Bell
Tolls, the symbolism is, for the most part, carefully con
trolled to support the central concerns of the novel. In
the middle period of the novelist's career, Hemingway's sym
bolism does become more explicit and obvious; but it is
still largely a symbolism appropriate to the author's in
tents and purposes.
31
Robert P. Weeks, "Hemingway and the Uses of Isola
tion, " University of Kansas City Review, XXIV (December
1957), 124. Weeks says that Donne's "'every man is a piece
of the Continent' . . . does not describe Jordan's view of
man any more than it does Jake Barnes' or Frederick Henry's."
Although interesting, this view seems inadequate. What
Jordan shares with Barnes and Henry is a similar approach to
life--that of a man in quest of meaning and values. Jordan
does, finally, achieve an awareness of himself in relation
to other men and to the universe itself; and it is this
awareness that makes him different from Barnes and Henry.
CHAPTER VII
RHETORIC AND SYMBOL IN THE LATE PERIOD:
ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
AND THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
Through the years, most critics have agreed that
Hemingway's novel of his early period, The Sun Also Rises,
is an effective piece of fiction. On the other hand, Across
the River and into the Trees,^ a novel of Hemingway's late
period, did not meet with unanimous acclaim when it was pub
lished in 1950. Joseph Warren Beach's comment, for example,
was fairly typical of the kind of unfavorable criticism that
greeted Hemingway's performance in the later novel:
It is painful to find that a serious artist in the full
ness of maturity and fame, can be such a boyish--and
bearish--show-off, that a distinguished manipulator of
words should depend so much on mere profanity for empha
sis . ^
As Beach suggests, much of Hemingway's failure in Across the
River and into the Trees stems from defective diction,
^Across the River and into the Trees (New York, 1950).
2
Joseph Warren Beach, "How Do You Like It Now, Gentle
men?" in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. and with Introd. by
Carlos Baker (New York, 1961), p. 227. This essay was ori
ginally published in The Sewanee Review, LIX (Spring 1951),
311-328.
233
234
certainly an important element in the rhetoric of fiction;
but, just as certainly, Hemingway's failure stems from even
more basic defects in the novel’s conception and execution.
"Story," Plot, and Defective Rhetoric in
Across the River and into the Trees
The "story" of Across the River and into the Trees is
simple. As the novel opens, Colonel Cantwell is on a duck
hunt near Venice. A flashback, which covers the events of a
two-day period leading up to the duck hunt, occupies Chap
ters II through XXXIX. During the two days preceding the
hunt, the reader learns (pp. 8-11) that the Colonel has a
bad heart, that he is close to death. The Colonel goes to
Venice, registers at the Hotel Gritti, meets some old
friends, dines with his girl friend Renata, a Contessa, and
sleeps overnight with her. After sleeping with her, he goes
off with the Barone Alvarito to the duck hunt. With Chapter
XLI, the flashback comes to a close; and the Colonel is back
at the hunt. On his return to Trieste with his driver
Jackson, he dies of a heart attack, leaving behind in his
jeep two shotguns and a portrait of Renata.
The plot concerns an embittered American, "half a cen
tury old," who in returning to Venice passes through terrain
on which he has fought in World War I to spend two days in a
city he loves. In loving the Contessa Renata, who is nine
teen years old, he seems symbolically to relive his youth
and also to purge himself of anguish and bitterness in
235
preparation for death. The plot is primarily about an em
bittered professional soldier who, in loving his "last" and
"only true love," in meditating upon the past, in getting
rid of anguish and bitterness, tries to become a better man
3
and to achieve an equanimity with which to face death. The
plot is potentially a good one; but Hemingway has not given
body to it in the events themselves and in his"arrangement
of events." The arrangement of events does not support the
central concern.
Unlike his first novel, Across the River and into the
Trees is a static book. For long stretches in the novel
nothing much happens in a physical sense. Chapters II
through VII deal with his traveling to Venice and his check
ing into the Hotel Gritti; most of Chapter IX (pp. 7 6-101)
takes the form of a long dialogue between Renata and the
Colonel at Harry's Bar; most of Chapter XII (pp. 115-148)
also consists of a long dialogue between Renata and the
Colonel; Chapters XIII and XIV deal with a scene on a gon
dola; Chapters XV, XVI, XVIII, and XIV focus on the Colonel,
who sleeps alone in his room and breakfasts the next morn
ing; and Chapters XXVIII through XXXV (pp. 216-258) revert
3
See Horst Oppel, "Hemingway's Across the River and
into the Trees," in Hemingway and His Critics, p. 217.
