Crane Vs. Memmingway Essay, Research Paper

War is one of the most controversial, serious, and scary things known to man. There are limitless ways that a person can think abort war and infinite opinions about it. Peoples opinions can change depending on a few different things. According to position, if you are a general in the army obviously you will have a different perspective on war than a human rights activist. Also your perspective can change just by the way that you are. Two writers, Steven Crane and Ernest Hemingway, represent one side of the way that writers can feel towards war. Steven Crane was a poet who had a very morbid view of life. He saw everything through pessimistic eyes. He thought that humans were unimportant and that individuality was simply mistakes made my nature. Humans are insignificant beings and if one day there were no humans left anywhere, it wouldn t make any difference. He relates this view of the world to his ideas about war. In one of his stories he is telling the morbid story of when a soldier gets his arm shot off. This event changes his entire perspective on life and on his views of other people.

Hemingway has very similar views to Crane. He believes that everything has something evil in it and in all of his writing you can tell that he is a pessimist and that he Always looks on the down side of things. In life Hemingway was a very paranoid and depressed person, his writing reflects these feelings. In one of his short stories In Another Country he write one of the most powerful paragraphs ever. This one paragraph generates the energy to fuel a story better than any other opening paragraph ever did. Hemingway writes,

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and there was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains

This paragraph is powerful for a few different reasons. It not only captures the interest of the reader but it portrays such a vivid view of loneliness. Raw human emotions are very rarely given justice by paintings or literature. In this case the feeling of loneliness is definitely portrayed in a believable and amazing way. After reading these lines you can picture this setting so well that you can insert yourself into the picture and then truly understand where this author is coming from. Their story that follows these great lines is one of desperation, loneliness, death, and sorrow. It is a story of hope in impossible situations. The following story tells of men that were badly injures in war and go through therapy even though they know there is no chance for recovery. It is really amazing the spectrum that Hemingway goes through in this story. He goes form loneliness to hope and then to clarity when the men are faced with the indisputable fact that they are never going to be fully rehabilitated. If more authors could put their ideas about things that they feel strongly about, like war, onto paper then this world would be filled with great stories.