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.