Oppel finds that Cantwell differs from Hemingway's previous
heroes in the way in which he faces death: "Actually the
challenge of facing death which is posed for Colonel Richard
Cantwell differs from that of most Hemingway characters. It
is a deep, inner challenge."
236
to dialogue, a long conversation between the Colonel and the
Contessa while in bed at the Gritti, followed by the
Colonel's monologue after the girl drops off to sleep. In
The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's concerns are embodied, in
large measure, in characters who act in scene and in dia
logue. Much of the theme in his later novel is embodied in
the thoughts of Colonel Cantwell; and thoughts, an important
rhetorical element appropriately employed in For Whom the
Bell Tolls, are difficult to dramatize. Thoughts, for one
thing, tend to become fragmented, piecemeal, difficult to
build into a structure coherent enough to sustain a theme;
thoughts are most effective in coordination with actions
and with dialogue. Virginia Woolf does sustain a theme in
Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, because the thoughts she
describes are those that recreate actions that occurred in
the past and continue into the present, actions that are
coherent and that involve people whom the reader gets to
know. The thoughts of Colonel Cantwell, fragmented and
intermittent, provide an insight into what is bothering him,
the bitterness and anguish that he has to purge before he
can achieve a kind of grace; but they do not recreate
actions--events that dramatize, make vivid, the necessity of
his having to rid himself of his bitterness and anguish. In
short, both dialogue and internal monologue, elements of the
rhetoric of fiction that Hemingway has invariably handled
237
with great skill in his previous work, are woefully ineffec
tive in Across the River and into the Trees.
Chapters XXVIII through XXXV (pp. 216-258), a substan
tial portion of a book only three hundred and eight pages
long, take place in bed; and much of the long scene in bed
consists of dialogue and internal monologue. In this long
scene, the crucially important events (those dealing with
the immediate cause of the Colonel's anguish and bitterness)
take place retrospectively. One learns that he is bitter
because of the stupidity of generals safely behind the
lines, generals who really do not know what war is. In
Chapter XXXI, the Colonel speaks of his almost traumatic
loss: "Now every second man in it was dead and nearly all
were wounded. In the belly, the back, the lucky buttocks,
the unfortunate chest, and the other places” (p. 242).
Later, he adds, "It was a good regiment. . . . You might
even say it was a beautiful regiment until I destroyed it
under other people's orders." The loss of his regiment
would certainly explain his anguish, but that loss is not
described in terms of sustained action, in vivid scenes, and
therefore his bitterness concerning those who he thinks are
responsible for his loss loses much of its force; and the
theme, which involves a purgation of that bitterness, loses,
correspondingly, its definition and focus— loses, that is,
the sharp edge that can pierce one to the heart. During the
long scene in bed, the Colonel says, "Now we are governed
238
. . . by the dregs. We are governed by what you find in the
bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their
cigarettes in" (p. 227). This strikes one immediately as
an outlandish statement. But it could have been understand
able; it could have even been, in fictional terms, "right"
and appropriate if the cause of his bitterness had been
described in scenes and action, in real characters revealing
stupidity, avarice, vulgarity, incompetence, and inhumanity
4
in their thoughts and in their actions.
Instead the reader is treated to a Colonel Cantwell
who, without seeming justification, takes pot shots at any
one who was not there with him on the front lines. Anyone
who was not there under fire, sharing his anguish at the
moment of his loss, becomes suspect. Thus he refers to one
general as a "Political General" (p. 125), to Patton as an
inveterate liar (p. 116), and to Montgomery as a mediocre
general (pp. 125-126). Writers of books about war also come
under his sporadic enfilade (p. 137), for most of them,
really, did not see the war as it had actually been. In one
scene which is genuinely effective (pp. 235-240), the
Colonel describes a briefing conference at which Walter
4
See Oppel, p. 216: "Not only is the dramatic content
sparse but we are also disappointed in the expectation that
characterization and character development compensate for
this feeling." But in Hemingway at his best "dramatic con
tent" and characterization are closely related. Thus one
cannot expect characterization compensating for a lack of
dramatic content— not, at least, in Hemingway.
239
Bedell Smith explains "how easy" the Huertgen Forest opera
tion will be, at which "they" explain the "Big Picture," the
"Semi-Big Picture," and the "Super-Big Picture," and at
which the "Political General" explains how "facilely" the
operation will succeed. But again a scene of this sort
seems only venomous unless one can understand the cause of
the Colonel’s bitterness; one has to have been there with
the Colonel at Huertgen Forest. Dealing with crucial events
by means of lengthy dialogues and internal monologues, all
of them occurring within a long flashback, is not the most
convincing way to further the central concerns of the novel.
