Mary McCarthy: "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment"

Similarly to Hemingway, McCarthy begins her story after the action has already begun: her main character, a woman in the middle of an extramarital affair, expresses in the first paragraph that she is planning on bringing her affair into the open. Also like Hemingway, McCarthy doesn't give any of her characters names, but does bestow monikers on some of them based on their relations to her main character. She diverges from Hemingway by  capitalizing these monikers and using them as though they were given names; for example, the man her main character is having an affair with is referred to as "the Young Man." Along with descriptors used as character names, McCarthy also capitalizes certain events like "Telling Him" or "Public Appearances" in order to emphasize their importance to her main character.

McCarthy is completely different from Hemingway in that she covers a relatively long span of time (an entire affair) and tells the story exclusively through the lens of her main character's thoughts, rarely stepping back to objectively describe anything--be it another character, the setting, or an action. However, while she does relate most of these thoughts in the voice of her character, she uses the third person to do so. She states many of her character's feelings and motives in a straightforward way, such as when she says very simply: "...she was angry all the way because she was afraid there would be trouble with the conductor" (17). However, McCarthy frequently goes into detail and explores her protagonist's thoughts in terms of "one and "you" and "they," fully explaining her character's reasoning and following her entire line of thought. For example, while explaining why her character finds affairs pleasurable she writes, "One put one's family and one's friends off the track because one was still afraid that the affair might not come out right..." (3) and while relating her thoughts on marriage she writes, "Almost all women...when they are girls never believe that they will get married. The terror of spinsterhood hangs over them from adolescence on." (18). She also gets inside of her character's head by exploring hypotheticals that her character is considering, or by forecasting what she plans on doing. For example: "She could take an apartment by herself in the Village. She would meet new people. She would entertain," (19) or "It would probably be best, she decided, to say 'West' at first, with an air of vagueness and hesitation" (21). Like Hemingway in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," she ends her story by having her character forecast what she will do in a particular situation.

One of the nuances of McCarthy's writing that I found interesting was the addition of lots of side notes in each sentence, which sometimes gave important new information but sometimes were just synonyms for the previous statement. For example, in this sentence she adds on new information: "But what this interlude of deception gave her...was an opportunity, unparalleled in her experience, for..." (4). But in this sentence the additions don't necessarily add new meaning, and are more for effect: "no truism of his, no cliché, no ineffectual joke..." (10). I also particularly liked the effect produced by her interjection of "she thought" or "she said" or "she recognized" in the middle of a sentence, such as when she writes, "Not, she thought, because his impetuosities, his gaucheries, demonstrated the sincerity of his passion for her..." (5). Finally, I also appreciated her technique of listing several examples of something both to provide more explanation and also to sneak in descriptions of events: "To meet at a friend's house by design and to register surprise, to strike just the right note of young-matronly affection at cocktail parties, to treat him formally as "my escort" at the theater during intermissions..."

Ernest Hemingway

In order to better understand and imitate Ernest Hemingway’s style, I chose to focus on three of his best short stories: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” While I already knew that his signature style involves using as few words as possible, I hadn’t been aware of the more nuanced techniques that help him do this. 

Hemingway begins “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the middle of the action, and gradually reveals more of the situation at hand through dialogue between his two main characters. In his other two stories, he begins with a straightforward description of the setting and a surface explanation of the situation. 

Dialogue is important in all three stories but is pared down, and rarely paired with anything more than a “he said” or “she said;” Hemingway trusts readers to pick up on his characters’ emotions through the dialogue itself, and often uses this dialogue to express an important theme of the story. He does provide descriptions of the setting and the actions or motivations of a character, but they are always straightforward and are often broken up into short, blunt sentences. For example, in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” all he says about a particular interaction is: “The old man looked at him. The waiter went away,” and his simple explanation of a character’s acquiescence to another is: “He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.” 

Hemingway also distances the reader from his characters by never using their names in his narration, even if another character has previously used their name in dialogue. Instead, he refers to his characters by some sort of surface-level trait, such as “the old man,” or “the waiter with a wife.” 

In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway divulges one characters’ stream of consciousness thoughts. He does this by first introducing that the character is thinking something, and then goes on to seamlessly integrate these thoughts with his narration. Since he uses a stream of consciousness approach for relating a character’s thoughts, Hemingway often includes questions, short sentences when the thoughts are disjointed and choppy, contradictions, and sometimes even  semi-colons to make some thoughts flow as naturally as they would in that character’s mind. I was particularly inspired by his ending to “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which he merges his character’s thoughts with his own narration in order to express what they will do later that evening.