Here are some prompts you might want to respond to for In Our Time. You’re also welcome to respond to anything in the book that interested you, or to another student’s comment, if you prefer.
Please remember that blog posts must be at least 200 words to receive full credit for the day, and they must be posted before 5:00 p.m. on the day they’re due.
- What did you think of the structure of the book? You might want to speculate about how the vignettes and stories work together or about why Hemingway chose to present the book in this way.
- “On the Quai,” which opens the book, is very short, but has a complex structure that involves narration within narration. While it was not part of the original collection published in 1925, Hemingway deliberately added this story to introduce the collection in the 1930 edition of the book. What themes, concerns important to the book as a whole does this story introduce?
- Choose a single story that appealed to you in the collection and discuss it in more detail.
- Talk about the presentation of gender in the book—while most of the stories and vignettes address gender issues in some way, perhaps the pieces most significant in this regard are “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “The End of Something,” “A Very Short Story,” and the four stories about young, married couples: “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season,” and “Cross-Country Snow.”
Having now finished In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, I find the structure of his collection to be absolutely brilliant and see it as central to revealing his view of war and the trauma it inflicts on those involved. If I had been asked this same question earlier on in my reading, however, I would not have said the same.
When initially reading the vignettes and short stories that follow them, I saw little coherence or continuation in terms of character, setting, or conflict. While some vignettes and short stories follow certain characters (like Nick) and topics (such as bull fighting and executions) the majority jump between different characters and subject matter with no explanation. The vignette in the first chapter, for example, focuses on a group of drunken French soldiers only fifty kilometers from the frontline of battle. This story is never visited again, and I was left wondering what became of these soldiers who seem on the edge of giving away their position. “Indian Camp”, the short story that follows this vignette, takes place not in France but in North America. Furthermore, the characters are not soldiers but a mixed group of native Americans and Westerners who find themselves not on the battlefield but assisting in childbirth (although the violent nature of the birth is reminiscent of a battlefield of sorts). So geographically and demographically these two narratives, in my view, could not be father apart. This scenario plays out in a number of different places in the collection and left me feeling, at times, confused and a bit frustrated as I tend to enjoy more linear narratives.
It wasn’t until I took a step back from my closer reading and thought about the larger picture of the collection that the structure began to make sense and I saw cohesion in a thematic timeline of sorts that develops in both the series of vignettes and the short stories. With the vignettes, for example, I identified two main sets: #1-8 discussing aspects of war and #9-14 centering on bull fighting. The final vignette acts, in my opinion, as a closing scene where all parties who enter into violence, be it through war or bull fighting, must face the reality of death, whether of the body or the mind. Understanding this broader structure of the vignettes, for example, made the entrance of Nick in chapter six especially striking when initially I was surprised to find him there. Prior to the sixth vignette, Nick is only a central character in the short stories and we see his life primarily through domestic concerns, such as his relationship with his parents and a failed romance. As he grows older, however, he enters the war and becomes a character not just of the short stories but of the series of war vignettes as well. I found this interesting as it seemed to point to Hemingway’s treatment of war as all consuming and a reality that, try as they may, his characters cannot escape. There is no separate world where war occurs and people can remain outside of it – eventually it pulls you in.
I saw a similar progression in the layout of the short stories as well. The first eight short stories (from “Indian Camp” through “The Revolutionist”) are all proceeded by war vignettes. In these short stories, we not only follow Nick, who ends up in the war, but various soldiers and characters trying, unsuccessfully, to escape from war on a physical or emotional level. The next set of six short stories (from “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” through “Big Two-Hearted River Part I”) are proceeded by the bull fighting vignettes. In these short stories, character relations seem to mirror the nature of the bull fight that proceeds it. In “Cat in the Rain”, for example, George’s wife becomes fixated on obtaining a cat she sees out in the rain, desiring to rescue it. When she is unable to do so, she lists a number of unrelated things she also wants. Rather than engaging with these desires, George dismisses them and doesn’t seek to understand what is truly at the heart of these wants. This reflected, for me, the confusion of the bull who is so bombarded by bloodshed that he is unsure of whether to attack or not. Just like the bull, George does not engage with the ‘action’ of the moment (his wife’s desires) and instead does nothing, albeit not out of confusion but out of apathy.
I believe that adding the vignette “On the Quai at Smryna” as the pilot piece for In Our Time serves to introduce Hemingway’s readers to the dark irony and dry pointillistic tone of observation for which his prose is best known. The narrator’s need to cope with the horrors around him through sarcasm highlights the true impact of futile loss and war on his psyche. He begins with a description of the nightly screaming, the spotlights “doing the trick” to quiet them. For every irritation of war there seems to be a hypocritical and/or macabre solution, such as sending the sailor on board and lying to the angry Turkish soldier to appease him, or the Greeks breaking the legs of their mules to drown them in the sea once their purpose was complete.