Unlike the central events in Across the River and into
the Trees, those in The Sun Also Rises are dramatized. The
tension of dramatic conflict is in the structure of the plot
itself and gives force to the central concern: Jake
Barnes's groping toward a meaningful life, his search for
values.^ In the later novel, however, no dramatic conflict
exists to give force to the novel's main theme, which is the
purgation of bitterness. The conflict dwindles to an appar
ently petulant attack on everyone and everything that the
Colonel finds distasteful. Even the animadversions upon
^See Robert W. Lewis, Jr., Hemingway on Love (Austin,
Tex., 1965), p. 195. Lewis comments upon what could very
well be a central concern of the novel: "He is no Christ,
but he has taught himself through his own Passion enacted oh
a bare-assed hill in the Huertgen forest, in bad marriages,
and in countless other agonies of his violent life, that
concern for oneself is a luxury." The point I am making is
that Hemingway fails to dramatize that central concern.
240
people he really does not know, however, would be under
standable if the immediate cause of the Colonel's bitterness
were shown, were accounted for, in the plot of the novel.
Thus, for instance, his disparagement of the post-war
Milanese rich man he encounters in a bar lacks real force:
". . . the Colonel wondered how much taxes the man had
escaped to buy that sleek girl in her long mink coat"
(p. 38). At Harry's Bar, the Colonel and the Contessa see a
man with the face of "Herr Goebbels" (p. 89). This man,
whom they see again at the bar of the Gritti (p. 127), is an
American writer who has, apparently, done nothing to earn
the Colonel's enmity; yet Cantwell's animosity toward the
writer is obvious: "... there was black hair that seemed
to have no connection with the human race" (p. 87). Only
when one thinks about the loss of the Colonel's regiment
(p. 233), about the briefing conference with the "Political
General," or about his former journalist wife— only then
does one understand his bitterness concerning the writer;
the writer is simply symbolic of the kind of person who does
not "know the score, " who, while knowing nothing of war or
of life, writes as if he does know and, in the process, dis
seminates lies and distortions. The fact that the writer
reminds the Colonel of Goebbels is suggestive. One does
not, however, readily see the causes of the Colonel's bit
terness. One does not see them because of a failure in
Hemingway's rhetoric: his dependence upon dialogue and
241
internal monologue to carry the burden of his action; his
failure to have contrasting characters confront each other
in meaningful scenes; generally, his failure to dramatize
the important events of the novel.
Relationship Between Characters, Rhetoric,
Theme, and Defective Symbolism
There is a direct relationship between Hemingway's
employment of characters, his rhetoric, and his defective
symbolism. The characters whom Hemingway admires belong,
generally, in roughly two categories: people who have expe
rienced suffering and people who are professionally compe
tent. Of the people who are professionally competent he
admires, among others, Generals Bradley, Rommel, and Ney.
The people who have suffered, who "know the score," include
the boatman with six children, the Gran Maestro of the Hotel
Gritti, who has been in World War I with the Colonel, and,
of course, the Colonel himself. However, the people whom
the Colonel admires are never in direct contact with the
people he does not admire; partly because of this lack of
contact, the bitterness and anguish which he wishes to purge
lacks the force generated by a plot in which dramatic con
flict and contrast inhere. And because of this lack of con
tact, furthermore, the characters do not acquire symbolic
dimensions that they should have in order to support and to
give direction to the central concerns of the novel, for
instance the important symbolic dimensions that the Cohn-
242
Romero contrast and the Rinaldi-Priest contrast acquire in
The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. A defective
rhetoric, an instance being Hemingway's excessive reliance
on dialogue and internal monologue, is, moreover, one of the
reasons why his characters do not define themselves in sym-
bolic opposition and thus assume symbolic dimensions; the
Gran Maestro, whom we meet in a flashback, cannot, obviously,
confront General Patton, merely mentioned in a dialogue
occurring within that flashback. Basic to a failure of
Hemingway's rhetoric and, in part, his symbolism, is his
failure to have his characters confront each other in mean
ingful situations.
As in his two earliest novels, there are, in Across the
River and into the Trees, sets of contrarieties: profes
sionalism versus incompetence, experience versus innocence,
Europe versus America, the noble versus the ignoble, the
true versus the false, the enduring versus the evanescent.
