In Our Time was a harder book for me to digest after The Things They Carried--which was certainly confusing at times, but always seemed to have a unified goal of expressing emotional truth and communicating the war experience. In Our Time felt less unified to me, which is fine for a collection of short stories, but because of the reappearance of certain characters and some of the stories being so abruptly short, I still felt myself looking for some sort of overarching message. I didn’t really find one, but I do think this book had an overarching tone of gloom and foreboding, and throughout every story there was this feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Even some of the more innocent stories like “Cat in the Rain,” which ended with the woman getting a cat like she wanted, have a kind of dark undertone. In “Cat in the Rain,” this is felt in the tense interactions between the husband and wife (“Oh shut up and get something to read” 94), and the description of the cat (“big tortoise-shell cat pressed against her and swung down against her body” 94) implying a lack of dignity and maybe even dissatisfaction. Perhaps the cat was only a representation of all the things she wanted, and having the cat does nothing to help her reach those other freedoms or ease the dynamic with her husband.
I think the feeling of gloom and dread that hangs over all these stories is in part due to the content of the stories themselves--and Hemingway’s tendency to end them with a twist--but is definitely also aided by the “interstitial chapters” that do a pretty good job destroying any hopeful feelings that remain. We mentioned in class how these chapters are notable for describing scenes of intense violence in a very short amount of time. Particularly memorable ones include the man with Typhoid not even being able to stand up for his own execution, or Boyle shooting two Hungarians off their wagon even before actually knowing who they were. Typical of Hemingway’s iceberg narration style, we are handed these gruesome events, that don’t often relate to any of the rest of the plot, and we are given no instruction for what to do with them or how to interpret them. Even the interludes that don’t include direct acts of violence are still pretty disheartening and touch on the way war affects people and messes with their minds. One that really stood out to me was the soldier having a religious moment during the bombing and praying just to survive, but then immediately forgetting his promise or thinking nothing of it as he sleeps with a prostitute that night. Hemingway sort of runs down the positivity in the story from the soldier surviving, by giving us details that sort of tease the reliability or morality of the soldier. While I don’t feel like I have a place to really judge the soldier's actions, Hemingway’s narration is implicitly a little judgmental, or at least cold: "The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody" (67).
With all these italicized stories creating an ominous tone for the entire book, it was a bit of a surprise for me to read the last section where Nick seems so peaceful, content, and even optimistic. We see this side of Nick in the story “Cross-Country Snow” when he becomes a very poetic narrator describing “his sticks hanging like some insect's thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve...the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow" (108). But even that story had a melancholy ending with Nick and George realizing things won’t be the same anymore and acknowledging that even promises break and friendships don't last. Yet after all this gloom and disillusionment, the closing story is once again Nick out in nature--this time alone--and once again accompanied by feelings of contentment and peace. We identified the tone in class to be “meditative” which I think is very accurate. But this time, it ends with a more optimistic and hopeful tone: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (156). I’m a little confused what the significance of this ending is, whether it’s commenting on the healing power of nature or of being alone, and how to understand this in the context of all the tension in previous stories. It feels weird to view it as a post-war optimism after stories like “Soldier’s Home” that depict such an unsuccessful homecoming and assimilation back into civilian life. It was nice to end Nick’s narrative on a hopeful note, but after so many ominous endings it also felt a little strange to me.
I agree that the tone at the end of "Big Two-Hearted River" is a departure from the endings throughout the collection--"hopeful," maybe, as it looks toward the immediate future with a sense of possibility, rather than the grim, rude awakening at the end of "Cross-Country Snow," or the ironic certainty that "he would never die" that rounds off "Indian Camp."
ReplyDeleteJust as the fragmented aesthetic you describe throughout this collection is reflective of the modernist context Hemingway was working in (and helping create, in fact), the "darkness" in these stories can usually be connected with irony--that sense that the author (and reader) knows more than the characters, and so we see their little satisfactions and dissatisfactions with a sense of distance, an understanding that they aren't seeing a broad enough picture, that the author doesn't *quite* endorse the seeming resolution at the end of a story like "Cat in the Rain." The woman's unmet desires are ostensibly met by the delivery of the cat, but the story sure doesn't *feel* like it resolves so neatly--it's not clear that it's even the same cat, actually possessing the cat now seems like a messy and complicated proposition rather than a romantic "save the poor kitty" idea. She gets what she wants, but it isn't actually what she wants. "Dark" is maybe going a little far, to characterize this ending, but there's definitely a sense of desire being thwarted, even mocked, by circumstance. And the author is in on that mockery.
I agree that the narrative voice at the end of both parts of "Big Two-Hearted River" seemed very different from the previous stories in Hemingway's novel. It's interesting that, although the book felt very disunified, the reoccuring character of Nick proved to be very interesting. We are given short sections of Nick's life that amount to him starting at 8/9 years old and ending in his twenties or so. In the begining, we see Nick's father, the doctor, trying to teach Nick. At that point, Nick is seemingly uninterested in learning about his father's profession, so we deduced that he was just sick of hearing about doctor things. But, as time goes on, it seems as though Nick is just someone who enjoys being alone. Even when he is skiing with George, he seems to enjoy the sport more than anything. From experience, although one usually skiies in groups, it really is an individual sport when you boil it down. It's just you and the slopes. Being alone helps Nick reflect upon his life and think clearly, which is why we finally get a semi-happy ending when it comes to the end of "Big Two-Hearted River".
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