An Analysis Of Hemingway's Technique As A Short Story Writer

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n Moritz 1968, 168).

One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of such people, and it is unrealistic to put sublime thoughts into their heads. So Hemingway writes about them in their own oxlike, instinctive, thoughtless language. To write about gangsters, for example, Hemingway adopts their own language, with its slang and vernacular, as can be found in “The Killers”: “hot town” ,”what the hell”, ”talk to goddam much” ,”blow his head off”. ”it ain’t that”. In “After a Storm”, the narrator as protagonist is probably a sea adventurer, so he tells the story in a language that is cold and void of emotion.

It wasn’t about anything, something about making punch, and then we started fighting and I slipped and he head me down kneeling on my chest and choking me with both hands like he was trying to kill me. Brother, it was some storm.


It is his use of carefully selected details that enables Hemingway to achieve distinctive verbal economy, characterized flat, neutral diction, which make his stories simple, in a distinctive simple. Consider his use of “basic” vocabulary, and the heavy load of implication carried by such uncertain monosyllables as ”fine” in “The Killers”:

We all know that, bright boy, ”Max said, ”Talk about something else. Ever go to the movies?
“Once in a while,”
You ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.”

Such flat, neutral diction is most frequently couched in simple declarative sentences, with repetition replacing subordination. Consider the fo...