But the contrarieties are not made an integral part of the
plot. The events of the plot are not arranged to define
these contrarieties; and, finally, the contrarieties are not
sufficiently related to Cantwell's attempt to purge himself
^See S. F. Sanderson, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1961),
p. 112. Although he fails to elaborate upon his statement,
Sanderson focuses on one of the weaknesses of the novel when
he says of Across the River and into the Trees: Hemingway
"failed to accommodate in a consistent and satisfying way
the literal level of his story and the symbolic level at
which he was working also."
243
of bitterness. Lacking a dramatic conflict informing his
plot, Hemingway tries to give a factitious unity to the
novel in a number of ways. One way Hemingway attempts is to
give depth, significance, and coherence to his story by sym
bolic allusions to enduring art and to history. Hemingway
alludes, for example, to a parallel between his novel and
the Desdemona-Othello drama: "They were not Othello and
Desdemona, thank God" (p. 230). Despite Cantwell’s dis
claimer, the parallel between the two stories is striking.
Cantwell, like Othello, is a soldier who had once fought for
Venice: "Christ I love it, he said, and I'm so happy I
helped defend it when I was a punk kid" (p. 45). The Con
tessa, like Desdemona, is of the Venetian nobility, and she,
again like Desdemona, is fascinated by the tales related by
an old soldier who has fought in many battles. The reader
may also recall other deaths associated with Venice: Mann's
Death in Venice and James's The Wings of the Dove, in which
the heroine dies in Venice. The resonance developed by the
symbolic allusions, however, is not strong enough to encom
pass Hemingway's novel and to impart to it a unity it does
not have.
In lieu of a coherent plot and dramatic characters,
Hemingway also relies on explicit symbolism to give his
novel an adventitious and forced unity. Before entering
Venice, for example, the Colonel eliminates on the very spot
on which he had been wounded thirty years before: "It's a
244
wonderful monument. It has everything. Fertility, money,
blood and iron" (pp. 18-19). Later, going by boat to the
Hotel Gritti, the Colonel passes under various bridges
(p. 46) which, according to Carlos Baker, symbolize stages
in Cantwell's life: the
first white bridge is childhood, the unfinished wooden
bridge interrupted adolescence, the red bridge the first
far-off war, and the high flying white bridge an aspect
of youthful ambition.^
The portrait which the Contessa gives the Colonel is obvi
ously symbolic not only of the Contessa's love but also of
the Colonel's past; this symbolism becomes obvious when the
Colonel addresses the portrait in the following terms: "Boy
or daughter or my one true love or whatever it is" (p. 173).
The inference is obvious— a species of narcissism. The
Colonel in loving the girl loves himself as he was in the
past. In The Sun Also Rises, there is also an extensive use
of symbolism; but the symbolism is germane to the plot of
the novel; and it is a felt symbolism working, really, below
the level of the reader's consciousness to give depth and
emotional coherence to the plot. However, the symbolism in
Across the River and into the Trees does not, because of its
obtrusive artificiality, work upon the emotions of the
reader; nor does it work effectively with the central con
cern of the novel: the purgation of bitterness through love
7
See Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
(New York, 1952), pp. 278-279.
245
and through a coming to terms with the past. The girl,
besides being symbolic of the past, acts the role of a sort
of psychiatrist who cajoles the Colonel into purging his
bitterness through lengthy conversations; but in doing so
she loses definition as a real woman in a real love affair,
a love affair so real that it will satisfy the Colonel's
desire for the aching clarity of life before the inevitabil
ity of death. The girl is symbolic of too many things, or
perhaps symbolic in an overly explicit way. The series of
bridges and the Colonel's ritual of eliminating on the spot
where he had been wounded in World War I are, certainly,
symbolic of the Colonel's past; but they are so obtrusive in
one case and so egregiously outlandish in the other that
they seem artificial, adventitious, and thus ineffective.
The failure of symbolism in Across the River and into
the Trees is really a concomitant of a failure in other
areas of Hemingway's rhetoric of fiction: his failure to
dramatize crucial events; his failure meaningfully to juxta
pose scenes and characters; his failure to emphasize impor
tant scenes and actions; his failure to manage flashbacks
and internal monologues; a failure, in general, to assign
appropriate weight, in proportion and emphasis, to important
scenes, actions, and characters. No one can quarrel with
Hemingway’s choice of the third-person point of view with
the focus primarily upon Colonel Cantwell; unlike Barnes or
Henry, however, Cantwell does not look upon the world and
246
intuit from it a consistent and sustained symbolism reflec
tive of the central concerns of the novel. Perhaps Heming
way's use of flashback - and flashbacks within flashback
breaks the continuous tension which should exist between the
objective and subjective worlds; it is this tension from
which emerges the consistent and sustained symbolism of The
Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.
