Hills like White Elephant Essay

ling
What are the three key rules of real estate?
Location, location, location!
American Business Proverb
SETTING
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Villiam
Given the expansiveness of their form, novelists can lavish
of setting, just as they can describe characters down to such minutiae as the tears
hemmed in by limitations of space, rarely have such luxury and must ordinarily
limit themselves to very selective descriptions of time and place. When a writer
like Poe goes
into
great
detail in his descriptions, it is likely that atmosphere,
tual locale. The house of Usher is carefully described, right down to the cracks
in its facade, but Poe is perhaps more concerned here with establishing the phys-
n, per-
acter’s
led se-
ames’s
harac-
vs the
1 and
view
rnest
ction
dra-
ays,
cal setting as a metaphor for the crumbling psyche of his title character, Roderick
Usher. The “house” takes on a double meaning; it is both the literal house that
Roderick, his sister, and the narrator occupy, and the decayed lineage of the Usher
family, both of which come to an end at the story’s conclusion.
Setting is simply the time and place of a story, and in most cases the de-
tails of description are given to the reader directly by the narrator. A story
may employ multiple locations in its different scenes, and its time frame may
encompass only a few hours or many years. Carver’s “Cathedral” is a story
with relatively few details of setting—a middle-class home, a dinner table, a
television set. Because the story emphasizes the humdrum nature of his nar-
rator’s life, further description is unimportant. (Such restraint is also indica-
tive of Carver’s “minimalist” approach.) Borges’s “The Library of Babel,”
however, is almost entirely composed of description of setting for the simple
reason that the library is strange, exotic, literally “out of this world.”
A writer usually makes certain assumptions about his or her readers. A
writer whose stories will be read almost exclusively by subscribers to The New
Yorker, for example, would not be likely to expend much energy on describing
a midtown-Manhattan office. Similarly, the time setting of a story may be
omitted entirely, mentioned only in passing, or described in detail
. The circum-
chances of the individual story will dictate its treatment of time. John Cheever’s
and
ex-
ced.
to
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Some stories, however, depend on their locale or time setting much more
“The Swimmer” depends heavily on the way time in the story progresses from
a balmy noontime beside a suburban swimming pool to the chilling autumnal
climax. It is symbolically important that the main action of Hawthorne’s
“Young Goodman Brown,” which takes place during the dead of night, is
bracketed by an opening and closing section set during the daylight hours.
heavily and thus demand fuller exposition of setting. Historical fiction usu-
ally requires great attention to the different landscapes and customs of bygone
has committed an anachronism that may be only slightly more obvious than
another writer’s use of contemporary slang in the same setting. Local color
baras
. A writer who carelessly lets an alarm clock go off in a story set in 1776
THE ELEMENTS OF SHORT FICTION
860
fiction depends heavily on the unique characteristics of a particular area,
usually a rural one that is off the beaten path. Such places have become
increasingly rare in contemporary America, but such regions as the deep
South, the Southwest, or the Pacific Northwest still provide locales that pos-
Some writers establish reputations as practitioners of regionalism, setting
sess intrinsic interest because of their strangeness to many readers.
most of their work in one particular area or country. Bobbie Ann Mason
showed her deep roots in her native Kentucky in virtually every story in her
first collection. The Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez continu-
ally draws on the strange world of Colombian villages cut off from the con-
temporary world, places where past and present, natural and supernatural,
seamlessly join in what has been called Magic Realism. William Faulkner, of
course, invented a complete fictional universe (which is not at great variance
with the Mississippi where he spent most of his life) in the Yoknapatawpha
County where many of his stories and novels are set.
Stories contain both specific and general settings. The specific setting is
the precise time and place (or times and places) where the action occurs. The
general setting of a story, what is called its milieu or enveloping action, is its
sense of the “times” and how its characters interact with events and social cur-
rents going on in the larger world. We have already mentioned how the spe-
cific setting of a story often is a microcosm that reflects the doings of society
at large. It is impossible to read stories by Flannery O’Connor or Alice Walker
and not be made aware of the social changes that have transformed the rural
South in the last thirty years. Stories sometimes depend on readers’ abilities to
bring their knowledge of history and culture to bear on the events taking
place. In reading Ralph Ellison’s “A Party Down at the Square,” for example
,
younger readers may be unaware of the widespread prevalence of racial lynch-
ing in the South before the Civil Rights Era. Such stories gain additional reso-
nance from being seen in their historical context.
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain.
William Butler Yeats
THEME
Fables, parables, and other types of didactic literature make their purposes
clear by explicitly stating a moral or interpretation at the end of the story
. Lite
erary fiction, however
, is usually much more subtle in revealing its theme, the
overall meaning the reader derives from the story. Most of the reading or
did as children probably fell into two distinct categories-sheer escapisming
overt didacticism-with little middle ground. Thus, many readers, coming
to serious ficti
Ernest Hemingway 371
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“Papa
1899–1961, American
AN
vand,
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park,
Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago, the son of
a doctor who introduced his son to the outdoors.
