Intrinsic Power And Political Organisations

Intrinsic Power And Political Organisations This papers first aim is to analyse as well as evaluate the different thoughts and views exist in the literature about Power and politics are intrinsic to organisations. The second goal is to represent the motivational approaches related to power and politics in organization. The final goal is to show and illustrate the concept of power and politics through the film Devil Wears Prada. The review of the literature on organizational power and politics reveals a growing interest on this subject throughout the last few decades. Power and politics are the two indisputable part of organization. Decision making and problem solving are the two vital factors which are interconnected with Power and politics. Actual conflicts in organisations are resolved by power and political skills of managers and leaders. Power and Politics, though closely related, share similarities and differences but ultimately work together for the success of an organization. Unity in diversity should be the positive ou tcome of power and politics in organization. Power and politics are the crucial medium through which conflicts and divergent interest are managed and resolved. Power and politics are called the heart of organization. In the first part I want to discuss different aspects of power in organizations. Power is defined as the ability to get someone to do something you want done or the ability to make things happen in the way you want them. (Schermerhorn, Hunt, and Osborn). Throughout history, human beings have been fascinated by power. In the earlier periods power is prescribed by the structure of the organization. Without reference to the works of Marx (1967) and Weber (1978) it is hard to make sense of organizational power. Power is conceptualized broadly within a system-rational model of organizational structure. Decision making and concomitant exercising of power (logical, optimal and adaptive response) bring changes in the organization and we can say that The Devil Wears Prada is an example of a movie which is unapologetically or maybe semi-apologetically fascinated with power of Miranda. Power is important within the organizations and moreover for the management to influence individuals to make t hings happen. Power is to organization as oxygen as to breathing (Bernard Crick 1982). All organizations require power but all power dont require organization. We cannot make serious enquiry in to the organization without an enquiry of power. Main conception of power is concentrated on Webers (1947) classic definition that power is the probability that a person can carry out his or her own will despite resistance. The concept of power is often expressed in the literature by the words the ability to à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ as by Salancik and Pfeffer (1977) and the ability to bring about outcomes you desire (Power politics and organizations: Andrew Kakabadse and Christopher Parker,P 22). There are four dimensions of power such as behavioural view (Dahl), political view (Bacharach and Baratz), radical structural view (Lukes) and relational approach (Foucault). (Management Organization, Linstead and Fulop ,2nd Edition P 282). Great men are almost always not good men as they exercise influence and authority. As example in the film Devil Wears Prada we have seen how Miranda has treated her assistant Andy. In organizations, power is considered to derive from numerous sources. French and Raven (1959) identified five sources of power such as coercive power, reward power, exert power, legitimate or position power and referent power. Etizoni has classified power as coercive power, utilitarian power and normative power. Robbins (1984) has discussed the comparisons between the sources of power and the means to exert influence that refers to bases of power. Blau(1964): Power is the ability of persons as groups to impose their will on others despite resistance through deterrence either in the form of withholding regularly supplied rewards or in the form of punishment inasmuch as the former, as well as the latter, constitutes in effect negative sanction. The definition by Parsons (1956) is an interactive formulation but within a structural framework: Power we may define as the realistic capacity of system-unit to actualize its interests within the context of system-interaction and in this sense exert influence on processes in the system. Organizations should have formal and informal rules for coordinating actions of different people. People of diverse background, particular interests and different understandings abide by these rules. A famous thought by Lord Acton: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you super add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority (Lord Acton, 5 April 1987 to Bishop Mandell Creighton). The pluralists (Dahl1957, Wolfinger1971) claimed that power was equitably distributed around the society and no particular group had undue influence over decision making processes. The elitists (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962, Hunter1953, Mills1956) argued that power was concentrated in the hands of privileged few who controlled political agendas. The term power takes on different meanings when the unit or power holder is a formal group in an open system with multiple go als and the system is assumed to reflect a political-domination model of organization rather than only a co-operative model(Perrow 1970,P 84). In the film The Devil Wears Prada Miranda occasionally takes time from Andys daily routine and spreading fear and anxiety in her mind wherever she goes. In a scene Miranda tells Andy that I am your Master, you are dying to be like me, that is what Master (Miranda) never should say. This is all about her organizational power. In this part I want to represent the organizational politics with critical and mainstream approach. Organizational politics can be expressed as a social influence process in which behaviour is strategically designed to maximize short term or long term self-interest. Power and politics are the top two elements used in a company that either can cause the downfall or success of that organization. Politics is defined as the tactics used to obtain a desired goal, position or status in an organization. The power relationships in day-to-day relations could be understood by the political metaphor. If we consider the positive side then politics can be defined as A style of interaction which allows us to read and understand the situations, interpret them and exhibit the right kind of behaviour for inducing others to do what we want and do it willingly (Ferris,G.R,Davidson,S.l, and PerreweP.L (2005), political skill at work, P 9.Mountain view) And if we look at the negative side then it can be defined as The actions of individuals which are directed toward the goal of furthering our own self-interest without regard for the well-being of others or organization.(Kacmer,K.M. Carlson,D.S(1997),POPS A multiple sample investigation.Journal of Management,23, P 627). Political skill can influence organizational performance in different ways. The politically skilful managers and professionals often have higher job performance which is the building block for organizational performance. In the film Devil Wears Prada we have seen the politics of Emily (assistance of Miranda) as well as Miranda with Andy. For example, for facilitating the manufacture of a major new piece of equipment that is in demand from several customers, a project manager might use political skill. Political skill is positively associated with job performance in terms of quantity of work output, quality of workout and accuracy of work in organization. Thirty years ago J. Pffefer observed that organizations are more political than rational. Aristotle told that politics stems from a diversity of interests. Almost all employees bring their own interests, wants, desire, and needs in the organization. Robbins (2001) suggested that there are two forms of organizational politics, one is legitimate and other is illegitimate politics. Organizational leaders seek to satisfy not only organizational interests, but also their own wants and requirements, driven by self-interest. According to Farrell and Peterson the successful practice of organizational politics is perceived to lead to a higher level of power, and once a higher level of power is attained, there is more opportunity to engage in political behaviour. Politics are generated by structural cleavages in the organization among various component elements and identities, different values, affective, cognitive and discursive styles. Other causes of generation are the complexity and the degree of uncertainty, the external pressure coming from stakeholders or other actors and the history of past politics in the organization. If we accept the existence of power relations in organizations then politics and politicking are essential part of organization. Kissing up, passing the buck, apple polishing, covering your rear, creating conflict, forming coalitions, cunning, arrogant, scheming etc. are the negative terminology which are often used in organization as the political activity. Developing working relationships, encouraging change and innovation improving efficiency, facilitating teamwork, planning ahead, astute are the terminologies of positive aspect of organizational politics. The lack of concern with politics is the main void of organizational theory. Political alignment such as interest group of politics and coalition