stylistic analysis of "in another country" by ernest hemingway

Introduction
the story is about the experience of the soldiers during World War II. it is a real life experience of the author and he narrated how soldiers suffered and how they heal the wounds inside and out.

“IN ANOTHER COUNTRY”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Summary

It is about an ambulance corps member in Milan during World War I. Although unnamed, he is assumed to be "Nick" a character Hemingway made to represent himself. He has an injured knee and visits a hospital daily for rehabilitation. There the "machines" are used to speed the healing, with the doctors making much of the miraculous new technology. They show pictures to the wounded of injuries like theirs healed by the machines, but the war-hardened soldiers are portrayed as skeptical, perhaps justifiably so.

As the narrator walks through the streets with fellow soldiers, the townspeople hate them openly because they are officers. Their oasis from this treatment is Cafe Cova, where the waitresses are very patriotic.

When the fellow soldiers admire the protagonist's medal, they learn that he is American, ipso facto not having to face the same struggles in order to achieve the medal, and no longer view him as an equal, but still recognize him as a friend against the outsiders. The protagonist accepts this, since he feels that they have done far more to earn their medals than he has.

Later on, a major, Signor Maggiore, in an angry fit tells Nick he should never get married, it being only a way to set one up for hurt. It is later revealed that Maggiore's wife had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Maggiore is depicted as far more grievously wounded, with a hand withered to the size of a baby's hand, and Hemingway memorably describes the withered hand being manipulated by a machine which Maggiore dismisses as a "damn thing." But Maggiore seems even more deeply wounded by the loss of his wife.

It is also implied this entire episode is a dream, by subtle references to night time and searching for needed light. It is reminiscent of Dante's Inferno.

Theme

Dignity and Human condition

Analysis

the tone of the narration is superficially sanguine and the setting seemingly reassuring, there are strong underlying currents of dislocation, conflict, emptiness, and futility that indicate Nick has been deeply marked with more than shrapnel, and that his recovery cannot be effected by physical therapy.

• the story makes use of repetition to emphasize the narration

 “It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early.” He repeats this idea with a slightly different emphasis at the end of the paragraph: “It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.”

he states “We were all at the hospital every afternoon,” and later on he repeats, “Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon.”

• technique not only highlights the ideas Hemingway wants to drive home to the reader, but also gives the narration a sort of cyclical, complete, and self-contained feeling as the same ideas are revisited with slightly different words.

Critical Essay #1

Zam has been an associate professor at Fordham College and New York University, as well as a writer for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review and Details magazine. In the following essay, he examines Hemingway's sparse writing style, and compares that style to the early motion-picture technique of montage.

• distinctive style.
• were still heavily influenced by the verbose, extremely descriptive style of English and American authors of the nineteenth century such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville, Hemingway was not
• is free of the extensive use of adjectives common in the work of many earlier writers, and of many of his immediate contemporaries.

Critical Essay #2

Forrest Robinson is affiliated with Western Illinois University. In the following excerpt, he argues that the reader's revelation in Hemingway's "In Another Country" "can be seen only through the consciousness of the invisible first-person narrator who—in the creative act of giving a form and a focus to his own past experience—resolves a conflict implicitly disclosed in the process of narration."

• offers unusual evidence of the essentially heuristic and therapeutic nature of his storytelling. His thematic concern— that a person "find things he cannot lose"— takes on considerable significance when the distinction between the protagonist and the first-person narrator is clarified.

Critical Essay #3

The context of the war is only one of two contexts in the story. As we noted, the war serves as a metaphor for the natural order within which people struggle and die. The second context is the hospital, within which the issue at hand is the healing of those persons who have been wounded within the war-context.

• By extending these metaphors, we might suggest that the narrator's stake in his narrative is the resolution of how to be healed or how to be rejoined to a world characterized by destruction and death.

Critical Essay #4

Cass earned his doctorate in American literature at Ohio State University and has published critical articles on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, London, and James Gould Cozzens, as well as checklists for First Printings of American Authors. In the following excerpt, he examines several aspects of "In Another Country," including Hemingway's writing style, his allusion to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and his use of "window" and "looking" Imagery.

• that the author shifts his attention from the American soldier to the Italian major midway through the story, that he exercises strict control over his title allusion to The Jew of Malta, and that he cultivates a very elaborate motif of images concerned with looking and windows.