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Example research essay topic: Clean Well Lighted Place Sun Also Rises - 4,002 words

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There are a few great writers that have lived truly interesting and exciting lives. While it seems to be a truth that most writers have had some sort of event in there life, whether political, religious, or personal that has shaped them as writers and helped hone their craft to an affective and masterful way, it seems to be that there is one writer who has led a different life, one with adventure, love, death, and challenges that are completely different from the norm that most writers have experienced. Ernest Hemingway went through life with an interesting motto that cannot be annotated but noticed in his writings and biography: seek adventure and do not stop in the face of fear. That belief is Hemingway's basic thesis of life, and while most writers have written exciting tales of the imagination, it seems to be that Hemingway's fiction is autobiographical and relates closely to his own life in such a manner that the reader expects to be reading Hemingway's autobiography. But not only do these consist of adventure, some of his works are crafted around love lost and anger that resulted in such loss of love. Many of his works, if not all, contain some element of autobiographical touch and can be connected to a strand and even chapters of Hemingway's life.

But one thing that leads people to a confused state about Hemingway is his tendency to portray himself in ways that he did not truly fit into. There are only a few deciding factors that allow writers to become who they are inside and on the pages of their work. Ernest Hemingway's childhood was normal, but one event that can lead many to describe his masculine style of writing while retaining a touch of sensitivity comes back to his toddler years. His mother, a very successful and retired opera singer had a child one year prior to Ernest, his sister Marcelline. Grace Hemingway, his mother, feminized Ernest by dressing him up as a girl, like his sister Marcelline. Grace had desired twins but was disappointed with the single births of her first two children (Hays 18).

Several physiological notes can be made about this, but the most important is the fact that male children know they are like their father, female children know they are like their mother even if there is no knowledgeable distinction of genitalia. It is a natural understanding granted to mankind that allows such a distinction to take precedence over doubts of a male child being clothed as a female vice-versa. Another note to add is that some people are naturally born more aggressive than others, and this aggression is played out in many forms, such as horseplay or dreams. The young Ernest Hemingway had several dreams that reoccurred as a child that, according to Hemingway, remind him of his father. But these dreams nonetheless are vital to the aggression and vivid imagination asserted in his writings and life (Meyers 9) Gregory Hemingway, Ernest's son, wrote: He used to dream about a furry monster that would grow taller and taller every night and then, just as it was about to eat him, would jump over the fence (Meyers 9).

The argument can be posed that Hemingway was a masculine child from birth, one must consider that perhaps he knew of the differences being imposed upon him by his mother and that is why he clung to his father so often. His mother noted: [He] delights in shooting imaginary wolves, bears, lions, buffalo, etc. Also likes to pretend he is a a soldier... He storms and kicks and dances with rage when thwarted and will stand any amount of rough usage when playing... He is perfectly fearless after he shouts out fraid of nothing with great gusto (Meyers 9). Ernest's father was an outdoors man, one who went on hikes, fishing trips, and was a true nature lover.

Young Hemingway tagged along with his father on many of his escapades and at the age of two he said he was fraid of nothin (Hays 18). All of these aspects of his life are tied into his writings, The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bells Toll, Across the River and into the Trees, and The Old Man and the Sea all have some element and some sort of tone that correlates with the freedom and pursuit of conquest that Hemingway vividly portrays in his writings. The Old Man and the Sea is a story where the protagonist, Santiago- a frail and still sharp and strong old man- struggles to conquer Mother Nature. Green Hills of Africa is a story that can be related to Hemingway's and Teddy Roosevelt's experiences in Africa on safaris (Roosevelt and Hemingway are very similar to each other and will be discussed later). In Our Time is composed of many shorter stories that tie into a bigger picture; many themes and plots are consistent with that of Hemingway himself.

