级班劳晓静.docVIP

02级2班 劳晓静 Emptiness and Terror out of Simplicity --A Stylistic Analysis of Hemingway’s In Our Time 1They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. 2There were pools of water in the courtyard. 3There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. 4It rained hard. 5All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. 6One of the minister was sick with typhoid. 7Two soldiers carried him down stairs and out into the rain. 8They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. 9The other five stood very quietly against the wall. 10Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. 11When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees. From In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway This selection is one of a number of self-containing vignettes that Hemingway places between longer pieces in his book In Our Time. Hemingway is rightly seen as the master of the simple declarative sentence, pursuing “what really happened in action” in a direct, hard-boiled style so that writing reproduces the action or event in all its completeness. Hemingway himself fostered this theory about his writing, though even for him the presentation of action was clearly twofold: an action was to be represented as truly as the author must select out of a continuum the smallest number of precise details in order for the reader, when viewing the ensemble, to intuit the entire narrative. Hemingway later said that his style was fashioned on the “principle of the iceberg,” for “seven eighths of it (is) under water for every part that shows.” (Scott Donaldson, 1996) This selection is as simple as a style can be without appearing childish or childlike. At the same time, this prose is highly sophisticated and its impact on the reader is powerful. Hemingway was to create an atmosphere of horror—the Germans’ slaughter was inhuman to a degree unsur