548 Hemingway, Ernest
Hemingway casts survival in two basic frames:
“life and death” and “day-to-day.” The story begins
in a relatively pleasant village (Gorizia) close to the
front lines, where active fighting is common. Henry,
being an ambulance driver, needs to be near the
front but far enough away that the field hospital to
which he ferries the wounded will not be shelled.
The town is usually quiet and days largely consist
of idle conversation and some relatively innocent
trash talk. Lieutenant Henry reports on conversa-
tions where the priest is often teased, his purity is
set against a ribald desire for the good humor of the
other men. Such idle back-and-forth allows the sol-
diers and civilian support to build a rapport, and it
passes the time and becomes ritual in a world turned
upside down. Ritual helps the men order the world,
recast the day-to-day experiences and expectations
from the mundane life of tailoring or farming into
the mess hall as they come from the battlefield.
Rituals like the mocking of the priest give order to
the chaotic experience of the battlefield. When such
rituals break down, so do the men.
When Henry returns from his injuries, he
quickly discovers that his compatriots are deeply
demoralized. Upon his return, he is greeted with
friendly conversations, but they tend toward the
serious and philosophical. The men talk in quieter
tones, one-on-one. Henry meets with the priest,
then passes Rinaldi, then Gino jokes with him, but
the puns fall flat. The officers have given up on their
rituals and fallen despondent during Lieutenant
Henry’s absence. Their desire to survive has almost
completely eroded in the absence of sustaining rou-
tines. “There isn’t anything more,” the priest says.
“Except victory. It may be worse.” Henry responds,
“I don’t believe in victory anymore.” And the priest
rejoins, “I don’t. But I don’t believe in defeat either.
Though it may be better.” Defeat brings an end to
the suffering, the doldrums of the day-to-day horror
of war. Defeat brings death; victory means survival
and more fighting. When survival is the object of
dread, even the shepherd of the soul is lost to the
nihilism of war.
While Hemingway writes about the fragility of
the social and religious coping mechanisms for sur-
vival, he does offer one consistent possibility for his
protagonist (and thus his reader). Lieutenant Henry
is seriously injured in a mortar attack at the front.
He is shuttled to the local hospital, then to a better
hospital in Milan. It is not until Catherine joins him
there that his survival is ensured. “God knows I had
not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted
to fall in love with anyone. But God knows I had
and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in
Milan and all sorts of things went through my head
but I felt wonderful and finally Miss Gage came
in.” The doctor who would perform the successful
surgery on his leg had arrived. Love, intentional or
not, proffers the hope for survival. But Hemingway’s
alternative to society, religion, and ritual is a bright,
hot, and all-too-brief flame.
All one can do is survive a war. There is no safety.
No one leaves unscathed. The action of the novel
breaks away from the fighting during a temporary
retreat. Lieutenant Henry and Catherine diverge
from the road their comrades follow only to discover
that there is no safety in escape. They survive the
war only to be confronted with the simple real-
ity that everyone who is born dies. Ultimately the
survival rate for all men is zero. Lieutenant Henry
leaves the field alive. He is a survivor, but at the cost
of everything, most especially hope in the promise
of tomorrow. Hemingway leaves his protagonist and
his reader without a future, merely alive. Survival: It
may be worse.
Aaron DruckerHEmingWay, ErnEST The Old
Man and the Sea (1952)
The Old Man and the Sea was first published in the
September 1 issue of Life magazine in 1952. Two
years later it was the only novel to receive explicit
mention by the Swedish Academy when they
awarded Hemingway the Nobel Prize for literature.
Set in a Cuban fishing town, the short novel tells the
story of an old man, Santiago, and his four-day-long,
perilous, solo pursuit of a great fish.
Santiago’s past is full of hardships, yet his bad
luck has not made him weary of life. His body
shows the traces of years of strenuous work, but his
friendship with the boy, Manolin, and their talk of
baseball, the lottery, and fishing reveal a persevering
vibrancy in the old man. It is their close friendship