Ernest Hemingway's Short Stories

This paper looks at a trio of his short stories and at a theme that runs through them: The importance of home, or of places that serve for home. Before beginning this examination of these stories, a brief overview of his writing career and style will help place him within the historical literary landscape and also perhaps give us some insights into why it was so important for him and his characters to have a place to call home.

Hemingway's style as a writer was characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. His writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time and many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature.

After serving briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star early in his writing career, he left his job to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he was a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude

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t we most usually find looking for home and finding it in unexpected places in his short stories. Home for Hemingway's characters did not have to be - and in fact almost never was - as simple as an actual house where they had grown up in, and it is in fact this combination of home and not-actually-home that makes this theme so interesting in his stories. It is almost as if elevating the importance of a traditional hearth-and-home setting would be too feminine for Hemingway (for which one must read the words ôtoo weakö) and so he has found manly sorts of substitutes for a place that takes one in and comforts one and surrounds one with people that one can count on as allies. The home substitutes in Hemingway's stories are places that one might even die to see one last time, as does the character Luis Delgado in the story ``The Denunciation'' (Hemingway, 1969, p. 98). All we old clients of Chicote's had a sort of feeling about the place. I knew that was why Luis Delgado had been such a fool to go back there. He could have done his business some place else. But if he was in Madrid he had to go there (p. 100). Hemingway's ideas about home not as the place where, when you have to go there they have to take you in, but as a place tha
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Approximate Word count = 1366
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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