politics has an important effect on relations within organizations. In the film The Devil Wears Prada Miranda gives short orders and never likes to repeat herself. Andy is just supposed to know what she is talking about. Miranda wants her coffee as hot as brimstone, and sometimes even demands the unbelievable as at one point she demands a copy of a yet to be published Harry Potter book for her daughters. All these activities show the influence and organizational power of Miranda. The understanding of organizational politics requires a collective influence which is used by departments or subunits of organization to counter control and establish resistance pattern is described in Michel Croziers famous study The Bureaucratic phenomenon (1964). Most of the management and organization studies are based on Webers work as a simple affirmation of bureaucratic rationality. As example his work on Verstehen as an interpretive method for analysing human behaviour is almost completely ignored. The community power debate which was conducted during 1950s, 1960s, 1970s described the status of power as an empirical phenomenon. At the time of answering the question what is the structure and distribution of power in contemporary society? people were divided into two camps, one is pluralists (Dahl 1957, 1958, 1961, Wolfinger 1971) and other is elitists (Bachrach and Baratz ,1962,1963,Hunter 1953, Mills, 1956). The pluralists claimed that power was equitably distributed throughout society and there is no particular had undue influence over decision making processes. On the other side the elitists argued that power was concentrated in the hands of a privileged few who controlled political agendas. Then Dahl (1957) expressed that A has power over B to the extent that he or she can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957, PP. 202-203). On the other hand Bachrach and Baratz (1962) criticize Dahls explanation on concrete decision making situation , claiming that power is also exercised in non-decision making situations. All forms of political organization have a bias in favour of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of other because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out. (Schattschneider 1960, P 71, emphasis in original). Debate was increased when Lukess(1974) radical three dimensional view of power criticizes both Dahls one dimensional model and Bachrach and Baratzs two dimensional model. Decision making is a political interest which is resulting from the conflicts of interest characteristic of sub-goal differentiation within organization (Ganz and Murray, 1980, Mayes and Allen 1977, Rogers 1971, Vredenburgh and Maurer 1984). The dynamics of political behaviour is essential to understand for a full understanding of organizational functioning. The political character of organization life is rooted in non-bureaucratic decision mechanisms (Salancik and Pfeffer 1974, P 454) which is used to resolve the conflicts between organization and subunits. Gandz Murray (1980) expressed the difference between political and non-political uses of power. Miles (1980) asserts that it is important to recognize that politics need not be bad, though common parlance uses the term in a pejorative sense. The survival of an organization may depend on the success of a unit or coalition in overturning a traditional but out-dated formal organization objective or policy. Political activity can also be beneficial to organizations. If through the politicking of the marketing manager, changes in product are brought about which in turn provide commercial gains for the organization, then it could be claimed that such political behaviour is beneficial for organizations. A recent study developed a profile of individuals active in office politics based on a survey completed by a number of managers. The result indicated that managerial level, job function and sex were unrelated to political activity. However certain personality traits corresponded highly with the individual managers propensity to engage in office politics. The managerial person should avoid making their power open and explicit. Self-serving behaviour has a bad effect on organizations and its employees. Kanter (1979) told that People know who is holding power. Kanter has claimed that explicit claims to power are only made by the powerless. Office politics does exist in the organization regardi ng issues like departmental budget, space allocation, project responsibilities and salary adjustment (Robbins 2001). In the film Devil Wears Prada Miranda has done politics by choosing Andy to go to Paris with her over Emily and asked Andy to inform this to Emily, Again Miranda bypasses Nigel for a promotion so as to keep her own job secure as she was to be replaced and the information for which came from Andy. Thus organizational politics is blatantly portrayed here and is thus an excellent example. So far we have discussed the key aspects of power and politics. In this part I want to focus on motivation and discuss the relation between motivation and organization. Motivation is an essential part in organizations, both for the individual and for the organization as a whole. Motivational state or condition of a person has an impact or influence upon both behaviour and performance. Motivation to work is of great importance to us since we spend a lot of our time working in organizations (Michael W.Drafke and Stan Kossen., The Human Side of Organizations, Massachusetts: Addison/Wesley,1998,p.2-12). Pffefer (1981) has suggested that major characteristic often accompanying political behaviour is the attempt to conceal its true motivation. True motive was concealed because the actor believed that it was unacceptable. Motivation is equal important for manager and employee. In 1970 David McClelland and David Burnham published an article in Harvard Business Review called Power is the great Motivator. This article directly focused on managers motivatio n. A good manager is one who, among other things, helps subordinates feel strong and responsible, rewards them properly for good performance and sees that things are organised so that subordinates feel they know what they should be doing(McClelland,2003,P-109). In the film Devil Wears Prada Andy has motivated herself in different ways to be familiar with the new job environment in spite of rude behaviour of her boss Miranda. Recently the boundaries have widened and work and private life is much more connected to each other than past. In the past when one left his workplace, the person had less obligations or responsibility against the company (Karl Weick., Making sense of the Organization,Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006,P 207-210). Then Karl Marx stated that Freedom begins at the gates of the factory (Robert Tucker,The Marx-Engels reader,NewYork Norton,1978, P-440). Today people often bring their work home as well as colleagues socialize outside work (Weick). If employees are not motivated, no one would make an effort to work and companys performance would be less efficient. Vroom (1964) has developed expectancy theory from the original work of Tolman and Honzik(1930) and produced a systematic explanatory theory of workplace motivation. It claimed that the motivation to behave in a particular way is determined by an individuals expectation that behaviour will lead to a particular outcome, multiplied by the preference or valence that person has for that out-come. Vroom has argued that human behaviour is controlled by subjective probability. The equation is Motivation (M) = Expectation (E) * Valence (V). Abraham Maslows (1943, 1954) theory of motivation was the first theory to be applied to the world of work. He proposed that human beings have five needs (Self-Actualisation, Esteem, Social, Safety, and Physiological) and when these are not satisfied they provide the drive to act and set up the motivating mechanism. The most significance and potential value to managers attempting to understand the motivation in the workplace is the work of McClellands (1961) achievement theory. Herzbergs (1968) two-factor theory on intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors affect what individuals perceive as the value or valance of particular outcomes which will influence both their performance and job satisfaction. Communication between employees and managers within the organization is an essential and vital ingredient of motivation. Employees are motivated by recognition and constructive feedback from their manager. Motivation is a complex, dynamic and culture based concept so there is no one universal theory which is applicable to motivation. Karl Marx said that Men make history but not under conditions of their own choosing. In spite of covert nature of power and politics it is real and important aspect of all organizations. We have discussed the unitary, pluralist, radical and relational view of power and politics in this essay. Managers can prevent the misuses of power by confirming that clear organizational goals, plans, and individual roles, and responsibilities are understood and followed. Power should be used to manipulate the understanding and interpretation of organizational events. According to pluralist, radical and relational perspectives on power and politics it is generic to organization. The unitary as well as pluralist views provide a comfort zone to deal with power and politics. Managers should be highly skilled in reflective practice and critical thinking if they want to understand the relational view of power and politics. Smart and clever manager