A criticism of Icebergs in In Our Time

Is Hemingway's style effective in the short stories of In Our Time? 

Hemingway certainly does not make it easy for readers. With his sparse sentences and lack of internal descriptions, we are forced to consider the subtext of every interaction just to make sense of the words on the page. Most of the stories in In Our Time, when taken at face-level, seems to be missing something vital, like a very pale person. If I should skim through one beginning to end, I have no further curiosity, contemplation, or empathy.

It is only after some reflection is done can we sift out the emotions that Hemingway is attempting to highlight. Iceberg Theory, Hemingway's style, doesn't reflect on events below the surface. It creates a narrative distance that readers must bridge themselves.

I can see how this makes Hemingway's work thoughtful and literary. But while achieving artistic elevation, he sacrifices as much of his accessibility as does a writer using overly long sentences and words. I've read somewhere that Hemingway is comprehensible by fifth graders, and there's even a writing tool called Hemingway that deletes extraneous words. I've also read a quote that Hemingway's sentences began as spindly things, and he gradually had to build them up to full strength.

Take this example, from the story The End of Something:

"There's going to be a moon tonight," said Nick. He looked across the bay to the hills that were beginning to sharpen against the sky. Beyond the hills he knew the moon was coming up.
"I know it," Marjorie said happily.
"You know everything," Nick said.
"Oh, Nick, please cut it out! Please, please don't be that way!"

Presumably, readers should deduce that Nick and Marjorie have some kind of long-running "knowledge" conflict that somehow triggers an outburst from Marjorie. Iceberg Theory at work: we only see the iceberg of Nick and Marjorie's relationship. I don't feel any satisfaction from trying to deduce the details of their relationship with Hemingway's clues throughout the End of Something, though. By forcing me to bridge the narrative distance, I've lost empathy for the characters along the way. If he had given just a little bit about why I should care if either of these characters, or Bill, should live die or be happy, I would like this story more.

From this story, I've come to realize how Hemingway's style, which depends on Iceberg Theory, the theory of omission, never really grabbed my interest.

If I could describe narrative quality with temperature, I would say that it's cold. Icebergs are cold, after all. In Our Time is a cold book, in this way. It starts cold and stays cold. The Things They Carried, which took influence from Hemingway, also utilizes sparse descriptions. But it sometimes dives into the minds of characters or even the author. It is a cold and hot book, it has variety.

Chasing love in The Things They Carried

In The Things They Carried, Tim O' Brien dispels any notion of universal truths about war. War, he writes, can be anything, it can fun, boring, exciting, hell, and everything in between, and the range of stories he tells makes me believe that. Yet on the subject of love, Tim O Brien almost seems to be making a generalization: that love is sometimes illusionary and always fleeting, especially in wartime. It could be broken by death, the realities of war, or simply circumstance. And after being broken, it turns into something new.

Sometimes, as in the case of Henry Dobbins, the illusion of love is ripped away, only to reveal there was no such thing there at all. Dobbins wears the pantyhose of his girlfriend as a good luck charm, but when his girlfriend dumps him, he continues wearing them as if nothing had happened, "the magic doesn't go away." Maybe at the start of the war, the pantyhose were defined by his love, but they've transformed by firefights and landmines into something mysterious. They have taken on a magic.

Sometimes, it's very blatant the notion of love is being destroyed. Mary Anne begins her time in Vietnam innocent, wide-eyed, and cute. From her time conducting missions with the Green Berets, Mary Anne-- the brightest symbol of innocence in The Things They Carried-- has become someone that embodies the landscape of war. And of course, she falls out of love with Mark Fossie in the process.

Right after the death of one his soldiers, Jimmy Cross even burns the letters he's been carrying from a girl back home. He's realized he can't bear the burden of the war has placed on him and what he's brought from home. Could it be that in war, the idea of romance seems to die, the slow kind of attachment that requires an mental effort to maintain? There's nothing romantic about a true war story, O Brien says. Maybe the way he writes love in The Things They Carried isn't some kind of larger moral-- that war and love are incompatible-- but another facet of war's diversity.

We see this between the men of Alpha company. Based on the blame everyone feels after Kiowa's death, it's safe to say that they had strong feelings for him. But the love Alpha Company has for Kiowa isn't quite the romantic kind: it's of sort of camaraderie and faith that feeds on the fear of death and danger, the same fear that seems to squash down Jimmy Cross's feelings, that twists the heart of Mark Fossie's girl.

I realized O Brien has accomplished a magic trick. He's taken what we might think of romance born in peacetime, killed it, and replaced it with something new born of wartime, something I can't quite understand but probably gets closer to the truth.