Hemingway also invites us to analyze how grief and despair change with the lens of gender, as when the narrator observes the deaths of infants in the port city and the juxtaposition between the women who refuse to accept these deaths and the women who carry on conceiving and giving birth to new children. He says, “You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Wouldn’t give them up.” Despite the removed tone and shield of irony, the narrator’s discomfort becomes evident when he tries to explain his experience pulling one such woman off a “sort of litter” (the phrasing here denoting the animalistic effect of grief, corresponding to the mules described later). Her sudden death but strangely accelerated decay (almost as if she had been dead all along, despite the movements he witnessed) undermines his emotional distance from the people suffering around him and he experiences a disappointed need to be believed; “I told a medical chap about it and he told me it was impossible.” This introduces us to that imperative question: does trauma impair our ability to convey certain experiences or does language simply become inadequate?
The book is a collection of stories and vignettes that at first appear chaotic and unconnected but as I got deeper, I began to notice a distinct trend of repeated trauma in different forms on both the battlefield as well as the home front. One reviewer on Goodreads described this book as Hemingway’s “concept album” in which he attempts to take on the indescribable horrors of war by offering quick glimpses as opposed to a coherent, singular picture. The only real promise of tranquility appears to come from solitude in a natural environment. After many scenes of repeated violence and trauma, the only moments we are given rest is the two-part story of “Big Two-Hearted River” in which Nick Adams wanders through the ruins of an old town by himself and finds comfort in fishing in the cool river.
But here are a few outliers to this categorization. “My Old Man” stuck out to me as a standalone story that didn’t seem to fit into the Nick Adams narrative. It is longer than the others and has a distinctly different narrative tone of a boy thinking back on his complicated relationship with his father. And although it ends on a traumatic note, it was one of the moments where I began to wonder if I was projecting more onto the construction and order of the narrative than possibly was intended. I poked around on the internet a little bit and came to find that this collection was published under a few different editions with additional stories and a reordering of the existing stories in the later editions. It is important to keep in mind that this was Hemingway’s first published book and consisted of everything he had written up until that point. He wouldn’t achieve stardom until his next publication, The Sun Also Rises. Given the historical background it appears that each story is a standalone unit as opposed to a connected narrative.
he vignette “My Old Man” appealed to me the most out of all of the short stories because it was one of the longest short stories. Obviously, Nick plays as the main protagonist through a majority of the short stories, however, I really appreciated the relationship we got to build with the narrator in my old man as opposed to the other vignettes. While I appreciate the structure of the short stories and what Hemingway is trying to portray about trauma and the effects of war, and I felt the most attached to the old man since the story showed him over a longer period of time. I appreciate Joe’s perspective in describing his father because he sees him in a very idealistic light despite his father bettering money and getting drunk all the time. Joe’s vulnerability and sharing his ideas about his father, I felt more attached to him and was, therefore, more upset after he died by falling off his horse, Gilford. Joe’s idealistic version of his father causes me to question how we view our parents as children. For a long time, Joe believed his father to be invincible, and after he passed, Joe had to confront how other people viewed his father.
Specifically, Joe reminisces about his father on page 129. He overhears two people discussing Butler after the race, one of them states “well, Butler got his, all right.” As a response, the friend says “I didn’t give a good goddamn if he did, the crop he had coming to him on the stuff he pulled.” His father’s friend, George, tells Joe not to worry about it because his father was “one swell guy.” However, Joe continues to question his father’s character with the last line. I appreciate his ability to recognize the faults in his father, even though it is after his death. I don’t think Joe will ever come to terms with his father’s death and the time that he had with him, but I believe he will continue to question what kind of man his father was until the end of time.
The*
Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time subtly investigates the feminine and the masculine by positioning men and women specifically on the page. In the connected stories of Nick Adam, the reader follows Nick as he struggles to relate to the listless masculinity after the Great War. A central theme of Hemingway’s, Nick epitomizes the directionless wanderer who cannot connect with his masculinity until he withdraws from society. We are introduced to Nick in the first short story “Indian Camp” where he assists his father in the delivery of a Native American woman’s baby. The scene of the birth is claustrophobic, both on the page due to the short length and because the intimate act of birth is crowded into one tent with four men and the women struggling in the center. While the story is about the birth, the Native American woman falls away in the narrative. She becomes dressing as the doctor, Nick’s father, is the character of action. He commands the room and ultimately carries out the birth by performing a C-section which centralizes the men and their actions. The Native American gives birth to a boy, but the moment of celebration does not last when Nick discovers the baby’s father committed suicide while laying in bunk by slitting his own throat. These two actions (the birth and the suicide) are bloody and violent and each carried out by men. Though Nick’s father apologizes for bringing him along, Nick ends the chapter by feeling the river with his fingers and with the feeling that “he felt sure that he would never die” (10). In his young age, Nick witnessed both life and death in quick succession and while his father felt he had harmed his child by bringing him, Nick is empowered. This sense of power will evade him in the upcoming chapters as he struggles to maintain his sense of direction. When he breaks things off with Marjorie in “The End of Something,” he suggests that love is not meant to be fun and ends his relationship even though their day of fishing together seemed to depict an evenly matched and easy relationship. But this ease seemed to push Nick away. In “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick’s friend Bill praises him for breaking it off with Marjorie because, “‘It was the only thing to do. If you hadn’t, by now you’d be back home working trying to get enough to get married’” (37). Bill continues to belittle married life by stating that after a man gets married, “He hasn’t got anything anymore” (37). Nick’s replies are noncommittal. He simply nods but he never affirms his friend suggesting that part of him wants the domestic life he had let go with Marjorie. But only part of him.
