The
Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway offers characters more relatable than those in Mrs. Dalloway.
I enjoy learning about their lives and I find what they have to say intriguing.
My one complaint however, is that I often don’t know who is talking. Hemingway
likes to convey lengthy conversations between characters in short prose as if we were
watching the conversation rather than narrating it to us. I find myself
rereading these conversations to try to determine who is saying what. It’s almost as if I am reading a
play, except the names of the characters have been removed. This perpetual
state of confusion reminds me of reading the free indict discourse of Mrs. Dalloway. Switching between characters’ viewpoints and
rapidly switching who is talking are really not all that different. I think the
reason for this ambiguity goes back to Virginia Woolf’s belief that modern
fiction novels should focus on the characters. Her free indirect discourse
allowed us to get a substantial picture of the characters in a way we are not
accustomed to. Hemingway does the same thing by inserting us into his
character’s conversations. Although it can be confusing, the feeling of being a
bystander to a conversation allows us as readers to experience the characters’
thoughts and feelings being relayed first hand as opposed to relying on Jake to
narrate. On a similar note, having Jake narrate events in the story helps us
learn more about him as a character because his retelling shows his biases and
opinions of others.
I definitely agree that Jake's narrative can be confusing at times because of the way he expects us to be familiar with the people he talks with, and therefore doesn't explain himself fully. But I also think his narration reads better because he isn't stopping to explain things to us. He expects us readers to be experts and therefore focuses on telling us a story. With Woolf, everything had to bad explained. When one had an emotion, Clarissa would go into fully detail about how that emotion made her feel and how it affected others. With Jake, Hemingway allows us as readers to actually feel and relate to the emotions of the characters. He doesn't write in awkward pauses, he waits for us to feel them and insert them ourselves. All in all, it's a very effective writing style that I too thoroughly enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI also get confused sometimes when reading the dialogues. But I've found that it almost doesn't matter if I don't know who is speaking all the time. They repeat the same information so often within the conversation that I can still understand what is going on. Granted, there are some instances where it's necessary to know who is speaking but the characters can often be distinguished in just their manner of speaking.
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ReplyDeleteI have a similar sentiment to Renata. I see your point, but I often found it to be relatively easy to figure out who was saying what simply based on what was being said. We've touched one this point -- how many of the characters often seem to embody to be "just characters," relatively one dimensional and embodying only one dominant trait. It's funny how that affects dialogue.
I agree that it is sometimes confusing when there are long lines of dialogue, especially between more than two characters, but I feel that it was necessary for the book. You talked about Virginia Woolf's essay and how fiction must focus on characters, and what better way to do that than to feel like you are just sitting there listening in on their conversations. It is like a play and you are in the audience watching the events unfold. The reason that it is hard to know who is talking is because Hemingway tries to minimize the interruptions by the narrator during these dialogues, leading to that feeling of being there with those characters.
ReplyDeleteI really like your observation on feeling like a bystander. It adds another nuance to Hemingway's writing style. Like the prevalence of short sentences and monosyllable words, I think the way the dialogue is written is part of Hemingway's method of being direct. As the comments above have pointed out, it eliminates interrupting the flow of the conversation with establishing who said what and how they said it. However, in maintaining this aspect the dialogue becomes more confusing than direct and to the point.
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