User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane” (27-8). A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as away of bringing the reader along for the ride.

Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors (29), begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.” He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me” (30). The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead upon the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead”(30).It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:

blockquote** After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got

a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.

Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”

“Do I know him?”

“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”

page break 434-435

In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.

“Where’s Raven?” I asked.

“I’m here,” said Raven. (31)blockquote

@@ Line 68: / Line 68: @@
 another technique to enable documentary reportage to “talk to us, and convince us that we, our deepest interests, are engaged,” in the use of the second person: “Thirties documentaries constantly address ‘you,’ the ‘you’ who is we the audience, and exhorts, wheedles, begs us to identify, pity, participate.” His examples include Dorothy Parker’s Spanish Civil War writing, and Hemingway’s 1935 “First-Hand Report on the Florida Hurricane” (27-8). A number of Hemingway’s NANA dispatches employ the second-person as away of bringing the reader along for the ride.
+Hemingway’s dispatches used personal pronouns more artfully than is generally recognized. “A New Kind of War,” which William Braasch Watson notes as having been “[w]ritten with more care and imagination” than its predecessors (29), begins in second person: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.” He takes “you” outside, to see the damage and the dead from the bombing. “Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me” (30). The tension between the first person and second-person pronouns—the movement toward identification with “you” and the insistence that “it wasn’t me”—continues in the next line. Here the reader is at once still in the narrator’s shoes, but strangely distanced from the narrator through biographical tidbit and, at the same time, asked to see himself in the enemy: “The Italian dead upon the Guadalajara weren’t you although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like Our Dead”(30).It is worth quoting at length the dispatch’s transition to first person:
+blockquote** After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got
+a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you’d had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.
+Then in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy located out behind the Morata front along the road to Valencia they said, “Raven wants to see you.”
+“Do I know him?”
+“I don’t think so,” they said. “But he wants to see you.”
+“Where is he?”
+“Upstairs.”
+page break 434-435
+In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.
+“Where’s Raven?” I asked.
+“I’m here,” said Raven. (31)blockquote