With Hemingway’s In Our Time being published just years after the end of World War I and the initial “chapters” surrounding the topic of war, I wondered if maybe we were supposed to be seeing another book of war stories. But the short stories were never about the war and I was incredibly confused as to how the chapters and stories combined together and if there was supposed to be coherence within the book as a whole. I couldn’t figure it out on my own so I looked to critics and reviews to see what they thought about In Our Time as a whole.
Hemingway’s biographer, Michael Reynolds echo’s my confusions saying, "None is more confusing [than In Our Time] … for its several parts – biographical, literary, editorial, and bibliographical – contain so many contradictions that any analysis will be flawed”. D. H. Lawrence, a reviewer, calls the book a “fragmentary novel”. On the other hand, Dr. Jim Barloon, a Hemingway scholar, argues that the “only unity consists of similarities in tone and style and the recurrence of the Nick Adams character”.
With The Things They Carried, people compared the book to a concept album, saying that the individual stories were separate enough to be their own track while linked together through an overhead album. I don’t think that there is enough continuity throughout In Our Time for a concept album. I mean other than Nick Adams even the characters seem to be new in each chapter. Instead, I see the book more of a symphony, where each story is a different instrument or section of an orchestra.
“Hemingway invented a form—the vignette or "miniature"—to delineate the surrealistic horror of modern-day warfare. The vignettes constitute the miniaturization of war, drawn on a small scale not simply because one gets "scared sick looking at it," but because the sketch more truly reflects the actual experience of war, testifying, by its very form, to a view of war as disordered and disjunctive,” Barloon says.
In a symphony, one piece is being played but each instrument/section is doing their own part. As the various instruments and sections work together, a piece comes together. I’d still argue that the overall piece/book surrounds the topic of war. But Hemingway draws light to other aspects of life (ex. post war Europe in “Cross-Country Snow”, father-son dynamics in “Indian Camp” and husband-wife dynamics in “Mr. and Ms. Elliot” and “Cat in the Rain”) that are ever present, in spite of the war. Life is constantly moving with or without a war and all it’s craziness/violence and In Our Time as a whole shows us just that.
But not to fear if you disagree with my interpretation. Hemingway himself said in an interview that In Our Time, "...it has form all right". Later on he writes in a letter, “Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter of 'In Our Time' between each story – that is the way they are meant to go – to give the picture of the whole before examining it in detail".
Clearly the book was meant to have some type of unity. But Hemingway, in his classic non-revealing self, never tells us the exact meaning or connection behind In Our Time. This furthers my comparison of the book to a symphony because respectively, each reader/listener gets the luxury of having their own experience with the book/music. What one person will take away may be completely different than what the person next to them may get out of it. But that doesn’t matter and the writer/conductor doesn’t get mad that each person’s experience is individual and unique.
I love your comparison. I'm not a huge music fan, so I wasn't able to understand the concept album analogy, but I followed and agree with your symphony analogy. I also struggled to see a distinct unity in "In Our Time". The sub-chapters in between left me very confused and made me question why they were apart of the book. Your analogy has helped me to appreciate Hemingway a little more. Thanks. :)
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting metaphor. I know that in class we've made comparisons to [The Things They Carried] in terms of a album, separate but cohesive, but I really like the comparisons you draw by Hemingway putting together several different pieces (instruments) that still in the end form a whole. Here, I suppose then that Hemingway, if we still move with the musical metaphor, is the conductor, and he directs each instrument/stories' part in developing the full tone and emotion.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this post, great analogy! I was also very confused after reading the short “chapters,” and really I was usually just finished with a story, ready to go to bed or get to class, and quickly read the short vignette without giving it enough attention. It’s really cool that you looked into these confusing parts and shared critics’ opinions in your post. I like the comparison to a symphony, especially seeing the author as a conductor—Hemingway knows readers will take his stories differently, as a conductor doesn’t expect every person in the audience to take and interpret the music the same way.
ReplyDeleteThis is a useful way of thinking about the kind of "coherence" that this seemingly fragmentary and disjointed collection represents. You mention that the vignettes initially led you to expect another collection of war stories, and I think I might have mentioned at some point in class that I always think of this as a "war book"--or at least a "postwar" book, with the First World War looming in the background throughout (explicitly in "Soldier's Home" and "The Revolutionist" but implicitly in all the stories about displaced Americans in Europe, and the general tone of malaise and depression and a loss of any sense of meaning behind experience).
ReplyDeleteAnd I really like that quote from Barloon, describing how the "vignettes" work as a reflection of the nonnarrative, "surreal" nature of modern warfare. If these are the kinds of "stories" Krebs is carrying around with him, we get a sense of why he feels he can't tell them effectively using conventional war-story structures.