Style: Personal Impressions

Abstract

When Hemingway′s protagonists act there is a disturbing quality to the nature of such actions. A type of alienation effect is produced whereby, though ′the characters [may] come on with a heavy preponderance of active verbs ... the effect is passive′ . Even when these characters initiate actions ′they influence nothing events happen to them′.³ In Hemingway, the desire for authentic individual expression comes up headlong against a set of larger circumstances which deny such a possibility. It is this condition that his fiction represents. His protagonists are powerless in the face of history. The stress on action and sensation in his prose cannot be separated from a type of passive determinism.

In narration ... the reader may grasp the real causality of the epic events. And only the experience of this causality can communicate the sense of a real chronological, concrete, historical sequence. . . . With the loss of the art of narration ... any artistic relationship to the composition as a whole is lost ... the vitality, vibrance and exuberance of life withdraws into the minute image.

(Georg Lukacs)¹

The opening lines of A Farewell to Arms cast a spell. They do not altogether make sense except as pure visual impressionism.

(Alfred Kazin)²