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Ernest Hemingway - American Writers 1: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

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Philip Young is I believe the first critic to provide a clear understanding of the Hemingway code - hero. The hero is not as some may think the public figure hero the bullfighter, or the champion boxer or even the commanding soldier . The hero is like Hemingway himself and like Jake Barnes and in a way Nick Adams the one who has been wounded in the war and who must somehow " be stronger at the broken places". The public hero in his ' grace under pressure ' may give an example. But the code hero the true Hemingway hero has to imitate in silence without complaint, without big words, without heroic proclamation of himself those simple right actions which answer the situation. This is in accord with the famous Hemingway passage when he speaks about the inability after the War to use words like ' sacred ' and ' patriotic' , the big words. The code hero instead wounded, numbed must act in a kind of clean and efficient almost ritual way in restoring himself and the world. Simple action with a minimum of words. Action which is repeated almost like a ritual. Action which has something of the quality of the famous Heminway style with its hypnotic Biblical simplicity and its conjunctive connections. The rhythmic ' and ' and ' and' of Hemingway's prose conveys too the mirror of this kind of redemptive action.
An excellent work for better understanding the whole structure and basic meaning of the Hemingway word and act.