Nick Adams is the protagonist in many of those stories and many scholars have compared Ernest Hemingway to Nick Adams. Nick has a sense of adventure, being a fisherman, hiker, and soldier of World War I himself. Several scholars have noted Nick Adams and even Nicks father, who is nameless in the compilation of short stories, is like Ernest Hemingway. However, the stronger of the two is Nick Adams.

The obvious and more logical connections are those that consist of Nick Adams being a war veteran of World War I and a Midwest boy, just like Hemingway. Also, Nicks father stressed masculinity, just like Ed Hemingway, Ernest's father (Meyers 6, 7, 11 - 12). If one is to look at the details and relevancy of events that take place in both Nicks life and Ernest's life, then some interesting points can be claimed. The first point is that his parents marriage was generally good, but it had some short comings that created separations between Ed and Grace (Meyers 8), and Nicks father also has a very hot tempered and does not get along with his wife that well.

But also it is interesting to see that Adams went through adventures that Hemingway never experienced, such as the Indian wars. It is every boys dream to fight in wars where he is victorious, and even though Hemingway participated in a war, he never fought for America in America. He had adventures left undone. He had failed, in sense, a dream of his childhood, thus he painted Nick Adams in a way he himself wished he could be, or more importantly, could have experienced. Once the young Ernest was done with high school, he did not go to college or a university, but instead he wrote for the Kansas City Star for a little over six months. It was noted by several of his colleagues that he would always venture to the action (ernest.

hemingway. com). Of course, like most of his novels and short stories, action and adventure are evident in the overall plot. It has also been said that what makes for his adventurous writing is not only his imagination as a child, but the Stars recommendation to Use short sentences.

Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative (wikipedia. org).

While Hemingway's writings were predominantly written with all of the elements listed above, it can be found in some of his pieces where a negative and somber tone reigns the literature instead of the positive vice that he was told to use on a regular basis. In one of his short stories called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place Hemingway has written the short plot in laymen terms, or for the lack of a better word, in common man speech. But as Hemingway obeys the Stars vice of short sentences, mainly in the dialogue, a negative tone arises in the very beginning of the story. It was late and every one had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

Last week he tried to commit suicide, one waiter said (Poore 417). That passage is from the opening of the short story and even a novice reader can note that a negative and depressing tone has been set forth. One can note that the depressing tone does not exist in most of his writings, but it is present. Hemingway created a pessimistic attitude toward negativity when he said loss is inevitable (Hays 40). This depressing and pessimistic belief was expressed very clearly in one of his novels, Death in the Afternoon. Not only does this title give a first impression of pessimism, but the following quote shows Hemingway's depression in his writing and the ignoring of the advice that his journalist colleagues gave: All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion... If two people love each other there can be no happy ending to it (Hays 40). That excerpt was written after his encounter with Agnes von Korowsky, his nurse turned lover during World War I. The relationship ended up a disaster. Hemingways personal belief of maintaining dignity and courage during loss is evident in several of his other writings, but Death in the Afternoon is the most noticeable. The laconic style in which Hemingway wrote was not completely due to his tragic experiences as it was his studying of great authors and his love for several other contemporary, local writers for his Oak Park newspaper while he was attending high school (Hays 40).

Hemingway studied such writers as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson (Hays 39 - 40). That Kansas City Star was an advocate for their rhetoric that influenced Hemingway's journalistic style of novelizing, Ezra Pound stated at one time: Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Dont use such an expression as dim lands of peace. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writers not realizing the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions (Hays 39). That very creed of Pound has been a reality in Hemingway's writings, and not only did a great writer affect Ernest, but a sports writer of Ernest's time used short sentences and declarative sentences (Hays 40). One can come to the conclusion that Hemingway had several factors hone his writing style, but a scholar must remember that all writers stressed a basic theme: short and basic sentences. Ernest Hemingway's war years probably affected him the most in his writings, not to mention his childhood full of adventure. Poor vision kept Hemingway out of the normal infantry, and since he longed to find adventure and thrills in far away lands, he joined the American Field Service Ambulance Corp and was sent off to Italy to serve (wikipedia. org).

