헤밍웨이 인물들의위험한 선택

Abstract

Hemingways life and work has often been interpreted as a typical expression of American tradition of escapism. This interpretation would not be wrong; on the contrary, it enlightens his reader on the complex cultural background of his death-oriented plot. His protagonists, without exception, try to escape from everyday reality of culture by indulging in outdoor activities such as fishing, participating in war, watching bullfighting, safari hunting, etc. Indeed, they have no effective relationships with cultured sorts, struggling to discover themselves in the more primitive dimension. Hemingways best works including The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea are all among the finest and most outspoken pieces of that variety in American Literature. Another trend of interpretation focuses on the pshychic state of Hemingway heroes. The psychic trauma inflicted by the World War I, which was not a play but an unknowable violence itself, was conjured and relived in Hemingways novels over and over again. It is possible that Hemingway can be envisaged as a psychiatrist who diagnoses his own mental and emotional disorders incurred by the war and project them into his works. His characters are, in one aspect, all war patients in Freudian sense, who have sufferred a severe wound, obeying the so-called repetition compulsion, and dreaming a masochistic dream. It can be told that as a means of adjusting to the neurosis, Hemingways heroes repeat the experience of death and violence endlessly. However, the thematic circle of these two interpretations can be enlarged when they are projected to the more universal current of 20th-century Western thought — existentialism — whose appeal lay mainly in its ability to reflect the experience of violence, atrocity, and alienation brewed in the 20th-century European civilization. In the post-World War I years, it began to grip the imagination of many thinkers, writers, and artists; and Hemingway belonged to the crew of the lost generation. Like other existentialist writers, Hemingway speculates in his works about the nature of reality, subordinating traditional metaphysical questions to an anthropocentric perspective, in which there takes place a tragic confrontation between man and the world. Especially like Camus, he regards human existence as unexplainable and the world man inhabits as hostile and indifferent, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of ones acts.