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Hemingway 's The World War I, Lost Generation, By Ernest Hemingway

Decent Essays

as weak. He makes them seem stupid and ignorant.
Literary style and works
Many people hold the opinion that there has been no American writer like Ernest Hemingway. A member of the World War I “lost generation,” Hemingway was in many ways his own best character. Whether as his childhood nickname of “Champ” or as the older “Papa,” Ernest Hemingway became a legend of his own lifetime. Although the drama and romance of his life sometimes seem to overshadow the quality of his work, Hemingway was first and foremost a literary scholar, a writer and reader of books. Hemingway enjoyed being famous, and delighted in playing for the public spotlight. However, Hemingway considered himself an artist, and he did not want to become celebrated for all …show more content…

Leon Edel has attacked Hemingway for his `Lack of substance ' as he called it. According to him, Hemingway 's fiction is deficient in serious subject matter. 'It is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection - such reflection as there is tends to be on a rather crude and simplified level '. (10)
The majority of his early novels were narrated in the first person and enclosed within a single point of view, however, when Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, he used several different narrative techniques. He employed the use of internal monologues (where the reader is in the “mind” of a particular character), objective descriptions, rapid shifts of point of view, and in general a looser structure than in his earlier works. Hemingway believed that “a writer’s style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists. For Whom the Bell Tolls is the most serious and politically motivated novel that Hemingway wrote. There are few comic or light episodes in the entire book. For Whom the Bell Tolls is an attempt to present in depth a country and people that Hemingway loved very much. It was an effort to deal honestly with a very complex war made even more complex by the beliefs it inspired. Ernest Hemingway’s style, with its consistent use

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