In Our Time Literary Analysis

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway delves into the true cost of war on the individual. World War One, also known as The Great War, is one of the biggest wars in the modern history. Generations of young men were exposed to the horrors of warfare without being aware of the cost it would have on them. The war took a sense of innocence not only from these soldiers but also from the world.
“The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I don’t know why they screamed at that time”(11). The story On the Quai at Smyrna introduces the sheer horror of war. The narrator exposes the chilling reality by describing the screams. The screams of the prisoners show a sliver of the fear and pain that many people felt during the war. The narrator’s attention to the screams is also very telling. He makes a conscious observation that they happen “every night at midnight”. The narrator not only mentally records the …show more content…
Throughout the book the readers are exposed to Nick’s life. We first see him as a young boy in Indian Camp. Indian Camp presents a very innocent and naive Nick, one who hasn’t been exposed to the horrors of life. While the young Nick states that he knows the women is going to have a baby his father quickly insists that “[he] does not know” (16). Nick is unaware of the pain that coincides with labor, especially labor without anesthetic. This shows how Nick sees life as a pure thing, something that is simple and painless. That night Nick also is exposed to a man who killed himself. The concept of taking ones own life is something Nick finds hard to grasp as he looks to his father for an explanation. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die” (19). While Nick battles with comprehending the origin of life and death he still maintains some of his childhood innocence by believing that “he would never