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He dove into the river and escaped. He swam to safety and boarded a train to
Stresa where he reunited with Catherine. REFLECTIONS OF HEMINGWAY’S LIFE
Hemingway did not only create characters but created himself. The meaning to
that is that he took his life and intertwined it not only into one of his
stories but almost all of his stories. As a writer, Hemingway drew heavily upon
his war experiences, as is seen in his earlier works that speak of men and women
deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had
believed, as well as, of those who lived with hostile disregard for anything but
their own emotional needs. Many of the situations and characters in A Farewell
to Arms came from Hemingway's own experience with the war in Italy. Not long
after high school Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1917.
Just like Frederick in the story he is seriously wounded and taken to get
medical care. Henry was posted in northern Italy and, like Hemingway, received a
wound from a mortar round. Even the details of the wound to the leg are based
exactly on the novelist's own injury. While Hemingway was recovering he fell in
love like Henry. The only exception to that is that the woman Hemingway fell in
love with ran off and became engaged to an Italian nobleman. “He also drew upon
his love of fishing, hunting, and bull fighting, where his writings tell of men
with simple characters and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and
bullfighters” (Roberts 8). He wrote of their courageous and usually futile
battles against circumstances. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other stories
Hemingway looked back on his African safaris from 1934. Most of the source
material for The Old Man and the Sea comes from Hemingway's own experiences
fishing off the coast of Cuba. Hemingway spent more than two decades of his life
living on the island, and fishing was one of his favorite activities. Another
episode in 1940 may have also served as a source for the novel.
Hemingway
witnessed a man and a boy in a small boat being dragged by a fish that the man
had hooked. When Hemingway approached to try to help, the man had screamed at
him to stay away. Hemingway watched the struggle for half the day, finally
pulling his own boat close enough to throw some provisions into the boat of the
embattled fisherman and boy. Beginning with the illustrative story and perhaps
this experience, Hemingway added deeper elements from the environment to flesh
out Santiago's character and develop the action of the story. THEMES In “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” Harry himself regards his life as a failure. “He has
prostituted his art”: each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which
he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally,
he did no work at all. The months and years of idleness slip by. He never acts,
he never loves, he never carries out his plans. He returns to Africa simply
because he had once been happy there, and he thinks perhaps there he can work
the fat off his soul. Scorning the challenge of real life all around him, he
postpones writing the stories he knows, and he postpones loving an eminently
lovable woman simply because she is his and is available at the present moment.
Harry then becomes infected with the disease called gangrene. He lays on his cot
where he flashes back to scenes from his life that he has saved to write, taking
pleasure in their recall but knowing he will never write about them. He dreams
of his younger days when he was capable of fulfilling and remaining true to his
talent. Therefore the theme is don’t put off what you could have done today to
do tomorrow. Always have courage and face your fears in life is the lesson from
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Francis Macomber was a wealthy
American on a safari with his beautiful, unloving wife, Margot. On one of the
first days out Macomber flees away as fast as possible to get away from the lion
instead of shooting due to his fears. This is similar to how he ignores his
wife’s cheating habits instead of confronting her. Later on Macomber has the
chance to live up to his fears again which he does, by facing a buffalo and his
wife (when he realized she was in Wilson’s tent one night). You may not always
know one’s true background and what is really happening in their life. That is a
theme for “In Another Country”. The narrator for the story is in Milan for
rehabilitation where he meets an Italian Soldier, a champion fencer, whose hand
has been wounded while at war that is also in rehabilitation. The recovering of
his hand does not seem to have the slimmest effect on him at all. That does not
seem to be right thought the narrator, for a champion fencer to lose his hand
and not care. The narrator works at his rehabilitation while the soldier
believes it will never work. One day while the narrator is working at his
rehabilitation he starts to give up hope. The soldier then starts yelling at him
about how dumb he is because eventually it will work. The soldier goes to make a
phone call after the fight. After his phone call he apologizes to the narrator
for yelling and tells him that he has just lost his wife. The narrator then
realizes that the soldier wasn’t worried about losing his hand he was more
worried about his wife’s life. Never give up no matter what the odds point to.
This theme refers back to “The Old Man and the Sea”. Santiago went over 80 days
without catching fish, but he would not give up. People would talk about him,
but he still went on and didn’t let them get to him. When Santiago set out on
the eighty-fifth day he never thought about catching a marlin as big as he did.
After being out for several days people were amazed when he returned home with
the marlin skeleton, even though it was just the skeleton. People told him his
bad luck was finally over. Lost love can be found but not always kept. This
theme acquired from “A Farewell to Arms”. When Henry and Catherine meet for the
first time Henry tries to seduce her. Henry then has to leave for war. Henry
then was sent to Milan after leg wounds to recover. That is where he meets up
with her again by a coincidence. There they began a passionate affair and fall
deeply in love with each other. Henry is then sent back to war after his
recuperation. Henry is so much in love he deserts the Italian Army and escapes
to Stresa to reunite with Catherine. Catherine at this point is pregnant with
their child. They escape to Switzerland together where Catherine goes into
labor. Things go terribly wrong while in labor and both Catherine and the baby
dies. The theme for “The Killers” is sometimes death isn’t supposed to happen.
Ole wasn’t at the restaurant where he normally goes the night Al and Max planned
on killing him. SYMBOLISM “In Hemingway the symbols are implicit: they follow
the laws of reality to such degree that in themselves they form a whole,
full-blooded story” (Esther Murer 4). The reader is at “liberty” to discover
that he is dealing with very profound and true symbols. Most readers do not
discover it at all, and read Hemingway just about the same way they read any
ordinary stories. Like the Macombers, Harry and Helen would seem to be an ideal
couple with everything to live for. But Harry is a morally sick man; his
physical wound is symbolic of his inner illness. The wound to his leg epitomize
his sickness, for it is a type of wound and has been subconsciously
self-inflicted. (Harry had neglected a thorn scratch and then treated it
improperly.) Like Francis Macomber he has been partially responsible for the
loss of his manhood, and he has, or imagines he has, a devouring mate eager to
seize any sexual advantage.
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