can boost themselves or their career through power and p olitics. Politics involves cultivating influential allies, controlling the flow of information and influencing decisions through ones power base. Organizational politics have detrimental effect on employees moral, loyalty and trust. Some people think that practice of politics can be cunning and deceitful while other people believe that it can be motivator with positive result. To understand the organizational political behaviour Farrell and Peterson (1982) proposed a three dimensional typology. One dimension is where the political activity takes place (inside or outside the organization), second one is the direction of the attempted influence (vertically or laterally) and last one is legitimacy of the political action (Functional vs. Dysfunctional conflict) .The processes by which the organization is operated should be ethically based. There are many internal and external aspects of organization which are the cause of success and failure of organization. Organizations must insure th at decisions are not based on personal agendas or outside influences. Organizations should abide by their code of conduct to avoid conflict of interest. The effect of Power and Politics depends on how they are practiced in organization. All the approaches of power and politics have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is very important to understand the limits of power and authority, resistance and obedience in organizations. Fundamentally, power is shaped by what we know and how we know what to do in organization. Throughout this essay I have represented the critical approaches of power and politics and the relation with mainstream approaches. I am unable to point out any organization which has no implications of power and politics. I agree with the topic that power and politics are intrinsic to organization. I think that there should be more research on this topic to clarify in a more broad vision. REFRENCES Amos Drory, Tsilia Romm Politics in Organization and its Perception within the Organization. Andrew J. Dubrin Political Behaviours in Organizations Bronston T. Mayes, Robert W. Allen Toward A Definition of Organizational Politics Cavanagh G F., Moberg D J.,Velasquez M. The Ethics of Organizational Politics, The Academy of Management Review, Jul 01, 1981; Vol. 6, N. 3, p. 363-374. Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips Power and Organizations. Clegg CHAPTER 5 Managing Power And Politics in Organizations, Resistance, Empowerment, Ethics (P 151-190). David Buchanan, Andrzej Huczynski Organizational behaviour( Third Edition, P 667-702) Dennis K. Mumby, Purdue University Power and Politics ,(Chap 15) Ferris,G.R,Davidson,S.l, and PerreweP.L (2005), political skill at work, Mountain view. Gerald F. Cavanagh, Dennis J. Moberg, Manuel Velasquez The Ethics of Organizational Politics Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, Konopaske Organizations behaviour, structure, Processes (Chap 10, P 275-295). Gilbert W. Fairholm, Organizational Power Politics, Tactics in Organizational Leadership Harvey, E., and R. Mills. Patterns of Organizational Adaptation: A Political Perspective, in Mayer Zald (Ed.), Power in Organizations (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), pp. 181-213. Ian Brooks Organizational Behaviour (P 233-258). Jackson, N Carter, P (2007). Rethinking Organizational Behaviour: A Poststructuralist Framework, Pearson Education. John Martin organizational behaviour Second Edition, P (807-884) John Bratton, Peter Sawchuk, Carolyn Forshaw, Militza Callinam and Martin Corbett Work and Organizational behaviour( Second Edition) Joseph W.Weiss Organizational Behaviour and Chang, managing diversity, cross-cultural dynamics and ethics.(Second Edition). Julieta Dà ¡vila, Samuel Hernà ¡ndez, Vicente Peralta Organizational Conflict, Power and Politics (June 2004). Kacmer,K.M. Carlson,D.S(1997), A multiple sample investigation Journal of Management. Kakabadse ,A Parkar,C(eds) Power and Politics and Organizations: A Behavioural Science view, London John Wiley Knights, D. and H. Willmott (eds.) (2007) Introducing Organizational Behaviour Management. London: Thomson. Laurie J. MullinsManagement and Organizational behaviour (Ninth Edition). Linstead, S., L. Fulop and S. Lilley, (eds) (2004) Management and Organization: A Critical Text. Basingstoke: (Second edition). Samuel B. Bacharach and Edward J. Lawer Power And Politics in Organization Zaleznik, A. Power and Politics in Organizational Life, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 48, No. 3 (1970), 47-60. . .

The Ideal Man Defined in The Fountainhead :: Fountainhead

The Ideal Man Defined in The Fountainhead  Ã‚     Ã‚   Ayn Rand has based her novel, The Fountainhead on the projection of an ideal man.   It is the portrayal of a moral ideal as an end in itself.   She has placed 'man-worship' above all and has brought out the significance of the heroic in man. Man-worshippers are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it.   They are dedicated to the exaltation of man's self esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth. The Fountainhead has brought out the greatness of man - the capacity, the ability, the integrity and honesty in man - as an ideal to be achieved.   It is based on the idea of romanticism which means that "it is concerned not with things as they are but with things as they might be and ought to be." The Fountainhead is the story of an architect, Howard Roark-, whose genius and integrity were as unyielding as granite and of his desperate battle waged against the conventional standards of society.   It is a tale of hatred and denunciation unleashed by the society against a great innovator; of a man who has great conviction in himself; of a person who believes that man's first right on earth is the right of the ego and that man's first duty is the duty to himself, a man who redefines egoism.   An egoist, in the absolute sense, is not the man who sacrifices others to self.   He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. Roark doesn't function through others. He needs no other men. His primary goal is to achieve perfection. He is a man with uncompromising values and integrity. In order to make her philosophy clearer, Ayn Rand has simultaneously given an account of people like Peter Keating and Ellsworth M. Toohey.   Peter Keating - a man who cheats and lies but preserves a respectable front.   He knows himself to be dishonest but others think he is honest and he derives his self-respect from that.   His aim in life is greatness - in other people's eyes.   Other people dictated his conviction which he did not hold but he was satisfied that others believed he held them.   Others were his prime concern.   He didn't want to be great but to be thought great.   He borrowed from others to make an impression on others.

Literary Analysis of Ernest Hemingway Essay

Stewart, Matthew C (2000) quite rightly points out that: If literary quality is a register of how deeply an author has felt the subject matter about which he writes, then Hemingway felt very deeply about his war experiences, for these are some of his finest stories. They are â€Å"In Another Country,† â€Å"Now I Lay Me,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be. † The first story very clearly anticipates A Farewell to Arms in its opening paragraph, its setting and the themes it raises. It depicts the ruined lives of wounded soldiers in a hospital, in particular the physical therapy of the American narrator and an Italian major. It is clear that the physical therapy is useless and that some sort of metaphysical, perhaps spiritual, therapy would be more fundamentally valuable for the psychically battered men. The second story, as stated above, depicts Nick and an Italian soldier lying awake at night near the front, unable to sleep. The American narrator dreads sleeping because he fears that his soul will leave his body. The final story depicts Nick Adams returning to the Italian front as a would-be morale booster, but he has been shot, receiving a head-wound that has rendered him barely able to control himself at the front. Indeed, his principal task is to hold onto his sanity. These three war stories are remarkable for their literary quality, for their high degree of autobiographical resonance, and for the way they illuminate A Farewell to Arms and each other. Most to the immediate purpose, however, is to assert that they constitute additional early evidence that Nick Adams was severely traumatized by the war. Lynn and Crews build a version of Hemingway as a world-renowned, middle-aged author pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and critics during the forties and fifties. Twenty-five years after the fact, they maintain, Hemingway fabricates the idea that the war affected him. Yet â€Å"In Another Country† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† were composed only two years after â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† was composed in mid-1932. These are Nick Adams stories; they are set at the war; they show Nick as physically and psychically wounded. The opening pages of â€Å"Now I Lay Me† even echo many particulars of â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† including the central action of trout fishing as psychic restoration. Hemingway’s finest explorations of the human consequences of war. Hemingway discussed his war nightmares with his first wife in the 1920s for the same reason? Hemingway as both young and middle-aged man undoubtedly kidded, exaggerated, misled, pulled