Obtrusive Symbolism g
in The Old Man and the Sea
Just as For Whom the Bell Tolls represents a vast
improvement over To Have and Have Not, so is The Old Man and
the Sea a much better piece of fiction than is Across the
River and into the Trees. Instead of presenting action
retrospectively, Hemingway depicts Santiago's struggle with
the Marlin and his battle with the sharks in dramatic terms
that continuously engage the reader's interest. The mean
ings of the story are directly related to the action itself,
and they in turn provide a context which enriches that
action. First, the action dramatically illustrates the
spiritual victory that Santiago achieves in the face of
actual, physical defeat. Second, the action serves to illu
minate a view of a universe in which each man, each creature,
9
has a "fixed role to play," and in which the qualities of
^New York, 1952.
g
See Leo Gurko, College English, XVII {October 1955),
31. Gurko states: "In this universe, changeless and bare
247
courage, humility, and nobility are exhibited in the playing
out of that role. In this view, moreover, man, together
with the other creatures of the world, is seen to be pro
foundly in harmony with the universe, with nature. And in
this view, too, Hemingway's concerns throughout his literary
career (his preoccupation with the nature of courage, his
"primitivism," his belief in craft and professional compe
tence, his essentially romantic belief in nature as repre
sentative of the true, the good, and the beautiful) finally
achieves a coherence and a philosophic wholeness which
envelops the action of the novel and makes it richly mean
ingful. Hemingway's last novel, really a novelette, is a
nearly flawless piece of fiction. Meaning, action, and the
context for action (Hemingway's universe) are intimately
related in The Old Man and the Sea.
If Hemingway had been content to let meaning stem
solely from an action which takes place in a given context,
he would have achieved an even more nearly flawless work of
art."^ Thus it is unfortunate that some of the symbolism in
of divinity, everyone has his -Eixed role to play. Santiago's
role is to pursue the great marlin."
"^See Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., "The Old Man and the
Sea: Hemingway’s Tragic Vision," in Ernest Hemingway; Cri
tiques of Four Major Novels, ed. and with Introd. by Carlos
Baker (New York, 1962), p. 155. Burhans admirably states
what I here have in mind: . . out of his concern with
action and conduct in a naturalistic universe Hemingway has
not evolved new moral values; rather he has reaffirmed man's
oldest ones— courage, love, humility, solidarity, and inter
dependence . "
the novel is obtrusive, that it has little to do with the
action of the novel or with the context for action. The
symbolism which one finds obtrusive has to do with Christ,
his crucifixion, and his suffering. The action of the
story, one finds, has no clear relationship to Christ's
crucifixion; and thus the symbolic meaning of Christ's
ordeal cannot be said to stem naturally from the objectively
depicted action of the novel. After all, Santiago's aim is
to bring in the Marlin, not to save mankind. Moreover, the
Christ symbolism is not organic to the universe which
Hemingway assumes in The Old Man and the Sea. If the Christ
symbolism were less obtrusive it might be more effective in
serving subtly to associate the feelings aroused by thoughts
of the crucifixion with those aroused by Santiago's ordeal.
But when the symbolism becomes so explicit as to be obtru
sive, inevitably one begins to wonder what Christ and his
crucifixion have to do with Santiago and his ordeal with the
gigantic Marlin; once one’s intelligence, instead of one's
feelings, is engaged, one has to question the validity of
that explicit association. That the symbolism dealing with
Christ is all too explicit can be verified by a fairly care
ful reading of the novel.
When Santiago sees the first of two attacking sharks,
for example, Hemingway describes the old fisherman's reac
tions in the following terms: "’Ay,'" he said aloud. There
is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just such
249
a noise as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail
go through his hands and into the wood" (p. 107). Later,
after Santiago reaches shore, he shoulders the mast as if it
were a cross and starts to climb to his home: "He starts to
climb again and at the top he fell and lay for some time
with the mast across his shoulders" (p. 121). Within his
shack, he lies down on his bed "with his arms out straight
and the palms of his hands up" (p. 122) , an obvious allusion
to the crucifixion. The explicit nature of the symbolic
association between Christ and Santiago forces one to ques
tion whether that symbolism is apt; and one is, furthermore,
likely to conclude that it is not particularly appropriate.
