User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions
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“Where’s Raven?” I asked. | “Where’s Raven?” I asked. | ||
“I’m here,” said Raven. (31)blockquote | “I’m here,” said Raven. (31)blockquote | ||
The piece simply could not have sustained the second person for the remaining five pages. More significantly, for this deeply personal exchange between the writer and the faceless, eyeless soldier, Hemingway could not hide in the rhetorical device of the second person. In the process, he effects a reversal of the usual pronoun game; instead of identifying with the all-embracing “you,” we leave that trick behind and become fully attached to the narratorial “I” as ourselves, as we might not have been had the article begun in the first person. And even as the narrator identifies himself by name for the only time in any of the dispatches— “Hemingway,” and later | |||
“Ernest”—as decidedly not ourselves. We do not say, ''It isn’t me''. The historian Hugh Thomas notes “the refreshing candour” of Hemingway’s naming himself “in the world of the International Brigades, where no one’s name seemed to be truthfully given” (591).9** | |||