Ernest Hemingway 2 Essay, Research Paper

A person can easily recognize Ernest Hemingway s writing style by his simple sentence structure, clear dialogue, and the hopelessness of his characters. Soldier s Home , Hills Like White Elephants , and A Clean well-Lighted Place are perfect examples of three short stories that easily define his unique style.

Short, choppy sentences would cause a person first to believe that Hemingway may have written it. A reader would find it very easy to read at first, yet Hemingway somehow seems to make these sentences interesting. The reader s challenge is to figure out the tone and values of the character often by rereading paragraphs many times. In Soldier s Home Hemingway repeats short sentences about how Kreps thought about the difference between the girls back home and the European girls. These shorts, choppy sentences made the reader think about how Kreps was psychologically messed up after the war. When Hemingway describes the setting in Hills Like White Elephants he seems to do it in such a way to bore you and make you believe the characters are suffering from boredom and lack of communication towards each other. A very unique thing desplayed in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is that Hemingway describes simply leaves shadow in an electric light. Later in the story the leaves and the electric light show up almost trying to unfold a theme that the shadow showed some sort of life to it when the leaves were swaying. Although these sentence when first read are simple, they almost force your mind to wander and think about something much more complex such as a theme.

Very similar to the sentences Hemingway tends to use is the very clear and expressionless dialogue. He shows brief and quick communication between characters and this can confuse the reader as to what exactly they are speaking of. One way to figure out wether or not it is Hemingway s work is to see if the dialogue is distracted by other descriptive words. In Soldier s Home when Krebs is talking to his sister about softball for instance he answers the majority of her questions in simple fragments. There seems to be a deeper feeling coming from the words that Krebs is saying. The conversation shown in Hills Like White Elephants makes the reader try and figure out what exactly the man and the girl are talking about. It seems like it is almost a mystery and after someone reads it they have to use cluse from the conversation to solve it.