Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber Essay

Fiction can be placed in a spectrum where one end is commercial, which allows the reader to escape their everyday life and entertainment and is produced for profit, and the other literary, which delves into humanity and the world we live in in order to expand the reader’s mind impose new ways of thinking. With both types of writing there are expectations that aid in identifying them as either literary, commercial, or somewhere in between. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Ernest Hemmingway exists on the literary side of that spectrum. One of the first aspects of the short story that indicates literary writing is the misleading nature of the title. At first glance the title “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” could be taken to mean that Francis Macomber’s life was happy in its entirety, although it was short. However, in reality, the absence of the comma indicates the actual meaning to be that the happy part of Francis Macomber’s life was short lived. This initial misinterpretation, although brief, immediately forces the reader to think about what they are about to read, which starts the work off in a literary direction.
An identifying factor of …show more content…
Both nights before the hunts he was kept awake by unsettling events, and both times he goes into the tall grass in order to confront his wounded prey. The roaring of the lion unsettled him in the night, filling him with fear and cowardice, the feeling which carries on into the hunt. The second night, when he is unsettles by his cheating wife, his anger towards both Margot and Wilson gives him fuel and the drives him to become brave and elated when dealing with the Buffalo. The parallels with the hunts are exaggerated through Hemmingway’s plot structure, which adds to its literary