legs, manipulated, hoaxed, and lied. But the existence of these early war stories argues strongly against the idea that Hemingway decided to lay claim to the importance of the war in his work belatedly and factitiously. The incapacity to find his way through questions he cannot solve, his reticence the admission of his own weakness, those familiar steps on the path of the individualist–bring Hemingway’s contemporary to desertion on principle. The theme of desertion is not new to Hemingway. Long ago Nick Adams fled from his home town, then he fled to the front. But here too the brave arditti decorated with all sorts of medals is a potential deserter at heart. For example, that if all the stories about Nick Adams were collected and entitled â€Å"In Our Time† they would not have the structure which In Our Time does have. â€Å"The Killers† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† might fit, but â€Å"Fathers and Sons† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† would not. Hemingway’s favorite hero-ever the same under his changing names–and you begin to realize that what had seemed the writer’s face is but a mask, and by degrees you begin to discern a different face, that of Nick Adams, Tenente Henry, Jake Barnes, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Frazer. Hemingway shows us how complicated he is by his very attempts to be simple. A tangle of conflicting strains and inconsistencies, a subtle clumsiness, a feeling of doubt and unrest are to be seen even in Hemingway’s earlier books as early as his presentation of Nick Adams’s cloudless young days, but as he proceeds on the way of artistic development these features show increasingly clear and the split between Hemingway and reality widens. Closely following the evolution of his main hero you can see how at first Nick Adams is but a photo film fixing the whole of life in its simplest tangible details. Then you begin to discern Nick’s ever growing instinct of blind protest, at which the manifestations of his will practically stop. The well trained athletic body is full of strength, it seeks for moments of tension that would justify this sort of life and finds them in boxing and skiing, in bull fighting and lion hunting, in wine and women. He makes a fetish of action for action, he revels in â€Å"all that threatens to destroy. † But the mind shocked by the war, undermined by doubt, exhausted by a squandered life, the poor cheated, hopelessly mixed up mind fails him. The satiated man with neither meaning nor purpose in life is no longer capable of a prolonged consecutive effort. â€Å"You oughtn’t to ever do anything too long† and we see the anecdote of the lantern in the teeth of the frozen corpse grow into a tragedy of satiety when nothing is taken in earnest any longer, when â€Å"there is no fun anymore. † Action turns into its reverse, into the passive pose of a stoic, into the courage of despair, into the capacity of keeping oneself in check at any cost, no longer to conquer, but to give away, and that smilingly. The figure of Jake mutilated in the war grows into a type. It is the type of a man who has lost the faculty of accepting all of life with the spontaneous case of his earlier days. For example the wounded Nick says to Rinaldi†You and me we’ve made a separate peace. We’re not patriots. † Tenente Henry kills the Italian sergeant when the latter, refusing to fulfill his order, renounces his part in the war, but inwardly he is a deserter as well and on the following day we actually see him desert. â€Å"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more† ( â€Å"In Another Country†). This theme of sanctioned treason, or desertion in every form, so typical of the â€Å"extreme individualist, recurs throughout Hemingway’s work. But to learn to do it is no easy job, especially for one whose sight is limited by the blinders of sceptical individualism. Life is too complicated and full of deceit. The romance of war had been deceit, it is on deceit that the renown of most writers rests. The felicity of the Eliot couple is but self-deceit; Jake is cruelly deceived by life; for Mr. Frazer everything is deceit or self-deceit, everything is dope–religion, radio, patriotism, even bread. There is despair in the feeling of impending doom, and morbidity in the foretaste of the imminent loss of all that was dear. All stories if continued far enough end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonesome fashion. There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlives her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. † A variety of later stories– ‘The Revolutionist,†In Another Country,†A Simple Enquiry,†Now I Lay Me,†A Way You’ll Never Be’–affirm the various phases of Hemingway’s thesis: the suffering of the war, the resistances and defenses of his people, their ways of ignoring the scene around them which apparently they cannot control. The depression of the nineteen-thirties was thus a sort of shock to our writers, rather like the insulin treatment in modern therapy, which brought them back from the shadows of apathy to American life at best, and active hostility at worst. This much of the expression of the thirties Hemingway anticipates in his own withdrawal and return to our common life, though the pattern will vary with our other literary figures, and with John Dos Passos and William Faulkner we have both an apparent exception to the rule and a real one. But we cannot deny that if the return to social sanity through shock is better than no return, it is in the end a method of desperation rather than a counsel of perfection. Our Americans are also to show its effect in their work of the decade, as Hemingway has already. The crisis of the new age has caught him well along in his career. Can he discover, who has discovered so much and left much unsaid, the genuine method of unifying his work and his times, the fusion of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ which will further illuminate the tragic impulses he has made his own? We recall the phrase which summarized Hemingway’s solitary position: ‘a way you’ll never be. ‘ With such native capacities, the inheritance of wisdom and eloquence, the sense of bottomless intuitions we often have with Hemingway, the prophetic texture which marks his talent, will Hemingway now find a way to be? For what a marvelous teacher Hemingway is, with all the restrictions of temperament and environment which so far define his work! What could he not show us of living as well as dying, of the positives in our being as well as our destroying forces, of ‘grace under pressure’ and the grace we need with no pressures, of ordinary life-giving actions along with those superb last gestures of doomed exiles! Tenente Henry enjoys the definite, clear-cut relations between people, the good comradeship â€Å"We felt held together by there being something that had happened, that they did not understand,† and the feeling of risk while it lasts. But soon along with the debacle at Caporetto he finds himself faced by the cruelty of the rear, choked by its lies and filth, hurt by the hatred of the working people to gli ufficiali. And as his shellshock had lost him his sleep so does the stronger shock of war make him a different man. By the time the war is over he has learned to discern â€Å"liars that lie to nations† and to value their honeyed talk at what it is worth. Year after year Hemingway steadily elaborated his main lyrical theme, creating the peculiar indirectly personal form of his narrative (Soldier’s Home, Now I Lay Me), sober on the surface, yet so agitated; and as the years went by, the reader began to perceive the tragic side of his books. It became more and more apparent that his health was a sham, that he and his heroes were wasting it away. Hemingway’s pages were now reflecting all that is ugly and ghastly in human nature, it became increasingly clear that his activity was the purposeless activity of a man vainly attempting not to think, that his courage was the aimless courage of despair, that the obsession of death was taking hold of him, that again and again he was writing of the end–the end of love, the end of life, the end of hope, the end of all. The bourgeois patrons and the middle-class readers tamed by prosperity, were gradually losing interest in Hemingway. To follow him through the concentric circles of his individualistic hell was becoming a bit frightening and a bit tedious. He was taking things too seriously. In early days both critics and readers had highly admired the â€Å"romantic† strength, the â€Å"exotic† bull-fights, â€Å"the masculine athletic style;† but now Hemingway’s moments of meditation, his too intent gazing at what is horrible, According Hannum (1992) the trial of courage Nick so often faced had begun at least by the time of the Boulton episode. The doctor’s backing down before Boulton no doubt spurred Nick’s long fascination with boxing (his immediate recognition of Stanley Ketchel, Ad Francis, and Ole Andreson in the road stories) and his own concern with fistfights (the brakeman and Ad) and other challenges to his own courage. In â€Å"The Light of the World† he flinched and put up money when the bartender threatened Tom and him (292); in â€Å"The Battler† he smarted under the brakeman’s trick punch, then found himself briefly overmatched in the near-fight with Ad (101-02), but in â€Å"The Killers† he risked his life to warn Ole Andreson. In â€Å"In Another Country† Nick considered himself a dove in contrast to his â€Å"hunting-hawk† (208) comrades in Milan, though he learned a new courage from the Italian major whose wife died of pneumonia, and in â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† puked and fell back in his first infantry attack (314), but thereafter found courage in grappa. (Hannum 92) Conclusion If on closing Hemingway’s books you recall and assort the disjoined pieces of the biography of his main hero you will be able to trace the decisive points of his life. Nick–first a tabula rasa, then turning away from too cruel a reality; Henry struggling for his life and trying to assert its joys, Jake and Mr. Johnson–already more than half broken and Mr. Frazer–a martyr to reflection and growing passivity. So we witness both the awakening and the ossification of the hero whose psychology is so intimately known to Hemingway himself, and as opposed to it a file of brave and stoic people–the Negro in â€Å"Battler,† the imposing figures of Belmonte and Manola, the broken giant Ole Andreson; in a word–those people for whom Hemingway’s double has so strong an instinctive liking, first worshipped as heroes and then brought down to earth. Works Cited Hannum, Howard L.