His hunger for action would finally meet up with him in one his biggest tests he would ever face. Early in his tour of duty, Hemingway, a very young and perhaps naive man at the time, ventured to the front lines in Milan, France. An ammunition factory exploded, killing many people, factory workers and soldiers alike. Hemingway, being a medic, was ordered to pick up the pieces of the dead workers, who were mostly women. He had never seen anything of the sort before, and it hit him tremendously to experience death and destruction in a very personal way, which can be seen in several of his writings. An American soldier named Eric Dorman-Smith was also there, and he, like Hemingway, was shaken up and said a quote from Shakespeare's Henry IV, By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once we owe god a death...

and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next. (Wikipedia. org) That quote would later be used in one of Hemingway's more popular African short stories called The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, which will be discussed later, because it shows a relation between Hemingway and his relationships with women (wikipedia. org). While serving in Italy, Hemingway was delivering supplies to soldiers, and on July 8, 1918 at Fossalta di Piave was hit by an Austrian trench mortar filled with shrapnel and explosives; it landed three feet from his position (Meyers 30). The metal ripped through his legs, not going above his hip joint, and wounded him seriously. An Italian soldier was killed and Hemingway's friend was seriously injured as well (Meyers 30 - 31).

He was later shipped off to Milan, Italy to a hospital to heal and get back to a stable physical condition. It was at this hospital where he was tended by and would later fall in love with nurse Agnes von Korowsky (Hays 9). The relationship would not last when Hemingway went back to America and Agnes left him (Hays 9). That one experience in his life would later go onto the shape the basic underlying plot and protagonist of Farewell to Arms, written in 1926 to 1928.

The novel is almost autobiographical in the portrayal of Frederic Henry, the protagonist, and his lover, Catherine Barkley. But it also covers some of the more finite details of Hemingway's years in Europe during the war, like the drinking and the dreams he had with his relationship with Agnes, his first true love. A Farewell to Arms is a very powerful and can also be a depressing novel. One of the first cases where a reader can notice Hemingway's writing being influenced by his earlier years, in this case some of his most difficult and brutal years, is in the setting. From 1916 to 1918, in Italy on the front lines of World War I, a series of events happens that are very similar, if not identical to those of Hemingway. In chapter nine of the novel, Lieutenant Henry is injured seriously, a friend killed and another injured as well by an Austrian mortar shell.

There is no real need for an explanation for this piece of the literature because it resembles that of Ernest Hemingway's life so well, like mentioned above, almost autobiographical. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote a passage about the explosion that was very similar to that of his own injury. Ernest Hemingway accounted to Guy Hickok, a journalist friend whom Hemingway met in 1922, a metaphorical style of what happened on the battle field. There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the front. I died then.

I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like youd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasnt dead any more (Meyers 33 - 34). That same type of sensory would reoccur in A Farewell to Arms when Lt. Henry was hit by the mortar. His writing is like a posthumous memory, when one has life restored to them (Meyers 34). Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came a club-club-club- club- then there was a flash, as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on and on in a rushing wind.

I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back... I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a dolls eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside.

I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasnt there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and was very afraid (Meyers 34). In the early chapters of the novel, Henry falls in love with a nurse, before the character is injured. However, it is not until Henry is taken to Milan, Italy to recuperate when the affair with the nurse Catherine Barkley really begins to become a major part of the soldiers life.

Note that Ernest was taken to Milan to heal and that is when his affair with Agnes began. It is an interesting note that Hemingway wrote in chapter seven of the novel that he imagined himself in Milan with the nurse spending the night with her, similar to that of Hemingway's experiences with Agnes von Korowsky. These writings are very autobiographical, but besides trying to play out dreams that Hemingway desired, these writings were also the physical forms what Hemingway held as truth. To clear this notion up in a more simplistic form, these writings were the right of Hemingway, and no one else could write what he did. Going back the physiological foundation, the experiences that make up his life allow him to understand more fully and comprehend more extensively than any other author the trauma and fear that runs through a soldiers mind on a daily basis. Hemingway once stated that his heroes were those who had been wounded, men with shattered hand structures, amputated limbs, fractured legs, and a man with Christ-like piercings (Meyers 36).

