Hemingway's hidden sensibility

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to reveal the hidden sensibility and emotions underlying the objective journalistic style for which Ernest Hemingway is distinguished. The emotions will be brought into light through the characters struggle to achieve some form of existential authenticity. The characters interaction with their surrounding enables them to assert their existence and to pursue meaning in order to escape the idea of "nothingness". Hemingways characters experience a state of nothingness that is defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as a state of emptiness "created when a human wish or expectation is frustrated" (Kovacs 136). Hemingway does not present morals and feelings in abstract terms; instead he reflects them in the characters actions, reactions, and the things around them such as weather. They face lifes struggles and illusions by finding a new meaning for their lives. The Hemingways protagonists demonstrate the existentialist principle in which "man is nothing else but what he makes of himself" (Existentialism and Human Emotions 15). Hemingway succeeds in integrating journalistic experience into his literary writing to produce a work with objective material on the surface level and sensibility on the deeper level. Hemingway accomplishes this unity through his objective presentation of real life incidents. He does not present morals in abstract terms; instead he reflects them in the characters actions and reactions. Hemingway is concerned with presenting facts because he believes facts produce corresponding emotions and that emotions are the basis for reality. To him, reality lies not in the mind, but in the senses, in the general conceptions conveyed to us by sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. He therefore relies on senses rather than on the mind to reveal the truth about life because senses are concrete. This thesis aims to add new material to Hemingways scholarship by undertaking an analysis of three of Hemingways novels that are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea to illuminate the previously ignored area of emotions and sensibility in these works.