†Ã¢â‚¬ Scared Sick Looking at It†: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories. † Twentieth Century Literature 47. 1 (2001) Hemingway, Ernest. â€Å"The Art of the Short Story. † Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Ed. Joseph M. Flora. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 129-44. Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Complicated â€Å"Enquiry† in ‘Men without Women. ‘. † Studies in Short Fiction 32. 2 (1995) Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Puzzling Pursuit Race. † Studies in Short Fiction 34. 4 (1997) Paul, Steve. â€Å"†Ã¢â‚¬ËœDrive,’ He Said†: How Ted Brumback Helped Steer Ernest Hemingway into War and Writing. † The Hemingway Review 27. 1 (2007) Paul, Steve. â€Å"Preparing for War and Writing What the Young Hemingway Read in the Kansas City Star, 1917-1918. † The Hemingway Review 23. 2 (2004) Stewart, Matthew C. â€Å"Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War. † Papers on Language & Literature 36. 2 (2000) Tyler, Lisa. â€Å"Hemingway’s Italy: New Perspectives. † The Hemingway Review 26. 2 (2007)

Literary Analysis of Ernest Hemingway Essay

Stewart, Matthew C (2000) quite rightly points out that: If literary quality is a register of how deeply an author has felt the subject matter about which he writes, then Hemingway felt very deeply about his war experiences, for these are some of his finest stories. They are â€Å"In Another Country,† â€Å"Now I Lay Me,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be. † The first story very clearly anticipates A Farewell to Arms in its opening paragraph, its setting and the themes it raises. It depicts the ruined lives of wounded soldiers in a hospital, in particular the physical therapy of the American narrator and an Italian major. It is clear that the physical therapy is useless and that some sort of metaphysical, perhaps spiritual, therapy would be more fundamentally valuable for the psychically battered men. The second story, as stated above, depicts Nick and an Italian soldier lying awake at night near the front, unable to sleep. The American narrator dreads sleeping because he fears that his soul will leave his body. The final story depicts Nick Adams returning to the Italian front as a would-be morale booster, but he has been shot, receiving a head-wound that has rendered him barely able to control himself at the front. Indeed, his principal task is to hold onto his sanity. These three war stories are remarkable for their literary quality, for their high degree of autobiographical resonance, and for the way they illuminate A Farewell to Arms and each other. Most to the immediate purpose, however, is to assert that they constitute additional early evidence that Nick Adams was severely traumatized by the war. Lynn and Crews build a version of Hemingway as a world-renowned, middle-aged author pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and critics during the forties and fifties. Twenty-five years after the fact, they maintain, Hemingway fabricates the idea that the war affected him. Yet â€Å"In Another Country† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† were composed only two years after â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† was composed in mid-1932. These are Nick Adams stories; they are set at the war; they show Nick as physically and psychically wounded. The opening pages of â€Å"Now I Lay Me† even echo many particulars of â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† including the central action of trout fishing as psychic restoration. Hemingway’s finest explorations of the human consequences of war. Hemingway discussed his war nightmares with his first wife in the 1920s for the same reason? Hemingway as both young and middle-aged man undoubtedly kidded, exaggerated, misled, pulled legs, manipulated, hoaxed, and lied. But the existence of these early war stories argues strongly against the idea that Hemingway decided to lay claim to the importance of the war in his work belatedly and factitiously. The incapacity to find his way through questions he cannot solve, his reticence the admission of his own weakness, those familiar steps on the path of the individualist–bring Hemingway’s contemporary to desertion on principle. The theme of desertion is not new to Hemingway. Long ago Nick Adams fled from his home town, then he fled to the front. But here too the brave arditti decorated with all sorts of medals is a potential deserter at heart. For example, that if all the stories about Nick Adams were collected and entitled â€Å"In Our Time† they would not have the structure which In Our Time does have. â€Å"The Killers† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† might fit, but â€Å"Fathers and Sons† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† would not. Hemingway’s favorite hero-ever the same under his changing names–and you begin to realize that what had seemed the writer’s face is but a mask, and by degrees you begin to discern a different face, that of Nick Adams, Tenente Henry, Jake Barnes, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Frazer. Hemingway shows us how complicated he is by his very attempts to be simple. A tangle of conflicting strains and inconsistencies, a subtle clumsiness, a feeling of doubt and unrest are to be seen even in Hemingway’s earlier books as early as his presentation of Nick Adams’s cloudless young days, but as he proceeds on the way of artistic development these features show increasingly clear and the split between Hemingway and reality widens. Closely following the evolution of his main hero you can see how at first Nick Adams is but a photo film fixing the whole of life in its simplest tangible details. Then you begin to discern Nick’s ever growing instinct of blind protest, at which the manifestations of his will practically stop. The well trained athletic body is full of strength, it seeks for moments of tension that would justify this sort of life and finds them in boxing and skiing, in bull fighting and lion hunting, in wine and women. He makes a fetish of action for action, he revels in â€Å"all that threatens to destroy. † But the mind shocked by the war, undermined by doubt, exhausted by a squandered life, the poor cheated, hopelessly mixed up mind fails him. The satiated man with neither meaning nor purpose in life is no longer capable of a prolonged consecutive effort. â€Å"You oughtn’t to ever do anything too long† and we see the anecdote of the lantern in the teeth of the frozen corpse grow into a tragedy of satiety when nothing is taken in earnest any longer, when â€Å"there is no fun anymore. † Action turns into its reverse, into the passive pose of a stoic, into the courage of despair, into the capacity of keeping oneself in check at any cost, no longer to conquer, but to give away, and that smilingly. The figure of Jake mutilated in the war grows into a type. It is the type of a man who has lost the faculty of accepting all of life with the spontaneous case of his earlier days. For example the wounded Nick says to Rinaldi†You and me we’ve made a separate peace. We’re not patriots. † Tenente Henry kills the Italian sergeant when the latter, refusing to fulfill his order, renounces his part in the war, but inwardly he is a deserter as well and on the following day we actually see him desert. â€Å"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more† ( â€Å"In Another Country†). This theme of sanctioned treason, or desertion in every form, so typical of the â€Å"extreme individualist, recurs throughout Hemingway’s work. But to learn to do it is no easy job, especially for one whose sight is limited by the blinders of sceptical individualism. Life is too complicated and full of deceit. The romance of war had been deceit, it is on deceit that the renown of most writers rests. The felicity of the Eliot couple is but self-deceit; Jake is cruelly deceived by life; for Mr. Frazer everything is deceit or self-deceit, everything is dope–religion, radio, patriotism, even bread. There is despair in the feeling of impending doom, and morbidity in the foretaste of the imminent loss of all that was dear. All stories if continued far enough end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonesome fashion. There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlives her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. † A variety of later stories– ‘The Revolutionist,†In Another Country,†A Simple Enquiry,†Now I Lay Me,†A Way You’ll Never Be’–affirm the various