In the universe Hemingway assumes, morality is based upon a
man's doing, upon any creature's doing, what he is best
fitted to do: the man must catch the Marlin; the Marlin
must fight the man; and the sharks, by their very nature,
must attack the flesh of the Marlin. It is a morality which
is one with the physical nature of the universe, whereas
Christian morality is often at odds with the physical uni
verse. The concept of the survival of the fittest, for
example, may very well be reflective of the physical uni
verse, but it is certainly not reflective of Christian
morality. In the universe of The Old Man and the Sea,
Christian symbolism would thus seem to be inappropriate."*''*'
"^See Joseph Waldmeir, "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest
Hemingway's Religion of Man," in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques
250
One doubts that Santiago would think of himself as Christ.
One notes, too, that Santiago's painfully cramped and
torn hand is linked symbolically both to the bone spur in
Joe DiMaggio's heel and also to Christ's crucifixion, a sym
bolic association which immediately strikes one as inappro
priate. Christ's dying for mankind has little in common
either with Santiago's heroic struggle with the Marlin or
with Joe DiMaggio's helping the Yankees to a pennant despite
a painful bone spur. Joe DiMaggio, moreover, would seem to
have more in common with a figure like the pre-Christian
Achilles, who also had problems with his heel and who, like
DiMaggio, had much to do with the victories of his "team."
Santiago, moreover, thinks he has been beaten because he has
gone "out too far" to sea (p. 121); that is, a species of
pride lies behind his ordeal with the Marlin, a pride much
like the concept of hubris in Greek tragedy. The old man
himself is aware of his pride: "You did not kill the fish
only to keep alive and to sell for food. . . . You killed
him for pride and because you are a fisherman" (p. 105).
of Four Major Novels, p. 148. Waldmeir tries to account for
the Christian symbolism in the novel in the following way:
"But the Christian symbolism is in the book, and it does
appear to constitute a Christian Allegory. Yes, but on a
superficial level." He goes on to say that the religious
allegory in the novel constitutes an "allegorical interpre
tation of the total body of the work." This may be true,
but it does not deal with the question of whether the Chris
tian allegory is germane to the novel itself, although it
may very well constitute an "allegory" on the total body of
Hemingway's work.
251
Surely Santiago's pride is not consonant with Christ's
character. That pride, however, may very well be under
standable in a universe in which men, as well as other liv
ing organisms, must do what they must do, and in which val
ues such as courage, nobility, and even a sort of beauty
inhere in the superb performance of one's appointed role in
life. Of his killing the big fish, Santiago says: "Do not
think about sin. . . . You were born to be a fisherman as
the fish was born to be a fish" (p. 105).
For the most part, nevertheless, the symbols in The Old
Man and the Sea are appropriate to the central concerns of
the novel. The lions that recur in Santiago's dreams, the
Marlin, the Sharks, the Portuguese Man of War, the sea— all
are broadly suggestive of courage, of nobility, or ugliness,
of life itself; and they are appropriate to the universe
Hemingway envisions for his novel. These symbols are
organic to the action of the novel, providing, as they do, a
natural context that serves to give resonance and richness
to Santiago's epic ordeal.
Symbol and Rhetoric: A Summary
Despite the qualified success of The Old Man and the
Sea, a close reading of Hemingway's fiction would suggest
strongly that his writing becomes not only increasingly sym
bolic but also obtrusively so in his late period. In Across
the River and into the Trees, Hemingway uses an obtrusive
symbolism to hold together a novel which is basically
252
without focus; and in The Old Man and the Sea, he employs an
obtrusive symbolism that mars an otherwise coherent and fine
work of art.
One can suggest reasons for Hemingway's increasingly
obtrusive symbolism and for the general decline of his
powers as a novelist. In the light of American literary
history, Hemingway's failure to sustain the art he per
fected in the Twenties can be seen as characteristic of
American writers in general. Melville, Hawthorne, Fitz
gerald, and Faulkner did their best work early in their
careers. Only James improved with age, and he had taken
root in English society. In short, the cultural milieu of
America may serve to explain Hemingway's decline. With the
passage of time, moreover, the influences of the Twenties,
particularly those of Pound and Stein, diminished in force;
and Hemingway may have become less amenable to the fructify
ing influences of contemporary writers and critics. Having
perfected his art in the Twenties, Hemingway could not con
tinue to write in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties as he
had in the Twenties. And perhaps his disdain of much con
temporary criticism and writing prevented his developing
beyond the art he had perfected in the first decade of his
writing career.
