Anderson And Hemingway’s Use Of The First Person Essay, Research Paper

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of

sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

At one point in his short story, “Big Two-Hearted

River: Part II”, Hemingway’s character Nick speaks in the first person.

Why he adopts, for one line only, the first person voice is an interesting

question, without an easy answer. Sherwood Anderson does the same thing

in the introduction to his work, Winesburg, Ohio. The first piece, called

“The Book of the Grotesque”, is told from the first person point of view.

But after this introduction, Anderson chooses not to allow the first person

to narrate the work. Anderson and Hemingway both wrote collections of short

stories told in the third person, and the intrusion of the first person

narrator in these two pieces is unsettling. In both instances, though,

the reader is left with a much more absorbing story; one in which the reader

is, in fact, a main character.

With the exception of “My Old Man”, which

is entirely in the first person , and “On the Quai at Smyrna”, which is

only possibly in the first person, there is just one instance in In Our

Time in which a character speaks in the first person. It occurs in “Big

Two-Hearted River: Part II”, an intensely personal story which completely

immerses the reader in the actions and thoughts of Nick Adams. Hemingway’s

utilization of the omniscient third person narrator allows the reader to

visualize all of Nick’s actions and surroundings, which would have been

much more difficult to accomplish using first person narration.

Nick is seen setting up his camp in “Big

Two-Hearted River: Part I” in intimate detail, from choosing the perfect

place to set his tent to boiling a pot of coffee before going to sleep.

The story is completely written the in third person and is full of images,

sounds, and smells. In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II” Hemingway exactly

describes Nick’s actions as he fishes for trout. Details of his fishing

trip are told so clearly that the reader is almost an active participant

in the expedition instead of someone reading a story. He carefully and

expertly finds grasshoppers for bait, goes about breakfast and lunch-making,

and sets off into the cold river. By being both inside and outside Nick’s

thoughts, the reader can sense precisely the drama that Hemingway wishes

to bring to trout fishing.

Nick catches one trout and throws it back

to the river because it is too small. When he hooks a second one, it is

an emotional battle between man and fish. Nick tries as hard as he can,

but the fish snaps the line and escapes. Then, as Nick thinks about the

fate of the trout which got away, Hemingway writes, “He felt like a rock,

too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the

biggest one I ever heard of.” This sudden switch to first-person narration

is startling to the reader. Until this point Hemingway had solely used

third person narration, but he did it so well that the reader feels as

one with Nick. It is not definite whether this is Nick or Hemingway speaking.

It could easily be either of the two. Hemingway doesn’t include, “he thought,”

or, “he said to himself,” and so it is unclear.

The result is the same regardless. Using

first person narration at this point serves to make the story more alive,

more personal. It jolts the reader into realizing the humanity of Nick;

he is no longer the object of a story but a real person. If Nick is making

so much stir over it that he speaks directly to the reader, he must feel

passionately about it. Or if Hemingway is so moved by the size of the trout

that he exclaims at its size, I can only accept that Nick also feels this

excitement. The sudden intrusion of the first person narrator makes the

story more complete and its only character more life-like. It also brings

the reader into the story as a listener.

Sherwood Anderson’s collection of short

stories, Winesburg, Ohio, also has a moment of first person narration.

The introductory story, “The Book of the Grotesque”, is written in first

person. The story begins as a third person narration, a tale about an old

writer. Using a third person narration, Anderson writes about an old man

and his episode with a carpenter. Then the old man goes to bed and the

reader learns his thoughts. In the middle of describing what he is thinking,

Anderson switches to first person narration. Suddenly there is a narrator

speaking directly to the reader. The narrator says, “And then, of course,

he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way

that was different from the way in which you and I know people.” At this

point the story becomes more than just a static piece, for the reader is

somehow now in it.

There is an ambiguity, however, because

the reader does not know if the narrator is Anderson himself or another

completely distinct character. As when Hemingway used this ploy, the result

is the same regardless. The reader is no longer merely a reader, but has

unexpectedly been transformed into an active participant in the book. Throughout

the rest of “The Book of the Grotesque”, the narrator is speaking to the

reader. Not only that, but the narrator is telling the reader about a book

which was never published, but is almost surely the one the reader is in

fact reading. In case the reader should forget, there is one other instance,

several stories later, in which Anderson adopts first person narration.

In “Respectability” he writes, “I go to fast.” Like Hemingway would do

years later, Anderson was forcing the reader to become a part of the story.

The entire book is a dialogue between narrator and reader. The effect is

that the reader becomes even more involved in the stories. Both of these

works are unlike others from the same time period which are told completely

using first person narration. Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice

B. Toklas and Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are both written wholly

in the first person. But both of these read like diaries, of which the

reader is just that – a reader. Neither one has a point at which the reader

is so definitely brought into the story consciously by the author. By jumping

abruptly into first person instead of using it all along, Hemingway and

Anderson more effectively do this.

Anderson’s and Hemingway’s sudden switches

to first person narration of course could not have been mere mistakes,

and their reasons may have been even more convoluted than imaginable to

late twentieth century readers. What is left are two collections of short

stories in which the reader plays an actual role. The intrusion of first

person narration makes these stories come alive in a way that a third person

narration cannot, a tribute to the skill of both of these authors.