phases of Hemingway’s thesis: the suffering of the war, the resistances and defenses of his people, their ways of ignoring the scene around them which apparently they cannot control. The depression of the nineteen-thirties was thus a sort of shock to our writers, rather like the insulin treatment in modern therapy, which brought them back from the shadows of apathy to American life at best, and active hostility at worst. This much of the expression of the thirties Hemingway anticipates in his own withdrawal and return to our common life, though the pattern will vary with our other literary figures, and with John Dos Passos and William Faulkner we have both an apparent exception to the rule and a real one. But we cannot deny that if the return to social sanity through shock is better than no return, it is in the end a method of desperation rather than a counsel of perfection. Our Americans are also to show its effect in their work of the decade, as Hemingway has already. The crisis of the new age has caught him well along in his career. Can he discover, who has discovered so much and left much unsaid, the genuine method of unifying his work and his times, the fusion of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ which will further illuminate the tragic impulses he has made his own? We recall the phrase which summarized Hemingway’s solitary position: ‘a way you’ll never be. ‘ With such native capacities, the inheritance of wisdom and eloquence, the sense of bottomless intuitions we often have with Hemingway, the prophetic texture which marks his talent, will Hemingway now find a way to be? For what a marvelous teacher Hemingway is, with all the restrictions of temperament and environment which so far define his work! What could he not show us of living as well as dying, of the positives in our being as well as our destroying forces, of ‘grace under pressure’ and the grace we need with no pressures, of ordinary life-giving actions along with those superb last gestures of doomed exiles! Tenente Henry enjoys the definite, clear-cut relations between people, the good comradeship â€Å"We felt held together by there being something that had happened, that they did not understand,† and the feeling of risk while it lasts. But soon along with the debacle at Caporetto he finds himself faced by the cruelty of the rear, choked by its lies and filth, hurt by the hatred of the working people to gli ufficiali. And as his shellshock had lost him his sleep so does the stronger shock of war make him a different man. By the time the war is over he has learned to discern â€Å"liars that lie to nations† and to value their honeyed talk at what it is worth. Year after year Hemingway steadily elaborated his main lyrical theme, creating the peculiar indirectly personal form of his narrative (Soldier’s Home, Now I Lay Me), sober on the surface, yet so agitated; and as the years went by, the reader began to perceive the tragic side of his books. It became more and more apparent that his health was a sham, that he and his heroes were wasting it away. Hemingway’s pages were now reflecting all that is ugly and ghastly in human nature, it became increasingly clear that his activity was the purposeless activity of a man vainly attempting not to think, that his courage was the aimless courage of despair, that the obsession of death was taking hold of him, that again and again he was writing of the end–the end of love, the end of life, the end of hope, the end of all. The bourgeois patrons and the middle-class readers tamed by prosperity, were gradually losing interest in Hemingway. To follow him through the concentric circles of his individualistic hell was becoming a bit frightening and a bit tedious. He was taking things too seriously. In early days both critics and readers had highly admired the â€Å"romantic† strength, the â€Å"exotic† bull-fights, â€Å"the masculine athletic style;† but now Hemingway’s moments of meditation, his too intent gazing at what is horrible, According Hannum (1992) the trial of courage Nick so often faced had begun at least by the time of the Boulton episode. The doctor’s backing down before Boulton no doubt spurred Nick’s long fascination with boxing (his immediate recognition of Stanley Ketchel, Ad Francis, and Ole Andreson in the road stories) and his own concern with fistfights (the brakeman and Ad) and other challenges to his own courage. In â€Å"The Light of the World† he flinched and put up money when the bartender threatened Tom and him (292); in â€Å"The Battler† he smarted under the brakeman’s trick punch, then found himself briefly overmatched in the near-fight with Ad (101-02), but in â€Å"The Killers† he risked his life to warn Ole Andreson. In â€Å"In Another Country† Nick considered himself a dove in contrast to his â€Å"hunting-hawk† (208) comrades in Milan, though he learned a new courage from the Italian major whose wife died of pneumonia, and in â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† puked and fell back in his first infantry attack (314), but thereafter found courage in grappa. (Hannum 92) Conclusion If on closing Hemingway’s books you recall and assort the disjoined pieces of the biography of his main hero you will be able to trace the decisive points of his life. Nick–first a tabula rasa, then turning away from too cruel a reality; Henry struggling for his life and trying to assert its joys, Jake and Mr. Johnson–already more than half broken and Mr. Frazer–a martyr to reflection and growing passivity. So we witness both the awakening and the ossification of the hero whose psychology is so intimately known to Hemingway himself, and as opposed to it a file of brave and stoic people–the Negro in â€Å"Battler,† the imposing figures of Belmonte and Manola, the broken giant Ole Andreson; in a word–those people for whom Hemingway’s double has so strong an instinctive liking, first worshipped as heroes and then brought down to earth. Works Cited Hannum, Howard L.†Ã¢â‚¬ Scared Sick Looking at It†: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories. † Twentieth Century Literature 47. 1 (2001) Hemingway, Ernest. â€Å"The Art of the Short Story. † Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Ed. Joseph M. Flora. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 129-44. Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Complicated â€Å"Enquiry† in ‘Men without Women. ‘. † Studies in Short Fiction 32. 2 (1995) Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Puzzling Pursuit Race. † Studies in Short Fiction 34. 4 (1997) Paul, Steve. â€Å"†Ã¢â‚¬ËœDrive,’ He Said†: How Ted Brumback Helped Steer Ernest Hemingway into War and Writing. † The Hemingway Review 27. 1 (2007) Paul, Steve. â€Å"Preparing for War and Writing What the Young Hemingway Read in the Kansas City Star, 1917-1918. † The Hemingway Review 23. 2 (2004) Stewart, Matthew C. â€Å"Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War. † Papers on Language & Literature 36. 2 (2000) Tyler, Lisa. â€Å"Hemingway’s Italy: New Perspectives. † The Hemingway Review 26. 2 (2007)

Literary Analysis of Ernest Hemingway Essay

Stewart, Matthew C (2000) quite rightly points out that: If literary quality is a register of how deeply an author has felt the subject matter about which he writes, then Hemingway felt very deeply about his war experiences, for these are some of his finest stories. They are â€Å"In Another Country,† â€Å"Now I Lay Me,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be. † The first story very clearly anticipates A Farewell to Arms in its opening paragraph, its setting and the themes it raises. It depicts the ruined lives of wounded soldiers in a hospital, in particular the physical therapy of the American narrator and an Italian major. It is clear that the physical therapy is useless and that some sort of metaphysical, perhaps spiritual, therapy would be more fundamentally valuable for the psychically battered men. The second story, as stated above, depicts Nick and an Italian soldier lying awake at night near the front, unable to sleep. The American narrator dreads sleeping because he fears that his soul will leave his body. The final story depicts Nick Adams returning to the Italian front as a would-be morale booster, but he has been shot, receiving a head-wound that has rendered him barely able to control himself at the front. Indeed, his principal task is to hold onto his sanity. These three war stories are remarkable for their literary quality, for their high degree of autobiographical resonance, and for the way they illuminate A Farewell to Arms and each other. Most to the immediate purpose, however, is to assert that they constitute additional early evidence that Nick Adams was severely traumatized by the war. Lynn and Crews build a version of Hemingway as a world-renowned, middle-aged author pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and critics during the forties and fifties. Twenty-five years after the fact, they maintain, Hemingway fabricates the idea that the war affected him. Yet â€Å"In Another Country† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† were composed only two years after â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† was composed in mid-1932. These are Nick Adams stories; they are set at the war; they show Nick as physically and psychically wounded. The opening pages of â€Å"Now I Lay Me† even echo many particulars of â€Å"Big Two-Hearted River,† including the central action of trout fishing as psychic restoration. Hemingway’s finest explorations of the human consequences of war. Hemingway discussed his war