Moreover, Hemingway found a congenial subject matter in
the Twenties. He was able to write convincingly of the lost
generation, of young men and women searching for values in a
253
dislocated world. He was a part of that generation. The
war which had profoundly affected his generation was still
very recent history to Hemingway. Hemingway's feelings
were directly, immediately, involved in the substance of
his novels. And as World War I and the Twenties receded,
the immediacy of feeling which lay beneath the surface of
his prose was lost. His style, perfected in the Twenties,
showed little decline. But the substance of personal his
tory and feeling which helped to form that style became
attenuated. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled his
early days as a writer in Paris; and magically, as if trans
ported back to the springs of his art, Hemingway again wrote
the lucid, vibrant, pregnant-with-meaning prose of his early
years. It was as if Hemingway were closely associated with
an era which fully engaged his powers as a writer.
A review of this study will detail the reasons for
Hemingway's general decline.as a novelist and for the in
creasing obtrusiveness of his symbols. As noted in the
preface, Hemingway commented that a preconceived symbol
"sticks out--like raisins in raisin bread." Hemingway's
comment does not suggest that there are no symbols in his
novels. Rather, it implies that his symbols are an organic
part of his best novels, that they emerge naturally during
the evolution of the work of art itself, and that they are
intimately related to all the other elements that enter into
his fiction. It also implies that in bad novels, Hemingway's
254
included, symbols are not an organic part of the novel; sym
bols are "stuck in." An analysis of the ways in which sym
bols actually function in Hemingway's novels has indicated
some of the reasons for the relative success or failure of
those novels.
This study has been an attempt both to reveal the ways
in which Hemingway's symbols function to sustain the basic
themes in his novels and also to indicate the ways in which
his symbols are intimately related to the other elements of
his rhetoric of fiction. The effectiveness of Hemingway's
symbolism is a result of his effective employment of all the
other elements of his rhetoric: point of view, choice of
central character, juxtaposition of characters and scenes,
arrangement, emphasis, internal monologue, dialogue, and the
famous Hemingway style. In short, one really cannot evalu
ate Hemingway's symbolism unless one sees it in relation to
all the other elements of his total strategy. And an ade
quate evaluation of his symbolism will suggest reasons for
Hemingway's decline.
Point of view is inextricably related to the effective
ness of much of Hemingway's symbolism. It is the first-
person point of view, for example, which permits a consist
ent, continuous, and subtly felt interplay of symbols in The
Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Related to the
first-person point of view, of course, is the matter of the
choice of central characters, characters sensitive enough
255
to gain the reader's ready, or qualified, assent to their
views of the world, to their apprehension of symbolic mean
ings in scenes, characters, and objects. Also related to
the effectiveness of Hemingway's symbolism is the matter of
narrative distance between the writer and reader on the one
hand and the central character on the other. With the
Hemingway of the early period there must be relatively
little distance between the reader and the central charac
ter. If there were too appreciable a distance between the
reader and Henry and Barnes, for instance, one would not as
fully feel the impact of the symbolism in the early novels;
Henry and Barnes are relatively reliable narrators to whose
views of the world one can acquiesce during the process of
reading. Just as, in reading a lyric poem, one must par
ticipate directly in the experience of the poet, so must one
participate in the adventures of Barnes and Henry in order
to feel the symbolic impacts of the worlds they inhabit; a
third-person distance between the reader and Hemingway's
central characters would destroy the impact of Hemingway's
symbolism. Of course, one speaks here primarily of Heming
way's early novels; in his short stories, written in both
the first and third persons, symbol and ironic distance do
coexist harmoniously.
It must be noted, too, that the distance between
Hemingway and his central characters must often be kept to a
minimum; for much of the "reliability" of the ideas con
256
tained in internal monologues depends to a great extent upon
one's assumption that those ideas are essentially Heming
way’s- Reliable commentary, in its function of guiding the
reader, of helping him to adopt appropriate attitudes toward
the fictional material, and of generalizing the specific
meanings of the novel into universal meanings, demands that
the distance between the central characters of his novels
and Hemingway be kept to a minimum. Fielding could keep all
the distance he wanted between himself and Tom Jones, with
all the advantages stemming from a preservation of that
distance, because he knew that he could comment explicitly
in his own person on actions, characters, and scenes.
Fielding's narrative method, with all its advantages, would
preclude, however, the kind of symbolism Hemingway achieves
in his two early novels. Henry and Barnes must be not only
reliable narrators but also the sensitive instruments that
register the symbolic impact of the world upon them; and, of
course, those two functions are closely related.
