The Italian word Sprezzatura translates to “grace under pressure.” Above all elements of the heroic Greek character and the heroic Hemingway character, this element must be the defining one. If one wishes to compared the elements of Greek tragedy that are sewn throughout Hemingway fiction like sinews through beef, a good method of doing so is to compare the Greek tragedy heroic ideal (Odysseus, Achilles, etc.) with the Hemingway tragedy heroic ideal (Manuel Garcia, Santiago, etc.). There are two realms or worldview paradigms in which the Greek hero and the Hemingway hero must prove their heroism. In the Greek worldview the hero celebrates the tragedy of existence, an existence in which we are born to suffer and die. In the Hemingway worldview, we get no better portrait of the realm in which the hero must endure than the somber portrait of the universe in Hemingway’s short story, A Clean Well-Lighted Place.
It is in these two worldviews where we see the most profound difference between the tragic Greek hero and the tragic Hemingway hero. The Greek hero accepts with a certain joi de vrie the nada (or nothingness) of human existence. One which, though it may only entail birth, suffering and death, is to be lived as death is not viewed as some rosy hereafter by the Greeks. This is why, when Odysseus tours Hades he says he would rather be a rented field hand (the lowest form of Greek personage) than to be a master in Hades, i.e., it is much better to live life, any life, than the alternative, death. Hemingway’s hero accepts as readily as the Greek hero the meaninglessness of existence, the existential nada of it all. He, too, also accepts the fact that there is no escape as a human being from being born, suffering, and dying. While both the Greek tragic hero and the modern tragic Hemingway hero must exhibit endurance in the face of this existential dilemma, while both must exhibit grace under pressure during the stru...