nightmares with his first wife in the 1920s for the same reason? Hemingway as both young and middle-aged man undoubtedly kidded, exaggerated, misled, pulled legs, manipulated, hoaxed, and lied. But the existence of these early war stories argues strongly against the idea that Hemingway decided to lay claim to the importance of the war in his work belatedly and factitiously. The incapacity to find his way through questions he cannot solve, his reticence the admission of his own weakness, those familiar steps on the path of the individualist–bring Hemingway’s contemporary to desertion on principle. The theme of desertion is not new to Hemingway. Long ago Nick Adams fled from his home town, then he fled to the front. But here too the brave arditti decorated with all sorts of medals is a potential deserter at heart. For example, that if all the stories about Nick Adams were collected and entitled â€Å"In Our Time† they would not have the structure which In Our Time does have. â€Å"The Killers† and â€Å"Now I Lay Me† might fit, but â€Å"Fathers and Sons† and â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† would not. Hemingway’s favorite hero-ever the same under his changing names–and you begin to realize that what had seemed the writer’s face is but a mask, and by degrees you begin to discern a different face, that of Nick Adams, Tenente Henry, Jake Barnes, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Frazer. Hemingway shows us how complicated he is by his very attempts to be simple. A tangle of conflicting strains and inconsistencies, a subtle clumsiness, a feeling of doubt and unrest are to be seen even in Hemingway’s earlier books as early as his presentation of Nick Adams’s cloudless young days, but as he proceeds on the way of artistic development these features show increasingly clear and the split between Hemingway and reality widens. Closely following the evolution of his main hero you can see how at first Nick Adams is but a photo film fixing the whole of life in its simplest tangible details. Then you begin to discern Nick’s ever growing instinct of blind protest, at which the manifestations of his will practically stop. The well trained athletic body is full of strength, it seeks for moments of tension that would justify this sort of life and finds them in boxing and skiing, in bull fighting and lion hunting, in wine and women. He makes a fetish of action for action, he revels in â€Å"all that threatens to destroy. † But the mind shocked by the war, undermined by doubt, exhausted by a squandered life, the poor cheated, hopelessly mixed up mind fails him. The satiated man with neither meaning nor purpose in life is no longer capable of a prolonged consecutive effort. â€Å"You oughtn’t to ever do anything too long† and we see the anecdote of the lantern in the teeth of the frozen corpse grow into a tragedy of satiety when nothing is taken in earnest any longer, when â€Å"there is no fun anymore. † Action turns into its reverse, into the passive pose of a stoic, into the courage of despair, into the capacity of keeping oneself in check at any cost, no longer to conquer, but to give away, and that smilingly. The figure of Jake mutilated in the war grows into a type. It is the type of a man who has lost the faculty of accepting all of life with the spontaneous case of his earlier days. For example the wounded Nick says to Rinaldi†You and me we’ve made a separate peace. We’re not patriots. † Tenente Henry kills the Italian sergeant when the latter, refusing to fulfill his order, renounces his part in the war, but inwardly he is a deserter as well and on the following day we actually see him desert. â€Å"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more† ( â€Å"In Another Country†). This theme of sanctioned treason, or desertion in every form, so typical of the â€Å"extreme individualist, recurs throughout Hemingway’s work. But to learn to do it is no easy job, especially for one whose sight is limited by the blinders of sceptical individualism. Life is too complicated and full of deceit. The romance of war had been deceit, it is on deceit that the renown of most writers rests. The felicity of the Eliot couple is but self-deceit; Jake is cruelly deceived by life; for Mr. Frazer everything is deceit or self-deceit, everything is dope–religion, radio, patriotism, even bread. There is despair in the feeling of impending doom, and morbidity in the foretaste of the imminent loss of all that was dear. All stories if continued far enough end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonesome fashion. There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlives her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. † A variety of later stories– ‘The Revolutionist,†In Another Country,†A Simple Enquiry,†Now I Lay Me,†A Way You’ll Never Be’–affirm the various phases of Hemingway’s thesis: the suffering of the war, the resistances and defenses of his people, their ways of ignoring the scene around them which apparently they cannot control. The depression of the nineteen-thirties was thus a sort of shock to our writers, rather like the insulin treatment in modern therapy, which brought them back from the shadows of apathy to American life at best, and active hostility at worst. This much of the expression of the thirties Hemingway anticipates in his own withdrawal and return to our common life, though the pattern will vary with our other literary figures, and with John Dos Passos and William Faulkner we have both an apparent exception to the rule and a real one. But we cannot deny that if the return to social sanity through shock is better than no return, it is in the end a method of desperation rather than a counsel of perfection. Our Americans are also to show its effect in their work of the decade, as Hemingway has already. The crisis of the new age has caught him well along in his career. Can he discover, who has discovered so much and left much unsaid, the genuine method of unifying his work and his times, the fusion of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ which will further illuminate the tragic impulses he has made his own? We recall the phrase which summarized Hemingway’s solitary position: ‘a way you’ll never be. ‘ With such native capacities, the inheritance of wisdom and eloquence, the sense of bottomless intuitions we often have with Hemingway, the prophetic texture which marks his talent, will Hemingway now find a way to be? For what a marvelous teacher Hemingway is, with all the restrictions of temperament and environment which so far define his work! What could he not show us of living as well as dying, of the positives in our being as well as our destroying forces, of ‘grace under pressure’ and the grace we need with no pressures, of ordinary life-giving actions along with those superb last gestures of doomed exiles! Tenente Henry enjoys the definite, clear-cut relations between people, the good comradeship â€Å"We felt held together by there being something that had happened, that they did not understand,† and the feeling of risk while it lasts. But soon along with the debacle at Caporetto he finds himself faced by the cruelty of the rear, choked by its lies and filth, hurt by the hatred of the working people to gli ufficiali. And as his shellshock had lost him his sleep so does the stronger shock of war make him a different man. By the time the war is over he has learned to discern â€Å"liars that lie to nations† and to value their honeyed talk at what it is worth. Year after year Hemingway steadily elaborated his main lyrical theme, creating the peculiar indirectly personal form of his narrative (Soldier’s Home, Now I Lay Me), sober on the surface, yet so agitated; and as the years went by, the reader began to perceive the tragic side of his books. It became more and more apparent that his health was a sham, that he and his heroes were wasting it away. Hemingway’s pages were now reflecting all that is ugly and ghastly in human nature, it became increasingly clear that his activity was the purposeless activity of a man vainly attempting not to think, that his courage was the aimless courage of despair, that the obsession of death was taking hold of him, that again and again he was writing of the end–the end of love, the end of life, the end of hope, the end of all. The bourgeois patrons and the middle-class readers tamed by prosperity, were gradually losing interest in Hemingway. To follow him through the concentric circles of his individualistic hell was becoming a bit frightening and a bit tedious. He was taking things too seriously. In early days both critics and readers had highly admired the â€Å"romantic† strength, the â€Å"exotic† bull-fights, â€Å"the masculine athletic style;† but now Hemingway’s moments of meditation, his too intent gazing at what is horrible, According Hannum (1992) the trial of courage Nick so often faced had begun at least by the time of the Boulton episode. The doctor’s backing down before Boulton no doubt spurred Nick’s long fascination with boxing (his immediate recognition of Stanley Ketchel, Ad Francis, and Ole Andreson in the road stories) and his own concern with fistfights (the brakeman and Ad) and other challenges to his own courage. In â€Å"The Light of the World† he flinched and put up money when the bartender threatened Tom and him (292); in â€Å"The Battler† he smarted under the brakeman’s trick punch, then found himself briefly overmatched in the near-fight with Ad (101-02), but in â€Å"The Killers† he risked his life to warn Ole Andreson. In â€Å"In Another Country† Nick considered himself a dove in contrast to his â€Å"hunting-hawk† (208) comrades in Milan, though he learned a new courage from the Italian major whose wife died of pneumonia, and in â€Å"A Way You’ll Never Be† puked and fell back in his first infantry attack (314), but thereafter found courage in grappa. (Hannum 92) Conclusion If on closing Hemingway’s books you recall and assort the disjoined pieces of the biography of his main hero you will be able to trace the decisive points of his life. Nick–first a tabula rasa, then turning away from too cruel a reality; Henry struggling for his life and trying to assert its joys, Jake and Mr. Johnson–already more than half broken and Mr. Frazer–a martyr to reflection and growing passivity. So we witness both the awakening and the ossification of the hero whose psychology is so intimately known to Hemingway himself, and as opposed to it a file of brave and stoic people–the Negro in â€Å"Battler,† the imposing figures of Belmonte and Manola, the broken giant Ole Andreson; in a word–those people for whom Hemingway’s double has so strong an instinctive liking, first worshipped as heroes and then brought down to earth. Works Cited Hannum, Howard L.