(Hunting and fishing remained passionate inter-
ests of Hemingway throughout his life and figure
in many of his stories and novels.) Hemingway
wrote a weekly column for his high school paper
and contributed poems to the school magazine.
Instead of attending college, he took a junior reporter job at the Kansas City Star.
This early experience in daily journalism, which demanded compression, objectiv-
ity, and immediacy, influenced his mature literary style. Before America entered
World War I, the still teen-aged Hemingway wanted to see the action first-hand.
Repeatedly rejected for Allied military service because of a defective eye, he volun-
teered as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He served in Italy, and in 1918 the
nineteen-year-old was seriously wounded by shrapnel in both legs while delivering
supplies to front-line troops. After convalescence in Milan, an experience he drew
on in later fiction, Hemingway returned home but found readjustment to his pre-
war life difficult.
Hemingway now began writing fiction seriously but was compelled to work
in journalism to support himself. After his first marriage in 1921, the young cou-
ple moved to Paris, where Hemingway served as a correspondent for the Toronto
Star. These early years in Paris proved decisive. Influenced both by his intensely
attentive readings of classic authors like Chekhov and Tolstoy and by the more im-
mediate presence in Paris of his fellow American émigré Modernists like Gertrude
Stein and Ezra Pound, Hemingway slowly perfected the terse, direct
, and under-
stated style that would change the direction of modern American fiction. Heming-
ways celebrated prose style embodies Pound’s
definition of the “Imagist” method
that demands “direct treatment of the things” and “the use of absolutely no word
that does not contribute to the total design.” (Hemingway commented about
Pound, “He’s teaching me to write, and I’m teaching him to box.) Hemingway’s
creative work was first published in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and
In Our Time (1925). Encouraged by the success of his short stories, Hemingway
gave up newspaper work and undertook his first serious novel, The Sun Also
Rises (1926), a vivid depiction of the “lost generation” of aimless young ex-
patriates in France and Spain. More stories and novels followed; A Farewell
widespread celebrity
.
Following divorce in 1927 and immediate remarriage, Hemingway
from Paris to Key West, Florida with his second wife, and adopted the persona of
a Hemingway,” a vigorous sportsman and brawling drinker. To the delight of
journalists and the detriment of his health, Hemingway would play this overtly
robust role for the remainder of his life. Returning to Spain, he wrote Death in the
Serengeti Plains of Tanzania led to several major stories and to Green Hills of
Afternoon (1932), a nonfiction study of bullfighting. Traveling on safari across the
Africa (1935), a semifictionalized account of a hunting expedition. He revisited
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the best-selling novel of his career.
Spain in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, and this experience resulted in For
In 1939 Hemingway moved to Cuba, where he lived on an estate outside Ha-
s, indulging his love of deep-sea fishing. He also married for a third time to
Martha Gellhorn, a journalist. During World War II, Hemingway again served as
r correspondent. He flew missions with the Royal Air Force, and on D-Day he
crossed the English Channel with American troops. (Later, when the Allied troops
liberated Paris from the German occupation, newsman Hemingway personally “lib-
writing Across the River and into the Trees (1950), a novel about a former U.S.
erated” the Hotel Ritz bar.) In 1944 he divorced and remarried once again while
Army officer, which was a critical failure. The quality of his work declined seriously
in the 1950s
, though he did score a significant triumph with The Old Man and
the Sea (1952), a novella that was published in its entirety in Life magazine and
later became a best-seller. This heroic work not only won Hemingway his only
Pulitzer Prize, but it was reportedly the book most responsible for his 1954 Nobel
Prize. (He could not accept the prize in person because he had suffered serious in-
juries in a plane crash while on safari in Africa.)
In his last years Hemingway’s mental and physical health began to decline. The
loss of his Cuban home during Fidel Castro’s revolution deepened the depression
that had plagued him intermittently for years. He moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where
he completed a memoir of his Paris years, A Moveable Feast (published posthu-
mously in 1964), which ranks as one of his finest works. “There is no lonelier
man,” he wrote in a discarded draft of his Nobel acceptance speech, “than the writer
when he is writing except the suicide.” After undergoing debilitating electric shock
therapy for depression at the Mayo Clinic
, the sixty-one-year-old author committed
Hemingway so completely embodied the public image of the succesful Ameri-
arate the macho celebrity from the serious artist, or differentiate the carousing
am male writer that even today-four decades after his death—it is difficult to sep-
sportsman from the innovative stylist. The complexity of his life and personality still
Hemingways impact continues to be felt on modern fiction. His greatest contribu-
even though a dozen major studies have already appeared.
y lie in the terse, stripped-down quality of his early stories, which renders
rately captures the speech of hobos, waiters, bookies, and boxers. Even though his
contemporary alienation with stark concrete details and with dialogue that accu-
its influence. Yet it would be a mistake to look at Hemingway merely as a technical
innovator. His style succeeds because it is so inextricably wedded to the tragic vision
suicide at home in 1961.
fascinates biographers
,
tion may
moved
370

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