User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time,O Lord” (1928 31).{{sfn|1993}}'''9''' {{efn| “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (31),{{sfn|NAME|YEAR|p=PAGE}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer” (Hemingway, Ernest 90). {{sfn|NAME|YEAR|p=PAGE}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home” (Hemingway, In Our Time 76) or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette (67). Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling” (147). The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it” (21), could be seen as a signifier of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror” (Conrad 178) from Heart of Darkness.Conrad’s words, CedricWatts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale” (215). A quarter century later, Hemingway’s In Our Time offers yet another such thematic nexus.