Hemingway: A Literary Analysis

The way a story ends, whether it’s in a movie or a book, is extremely important. When a film or novel ends in an unsatisfactory way, those who watched or read it tend to be unhappy and the reviews will generally reflect this. Since the conclusion is the final installment, it is the portion that consumers tend to remember the most; therefore, a good conclusion is quintessential to any literary work. Ernest Hemingway found a great way to conclude In Our Time through the two-part story "The Big Two-Hearted River." This story followed a character, who was present throughout much of the book, as he went on a camping and fishing trip. If someone were to only read "The Big Two-Hearted River" as opposed to the entire book, they would more than …show more content…
One of these ideas was that growing up was not as amazing as it was made out to be; growing up was complicated. Specifically, this was suggested in "The Three-Day Blow" when Nick and Bill were talking. They talked about many things in this story, including an event that had recently occurred in Nick's life: he had ended his relationship with a girl named Marjorie. Bill tried to convince Nick that it was a good thing to have happened. He told Nick that if he had not broken things off, he would have been "back home working trying to get enough money to get married" (46). This conversation led Nick to begin thinking about how "she was gone and he had sent her away" (47), but also that he was not sure if would have wanted to marry Marjorie. He expressed his thoughts to Bill, who eventually tried to change the subject, telling him that if they did not talk about something else, "he might get back into it again" (47). After hearing this, Nick felt optimistic that mending the breakup was still an option. This conversation displayed how growing up brought complications, in this case, finding a partner for life. "The Big Two-Hearted River" concluded upon this idea in a similar way as it had for childhood: by depicting Nick engaging in camping and fishing as he did when he was younger. Not only were these activities …show more content…
Many propositions were made on this topic throughout the book, and among those were how it is an awful experience to go through and that it leads to soldiers detaching themselves from their lives because that is how they endured the chaos of battle. The book opened up with a story called "On the Quai at Smyrna," in which a war was going on and chaotic things were happening, such as how people "screamed every night at midnight" (11). This was followed up with "Chapter I" about an entire "battery [that] was drunk going along the road in the dark" (13). These two stories indicated how the soldiers drank as a method to detach themselves from what was unfolding around them, and in "Soldier's Home," the detachment that war caused was reinforced through a character named Krebs. In this story, Krebs's life after returning home from being in Germany for the war was described. Ernest Hemingway began the story by describing a picture from before the war "which show[ed Krebs] among his fraternity brothers" (69), and this was supposed to exhibit how he was very involved in his life prior to fighting in the war. As the story continued, Krebs was not especially proactive once he was back in the States; he would go to the library, read on the porch, or go to the local pool room to pass his time. Hemingway went on to write about how Krebs did not like the girls in his town