Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter

Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter are very different sorts of writers, with different styles and different ways of structuring their material. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a collection by Porter containing three long stories, or novelettes, while Hemingway's collection In Our Time contains a number of short stories held together by material separating the stories as if they were chapters in a larger work. Both writers tackle some of the major themes of fiction, including death, war, and sex, but they see these issues in somewhat different ways and present their material in their own unique styles. Both writers might be called stylists in that they make strong use of language to create a poetic vision in words, but Hemingway's spare style is not the same as the direct and descriptive style used by Porter.

Hemingway can be classified as a modernist in fiction. Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. Modernism rejected traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and sought to stretch the boundaries, striking out in new directions and with new techniques. More was demanded of the reader of literature or the viewer of art. Answers were not presented directly to issues raised, but instead the artist demanded the participation of the audience more directly in elucidating meaning and in seeing the relationship between technique and meaning (Baldick 140). In literature, writers d

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s about women (Wilson 64-66). William L. Nance divides her stories into two groups, the first set those containing a semi-autobiographical protagonist, and the second containing everything else. In the first group are the Miranda stories, and Miranda represents Porter every but as much as Nick Adams represents Hemingway. A repeated theme is the theme of rejection, and this theme is shaped around the character of Miranda. Miranda is presented in her stories as almost essentially alone (an echo again of Nick Adams). Miranda advances on a path to wisdom: The wisdom toward which such a path leads is a complete rejection of life. Miranda never realizes fully the ultimate meaning of this negativistic tendency in herself, and there is an opposing life-urge in her which prevents her from pursuing the downward path to its logical conclusion; yet her every step along this path is approved and justified by the author, though at some stages, especially in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," the approval is disguised--apparently even from the author herself (Nance 8). Porter makes no secret of the fact that Miranda is autobiographical both in the general outline of her life and in many of the specific details. Underlying this character is what

Category: Literature - E