Ernest Hemingway : narrative structure in The sun also rises and A PDF
Preview Ernest Hemingway : narrative structure in The sun also rises and A
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN THE SUN ALSO RISES AND A FAREWELL TO ARMS William Carey Vivian B.A. (Hons.), Simon Fraser University, 1986 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English 0 William Carey Vivian 1989 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY March, 1989 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL NAME: William Carey Vivian DEGREE: Master of Arts (English) TITLE OF ESSAY: Ernest Hemingway: Narrative Structure in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms DATE: Tuesday, March 14, 1989 PLACE: Library Board Room (4th Floor Library) TI ME: 230 p.m. EXAMINING COMMITTEE: Chairperson: Chin Baner jee Or. Peter Buitenhuis Senior Supervisor Professor of English . - Dr. David Stouck Professor of English - Dr. BickfordSylvester External Examiner Associate Professor of English, UBC Date Approved: March 14, 1989 PART I AL COPYR IG HT L ICENSE I hereby grant to Simon fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the t i t l e of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and t o make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Frnpqt [email protected];lvs N a w j v e Stuture i n The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms Author: (date) I ABSTRACT With respect to the work of Ernest Hemingway, it is generally assumed that all questions have been asked and all answers given. This is not the case. Our conceptions of such novels as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell t o Arms are based on personality cults (both friendly and hostile) and dated critical appraisals that are themselves influenced by biographic and populist notions. In our rush to take sides and attach meaning, we have overlooked the subtleties of the literature. Recent developments in Hemingway studies suggest that in some cases we have even missed the point entirely. Indeed, a careful, unprejudiced re-examination of these two novels indicates that we may have been reading them erroneously. Both novels are first person narrative presentations, yet, to date, no one has bothered to base a critical investigation e n t i r e l y on this literary specificity. Using the tools of recent narrative theory, this discussion attempts just such a reading. This reading, which pays careful attention to the rhetoric of each narrator, contradicts standard critical interpretations. It finds that Jake Barnes is not a bitter survivor of the so-called "lost generation," but that he is a triumphant spiritual hero. It also finds that Frederic Henry is not a romantic, existential hero, but that he is a liar and a con-artist. While these novels share their narrative perspective, the peculiarities of each require separate approaches. Because Jake iii Barnes' attitude toward his material constantly shifts and changes, it is necessary to follow the events of The Sun Also Rises in a methodical, linear fashion in order to understand their final effect on this narrator. Frederic Henry, on the other hand, employs a deliberate rhetoric throughout A Farewell t o Arms. In this novel, it is more productive to examine instances of this rhetoric, rearranging the events in terms of the degree of suasion used by this narrator in his attempt to blind the reader to the facts. Since the subject of a first person narrative presentation i s the narrator, in each of these cases authorial intention and ultimate meaning become quite clear when, in the end, we come to understand these narrators. DEDICATION For Noelle, Eliot and Dustin ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee: Peter Buitenhuis for being so rigorous; David Stouck and Bickford Sylvester for their encouragement. Special thanks also to Erik Kielland-Lund and Kathy Mezei. TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................... Approval ii ................................................... Abstract iii ................................................... Dedication v ........................................ Acknowledgments vi ............................................ I. Introduction 1 ..................................... 11. The Sun Also Rises 17 ..................................... 111. A Farewell t o Arms 78 ............................................ IV. Conclusion 118 ........................................ Bibliography 123 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When you first start writing stories in the first person if the stories are made so real that people believe them the people reading them nearly always think the stories happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for which is to make the story so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of the reader's experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do.' Ernest Hemingway chose to write his first two successful novels "in the first person." His faith in this method of presentation is expressed clearly in the fragment from a draft . of A Moveable Feast above. To "make the story. .real beyond any reality" would seem to be the exclusive domain of first person presentation. In shunning the literary conventions of third person where an obviously fictitious narrator communicates obviously created events, in adopting a "persona" that appears to speak for him (and, in some cases, appears to be him), the author implies that a real person is reporting real events ("the people reading them nearly always think the stories happened to you"). At the very least, this possibility seems more likely in ------------------ Larry W. Phillips, ed., Ernest Heminqway On Writinq ( ~ e wYo rk: I Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984),p. 5-6. phinips does not indicate the source of this fragment. 2~redericJ oseph Svoboda, Hemingway -& -Th-e- S un Also Rises: -The Style (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, . 112. Svoboda identifies this fragment as from an early draft of this text. a first person presentation. Paradoxically, by exposing the primary literary convention of telling, the author seems to deny it. A first person narrative presentation seems to be more sincere than a third person narrative presentation simply because it admits to being a narrative presentation. This effect, of course, is a complex and devious literary illusion, but one which Hemingway discovered was more successful than its third person counterpart in terms of making the story "appear" real. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Hemingway's intentions in this endeavour were simply sensational. The complexity of his work demands that we look beyond these remarks. (The "iceberg theory" applies to his few aesthetic statements as well as to his fiction.) In a handful of short stories and these two early novels,'the "appearance" of reality is an integral part of the story. Confident that this "appearance" would not stand up to repeated readings (those "things" the reader "did not notice"), Hemingway employed it only as a literary device to enhance his story's meaning. In these narratives, it is not the narrator's observations that should concern us, but the narrator observing. First person presentation always contains at least two stories - the story the narrator tells (the noticeable story) and the story of the narrator (the implied story) which is available only in his "telling." As Seymour Chatman claims, "the implied message is always the credible one, just as a person's tone of voice is
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