Hemingway also once stated that writers have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously (Meyers 36). This is a psychological thought process that can be seen more clearly in Terror T. O. Owens (for an easy up to date example). T. O.

receives criticism from sports reporters on a daily basis for his actions against the team, and T. O. s basic approach to the criticism is that the sports reporter must play football, they must be in his shoes before they can criticize him. It is almost like a rights of passage to do anything that comes close to or do what the subject does, even if that involves criticism. Hemingway held that same belief (however on a much more philosophical and deeper level than T. O. ), and this hurt that he talks about goes beyond physical, it is emotional, spiritual, and physical all at once.

Take a previous example of Catherine Barkley and Agnes von Korowsky. They both left the lives of their lover. Catherine is the fictional character who died, and Agnes is the actual person who left Hemingway. One can say that Catherine is the final end to what happened in Hemingway's life with Agnes, the leaving of the lover, but Agnes never did die in child bearing. And scholars will always try to make the plausible claim that Hemingway would at least have liked to see Agnes bear his child and then die, and that is another plausible theory.

The pain that is experienced in A Farewell to Arms is very emotional and saddening, it calms the reader and truly does make them analyze life. To him, Agnes was dead, she left him, although not in the true sense of death, but he lost her, his love. But not only does the aspect of a lover leaving draw attention to the direct correlation between Hemingway's life and his writings, but it also shows how Hemingway dealt with life. Agnes was the first woman to teach Hemingway the sensitive side of masculinity- how to love and be loved. Hemingway's experiences led him to write very intensely on the subjects he knew best, war, bullfighting, love lost, traveling, boxing, and being an all around outdoors man, but in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway takes some of his life experiences and twists them and exaggerates them to analyze life as it would be if those exaggeration were real. There truly is no plot to The Sun Also Rises; it has been classified as a plotlessness novel (Hays 49).

However, the reader is presented with an extreme challenge, to look at life with no sex even when it is fully available. As it was mentioned before, Hemingway was injured, and although his injury to the genitalia did not inhibit him from engaging in intercourse, the character Jake Barnes- the narrator and protagonist- has a war injury that castrated his penis. The novel is based around this injury, because Jake becomes involved with Lady Brett Ashley who is obsessed with having sex. It is obvious that Jake cannot satisfy these urges and obsessions that Brett has, which leads Hemingway to analyze his own love life with his injury. It is assumed that Brett loved Jake like they both had not loved before, and with her love for Jake and his inability to perform, it created a dismal situation. It has been recorded that Hemingway could not perform for Duff Twysden, his lover this novel is loosely based off of (Meyers 190).

Hemingway recorded his thoughts about the wounds of war and how they could affect love, which his own experiences will be examined later. It came from a personal experience in that when I had been wounded at one time there had been an infection from pieces of wool cloth being driven into the scrotum. Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a mans life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact... [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing they could do about it (Meyers 190). This quote with some explanation can create a clear picture of where Hemingway was going with this.

With the purposeful injury to the penis in the novel, the sex drive is still present, but it is unable to be displayed. This means that Jake could have all the feelings of a man but could not consummate them (Meyers 190). Just like Hemingway with Duff, which is still an exaggeration because he had children, he could not satisfy her desire, although unlike Jakes his desire was fulfilled. Scholars have noted that Hemingway's inability to consummate Duff Twysden is due to the fact that he was involved with other women simultaneously. Pauline Pfeiffer and Hadley Richardson were both involved with the writer while he was involved with Duff, and yet it seems to be the case that both Pauline and Hadley knew about it all. But one must also note that he was not happy with his relationship with Duff, and according to Hemingway he had an affair with another woman besides Duff, Pauline or Hadley during the writing of T...


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