User talk:CVinson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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 In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.
-Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' (1937) opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a 12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ (Hemingway, ''To Have'' 44).
+Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' (1937) opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
+{{pg|160|161}}
+gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ (Hemingway, ''To Have'' 44).
 In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).