Stylistic features studied following the critical reception of Hemingway’s style
Critical Reception Linguistic Features
-Meyers (1982, p. 5) ‘his classic style, stripped of adjectives is bare, sharp and direct’
- Paul (1999, p. 3) admires Hemingway’s ‘short, tight sentences.’
-‘Hemingway’s fiction is strikingly simple and concrete. It is comprised of monosyllabic words arranged in short sentences.’ Available at:
<http://www.pages.ykt.ru/miracle/hem.html> Internet accessed on 14-06-03.
- ‘It is the noun that Hemingway emphasizes because nouns come closest to things’ (Waldhorn, 1972, p. 35).
- ‘His adjectives and adverbs …are sparse and relatively unspecific’ (Waldhorn, 1972, p. 34).
- Azevedo (2005, p. 3) suggests that …show more content…
In addition, the sentences are shorter and have less subordination than the second excerpt. However, the tendency to use shorter sentences in the early works did not mean that Hemingway would not use long sentences when necessary to convey the meanings he wanted to transmit to the reader. Consider the following sentence taken from The Sun also Rises. The sentence is made up of sixteen lines.
I wondered if there was anything I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. (p.