†Ã¢â‚¬ Scared Sick Looking at It†: A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories. † Twentieth Century Literature 47. 1 (2001) Hemingway, Ernest. â€Å"The Art of the Short Story. † Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Ed. Joseph M. Flora. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 129-44. Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Complicated â€Å"Enquiry† in ‘Men without Women. ‘. † Studies in Short Fiction 32. 2 (1995) Nolan, Charles J. Jr. â€Å"Hemingway’s Puzzling Pursuit Race. † Studies in Short Fiction 34. 4 (1997) Paul, Steve. â€Å"†Ã¢â‚¬ËœDrive,’ He Said†: How Ted Brumback Helped Steer Ernest Hemingway into War and Writing. † The Hemingway Review 27. 1 (2007) Paul, Steve. â€Å"Preparing for War and Writing What the Young Hemingway Read in the Kansas City Star, 1917-1918. † The Hemingway Review 23. 2 (2004) Stewart, Matthew C. â€Å"Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War. † Papers on Language & Literature 36. 2 (2000) Tyler, Lisa. â€Å"Hemingway’s Italy: New Perspectives. † The Hemingway Review 26. 2 (2007)

Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley - 1532 Words

Like any author, especially one who created a new genre, there will be criticism, and Shelley is no exception. Shelley received criticism surrounding Frankenstein not only because she was a female writer, but because of her writing style. Originally, Frankenstein was published anonymously and was thought that her husband, Percy Shelley, wrote it (â€Å"Mary Shelley Biography† 2016). Shelley may have published Frankenstein anonymously because â€Å"’women understood that they got a â€Å"better hearing† if it was thought they were males’† (Ezell 35). Women who wrote literature in the 1800’s were not taken seriously and their pieces were seen as having no literary worth. Additionally, Shelley was both young and had no formal education, her style was bold and lacked refrain from grotesque details. Shelley wrote about psychological disturbances in Frankenstein and how Victor shows symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (McCulloch 2002). Fr ankenstein also suggested an incestuous relationship between Victor and Elizabeth, who grew up as his â€Å"more than sister† (McCulloch 2002; Shelley 35). Shelley apologized for her bold and unrefined style in her diary entry written in 1831 and said that she was handed all the tools that she needed to be a distinguished writer but she let everyone down (Poovey 346). She may have felt this way because she had only one true success and could not live up to the expectations set forth by her novelist parents and her poet husband. Even though Victor deviatesShow MoreRelatedFrankenstein, By Mary Shelley1650 Words   |  7 Pagesbook of Frankenstein does one just think of a mythical science fiction book that really has no meaning? Frankenstein can have numerous meanings depending on how a person perceives it. Frankenstein can be analyzed into many themes; some say religion, feminism, or scientific symbolization, it all depends on ones own perception. When one analyzes further into Mary Shelly’s life and then interprets the novel it is obvious that is a sociological theme. One can simply assume that Mary Shelley creates FrankensteinRead MoreFrankenstein by Mary Shelley1093 Words   |  4 Pagesfaster than man can contend with. That argument is the premises, moral, and plot base for Mary Shelleys tale Frankenstein. On the other hand, J. Michael Bishops, essay Enemies of Promise   on the other hand promotes and boast sciences achievements. However, Mary Shelley presents her point of view subtly yet very dramatically, which is much more effective than that of J. Michael Bishop. The dramatic story Shelley creates becomes a part of the reader, therefore holding the readers attention. ShelleysRead MoreMary Shelley Frankenstein859 Words   |  4 Pages Mary Shelley The Creature in Mary Shelley’s â€Å"Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus† needs a companionship as every ordinary human. Every man needs a woman, who will able to share moments of happiness and sadness, a woman who will be able to share thoughts and of course a woman who will be able to love a man. In this case the Creature needs a bride. But the problem is that the Creature from the â€Å"Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus† is not a human. SoRead MoreFrankenstein, by Mary Shelley1138 Words   |  5 PagesIs Frankenstein a man, whose ambition led to a disaster; or a monster, which created a life with disregard for the human race? Frankenstein, in my opinion, was the monster not the life that he had created. Frankenstein never admitted to his family what he had done, never admitted responsibility for his actions. He might as well have killed Elizabeth, William, Justine, and Clerval with his own hand. The so called â€Å"Monster† only wanted companionship; he did not want to murder those people. TheRead MoreFrankenstein, By Mary Shelley1325 Words   |  6 PagesI have been informed that you are pushing to remove the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley from the school curriculum. I’ve decided to write to you and explain why I believe that you are misinformed, and in fact, why this is a huge importance to the students of today. Frankenstein is a classic which recounts the life and horrors of Victor Frankenstein, as told through a series of letters and narrations. His obsession with the natural world and science brings him to a state of mind which ultimatelyRead MoreFrankenstein, By Mary Shelley1580 Words   |  7 PagesFrankenstein by Mary Shelley is a sci-fi novel written during the Romantic Movement in Britain’s early nineteenth century. The movement was stimulated by the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution and in reaction against the emphasis on reason in eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy (The Romantic Movement, 2014 ). Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Shelley was also a romantic poet during the movement. Shelley’s novel is evidently influenced by her relationship with her husband, which is illustratedRead MoreFrankenstein by Mary Shelley739 Words   |  3 Pagesinterconnections of humanity, nature, and divinity (â€Å"Romanticism 1†). English Romanticism being trendy in Europe, people would vent their outlooks onto their personal fiction works such as Mary Shelley. Shelley uses vivid creativity and romantic elements to create one of her admired novels, Frankenstein. In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, most of the characters prove their compassion for mankind, prove their rejection of technology and science, and prove their involvement in a romantic quest. These several characteristicsRead MoreFrankenstein, By Mary Shelley1040 Words   |  5 Pages In 1818, a book titled Frankenstein was published anonymously, mysteriously dedicated to William Godwin, a prominent journal ist and political philosopher of his time. The immediate reviews of the novel were mixed, most edging towards critical, although no one knew who the book was written by. However, while Frankenstein failed to gain popularity immediately, no one had any idea the lasting impact this novel would have on the world. Despite the lukewarm reception at its debut, it soon proved to beRead MoreFrankenstein, by Mary Shelley1078 Words   |  5 PagesMary Shelley’s Frankenstein has undoubtedly withstood the test of time. Frankenstein’s direct association with fundamental Gothic literature is extremely renowned. However, the novel’s originality is derived from the foundational thematic values found within the relationship (or lack there of) between Victor Frankenstein and the monster he had created, in combination with a fascinatingly captivating plot. Understandably, Frankenstein can often be associated with a multitude of concepts; however,Read MoreFrankenstein by Mary Shel ley1223 Words   |  5 Pagesto have multiple narrators telling a story? In Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, Frankenstein, three main narrators tell the story about the creation of a monster and the events that follow. The job of narrator shifts between Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster that Victor creates. As each narrator shares his own recollection of the events that occurred, new facts are introduced to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Although Frankenstein uses multiple narrators to tell the story, it