The collection ends with the two part story following Nick alone exploring nature. By absconding into nature he leaves societal expectations and thus, “He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him” (137). Without the need to even think, Nick is his most primitive, and potentially truest, self. He engages in stereotypical masculine activities like fishing and hiking alone, though the masculinization comes from the description rather than the simple activities. Nick must use his full strength to hunt for a big and then bigger catch. Hemingway uses descriptors such as “heaviness” and “power” to interpret Nick’s movements. This depiction of strength shows his innate masculinity. But Hemingway is careful not to limit Nick to simple abrasive masculinity because he had already established how wild and unadulterated masculinity can be damaging in the vignette featuring Luis and Maera. Luis lacked control and did not listen to any attempts to calm. By establishing masculinity run a muck, the final chapters with Nick provide something else. Nick engages with his masculinity, but Hemingway creates a unique and beautiful (probably the most beautiful passage of the whole book) when Nick discovers the black grasshoppers. The description takes the readers through Nick’s revelation as he discovers why the grasshoppers have been completely changed. Their skin, their features had become permanently changed by the damage to the land. The damage had occurred years before, but the black grasshoppers profess the lasting change. Nick engages with the black grasshoppers and holds the bug in his hands. He inspects the bug carefully and then lets the bug go. The interaction is close to motherly and affectionate. His soft care and consideration of the black grasshopper connects the two of them. The feminine care imbued in the scene shows the sides of Nick. Hemingway interrogates gender several different ways in In Our Time, but one of the key ways comes from the characterization of Nick Adams, the central repeated character throughout the work.
Ernest Hemingway’s book, In Our Time, was a tough book for me to grasp initially. In the beginning, I felt the book was all over the place, jumping from one scene to the next. Over time, I grew to understand that all the stories were relative to the others in one way or another. I felt the author’s methods of short storytelling was enjoyable. After a while, I noticed a recurring character, Nick, and grew invested in his stories.
A single story that appealed to me the most was “Soldier’s Home.” As a military veteran, I know all too well the odd and strange feelings of being back home after serving in a deployed environment overseas. A person can feel very out of place when returning and may feel like the only people who understand their experiences are the people they have served with. You want to share what happens, but then some may feel like it is easier to gloss over most details. In this short story, the character Krebs told lies about his experiences using other men’s stories as his own. The author writes, “His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done, or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers” (pg 82). To me, this means either he feels his service wasn’t good enough or that since no one wanted to listen to his truth, he chose to lie to be heard. He ended up feeling nauseous from it all, which could happen when a person tells enough lies.
The next thing about Krebs was his relationship issues. He was looking on at the girls that walked by, and he was mean to his mother by telling her he didn’t love her, and he didn’t love anybody (pg 89). He also struggled with his faith from going to a Methodist college prior to the war and telling his mother “I’m not in His Kingdom” at the breakfast table when he had returned (pg 88). War takes its toll on any soldier. I personally have deployed (away from home) in a sum of three years plus. The adjustment is hard after each tour. That is why this story appealed to me. It appealed to me because I understand the struggle.
Ernest Hemingway structures In Our Time effectively in that the stories are separate, yet they connect by themes such as masculinity and space. Hemingway’s consistent style unifies them further. Although the short stories are in male spheres and center around male figures (less so with “Cat in the Rain”), there is always a focus outside manhood whether it is on a female, a horse, or in the case of “Big Two-Hearted River,” a fish.
Females are not pictured in this short story, so the attention a man would have paid them now goes to a trout. No longer is the narrator longing for a woman (85), unsatisfied with the woman in his life (34), or wanting a woman but not wanting to put in the effort to get a woman (72). Here, there are no women. Instead, the fish is worthy prey: “Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout” (152). Nick finds the fish worth his effort, so he fights for it in a way he did not fight for Marjorie (33).
This collection of short stories is just as much about men as it is about what men give their attention to.
Moreover, there is some sort of power struggle in each piece (even woman versus labor), implying that struggle is essential to existence– or at least a good story.