How Did Ernest Hemingway Write A Banal Story

Ernest Hemingway’s short story, Banal Story, juxtaposes the difference between flashy headlines found in stories and articles, and the raw truth of reality. The story is set with an unnamed writer (who remains unnamed through the story’s entirety) sitting at his writing spot, eating oranges and watching the snow. Hemingway starts the story off this way to show the realty of the unnamed writers life. The beginning of this short story parallels the ending by concluding the story with a forum about a Spanish bull fighter who died of pneumonia and the people that carried pictures of him in their pockets in his memory. In between this parallel, the unnamed writer, through a stream of consciousness, asks multiple rhetorical questions to figure out what his audience likes to read about. Through the writer’s journey to write for the forum, he is also trying to search for life. Life for him has a lot to do with romance. This is because writers are “exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” (275) Hemingway’s use of parallelism, juxtaposition, …show more content…
The unnamed writer’s life is depicted in the first paragraph as sitting in his writing spot waiting for some inspiration. He sits and eats his oranges watching the snow outside turn into rain. He notices the change in temperature in the room when the electrical heater is not working correctly. This setting reveals the truth of the writer’s life and shows that it is not all glamour. As the writer’s thoughts digress into words on a paper, he writes about the death of a Spanish bull fighter. The realism of the unnamed writer’s life and the romance in his story of the Spanish bull fighter indicate that the writer is looking for something more to life and something more exciting and “romantic” than sitting watching he snow and eating