To a considerable degree the arrangement of events is
also intimately related to symbolism. The juxtaposition of
characters, scenes, and actions, in other words, helps those
characters, scenes, and actions take on symbolic force in
relation to the central concerns of a novel. Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms reveal many mean
ingful juxtapositions. In the earlier novel, for instance,
the scenes at Burguete tend to become symbolic of the good
257
life in juxtaposition to the opening scenes in Paris. And
in A Farewell to Arms, scenes with Rinaldi and the Priest
are juxtaposed in order to sharpen contrasting symbolic
functions of each character. Related to juxtapositions is
the matter of emphasis. The fact that, for example, the
Burguete scenes occupy so much narrative space in The Sun
Also Rises forces one to the realization of its symbolic
importance relative to the central concerns of the novel;
one realizes that Hemingway would not have given so much
space to a fishing trip unless the novelist felt it was
somehow germane to the movement of the novel toward the ful
fillment of its central concerns. Hemingway does not com
ment explicitly on the importance of the Burguete scenes; he
depends, to some extent, on the elements of juxtaposition
and emphasis to comment for him. And one observes with
respect to the early novels that juxtaposition and emphasis
are related not only to symbolism but also to point of view.
The fact that a first person center of consciousness expe
riences the juxtapositions that Hemingway artfully contrives
must, surely, in some way modify the symbolic force of the
scenes, actions, and characters that are juxtaposed.
There is, furthermore, a relationship between the
first-person narrators in the early novels and the symbolic
structure which some critics have discerned in them. Cer
tainly the fact that Barnes and Henry are unique individuals
in search for meaning and values in life will tend to shape
258
the symbolic sub-structure of the early novels; as individ
uals, surely, they will tend to see particular scenes,
objects, characters, actions, or aspects of landscape as
particularly symbolic; and what they tend to see as symbolic
would then begin to assume a symbolic sub-structure as one
reads The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. The cen
tral concerns of the two novels will also affect the nature
of the symbolic structure; characters in quest for meaning
or values, certainly, will find that certain aspects of the
life around them tend to take on symbolic dimensions.
Finally, Hemingway's language itself is related to his
kind of symbolism. In the early Hemingway, his language,
characteristically sparing in the use of adjectives, almost
forced the reader to center his attention on the objects
themselves rather than on the qualities associated with
them; and objects thus presented tend to become symbolic in
the same way that, for instance, any simple figure would
become symbolic if that figure were the only object painted
on an otherwise empty canvas; one wonders, that is, why that
12
figure is there or what it means.
12
See Harry Levin, "Observations on the Style of Ernest
Hemingway," in Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. and with Introd. by Robert P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1962), pp. 78-79. After saying that Hemingway does
not "cultivate" the adjective, Levin adds: "Hemingway puts
his emphasis on nouns because, among parts of speech, they
come closest to things. Stringing them along by means of
conjunctions, he approximates the actual flow of experience."
In Hemingway, the noun "unadorned by adjectives" often car
ries symbolic meanings.
259
In Hemingway at his best, symbolism is closely related
to the other elements of his rhetoric of fiction, and one
cannot really understand his symbols unless one analyzes
them in relation to the other elements in that rhetoric.
One cannot, that is, analyze the "raisins" in Hemingway's
bread simply because Hemingway did not bake raisin bread;
he did not bake it, at least, in his early period when his
art had achieved a formal perfection that it could not sub
sequently sustain through his middle and late periods. At
his best his symbols are not simply stuck into his novels;
his symbols, ideally, are organic to his novels. It is
true, however, that Hemingway became increasingly symbolic
in his middle and late periods. And in reading his novels
written after A Farewell to Arms, one is no longer aware of
being in the presence of that rare achievement: the per
fectly integrated work of art. As has been shown, Heming
way's symbolism is related to all the other elements of his
strategy; and his symbols tend to become obtrusive with a
concomitant decline from the perfected rhetoric of the
Twenties. This is not to say that For Whom the Bell Tolls
is an inferior novel; in many respects it may represent a
greater achievement than his two novels of the early period.
In reading the novels of the early period, however, one
feels that the writer is always in close relationship to his
fictional material, that he has shaped that material with
the highest degree of skill and imaginative intensity.
260
A final comment should be made about the critical
method, as opposed to the subject matter, of this disserta
tion. Although the explicit concern of this dissertation
has been an examination of Hemingway's symbolism, a largely
unstated but implicit concern has been that of providing a
new approach to the study of symbolism in fiction. By its
contrast of effective and ineffective symbolism in Heming
way, this study illustrates a method that can be applied to
other writers whose symbolism is important. The reasons for
the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a writer's symbolism
can often be specifically determined only by studying it as
an element in the rhetoric of fiction.
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261
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Creator Matsuda, Sumio (author)

Core Title Symbolism And The Rhetoric Of Fiction In Hemingway'S Novels

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor McElderry, Bruce R. (committee chair), Armato, Rosario P. (committee member), Nichol, John W. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-577204

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