In many Hemingway novels and short stories, excessive drinking generally plays a major role in the relationships between the characters. This is very apparent in “Hills Like White Elephants” and The Sun Also Rises. The alcohol provides a gateway for the for the characters to forget about their personal problems, as well as, act out against their problems and short comings.…
A number of creative individuals have taken their own lives, including John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and many other writers. The large number of such cases suggests that there may be a functional relationship between creativity and psychological health. This relationship seems to vary across domains, with the rate of suicide especially high in certain groups of artists. This may suggest that there may be something unique to those domains that either draws suicide-prone persons into the domain or has an impact on the individual such that suicide is considered and often attempted. When the poem writing by Anne Sexton entitled Her Kind you can closely compare how Anne’s mental health affected her poetry and how her poetry affected her mental health.…
“Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons,” so says Miguel de Unamuno. It might be true. Many different artists have dealt with struggles like trauma and mental disorders. Vincent Van Gogh is thought to have had depression, bi polar, and episode of derangement, and his work is considered some of the best. David Foster Wallace, is considered one of the most influential writers of the past three decades. Wallace had suffered from depression for many years, and unfortunately, committed suicide. From…
Many scholars have spoken about American expatriates and alcoholism in their reviews with a pessimistic point of view and with negative comments, like Cowley in his writing saying that “The Sun Also Rises is, in fact, a major example of a drunk narrative, in which alcohol is inseparable from the modernist ethos of despair”. However, I’d like to point out that all these critics have been written in the light of each scholars’ period, and that no one asked himself what Hemingway meant when writing about those themes and that precise moment of the…
Hemingway showed signs of PTSD in “Soldier’s Home” when coming home from WWI. “In the evening he practiced on his clarinet, strolled down town, and went to bed.” (Hemingway 1) This unwillingness to break out of routine is a classic symptom of PTSD. He is unable to find happiness in simple things; even in things he found happiness in before the war. “Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" is a parallel to his own thoughts about WWI and his suffering of PTSD as a result. His entire worldview has been skewed by his traumatic experiences in the war, and the ability to genuinely love requires an emotional balance he lost during the war. This PTSD the author gets, comes to somewhat of resentment toward war.…
Hemingway led a difficult life full of martial affairs and misfortune. Some of these experiences have set the foundation for Hemingway's greatest works. This essay will analyze the influence that Hemingway's separation from Pauline and divorce from Hadley had on "Hills like White Elephants." Before writing "Hills like White Elephants," Hemingway had been residing in Paris with his wife Hadley and son, Bumby. During their stay in Paris, Hadley and Ernest Hemingway met a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer. Pauline was more of a friend to Hadley than Hemingway was. Pauline did not think much of Hemingway at first, she thought he was lazy and a no-doer. Later Pauline and Hemingway fell in love and had an affair. Once Hadley knew of their affair, Hemingway requested a divorce. Hadley agreed under one condition, Hemingway and Pfeiffer had to separate for 100 days. After the 100 days if they were still in love, then Hadley would grant the divorce (Baker 174). This separation period left an indelible effect on Hemingway's life and…
Kashkeen, Ivan. "Alive in the Midst of Death: Ernest Hemingway." Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, American Century Series: Hill and Wang, 1961.…
Edgar Allen Poe, the author of both The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, as well as dozens of other works, is suspected to have suffered from various mental illnesses, as well as a dangerous pride. Poe himself once wrote, in a letter to his family, “I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but He quenched it in misery,” which heavily hinted at depression or other such ‘low mood’ disorders. Such an illness even brought him to a suicide attempt in 1848. However, despite such a melancholic disposition and downcast life, people said he had an “…excitable temperament with a great deal of self-esteem”., to the extent of even refusing to accept money when both he and his wife were too ill to work. Most people compare Poe’s chaotic…
Throughout Ernest Hemingway’s career, the characterizations of his protagonists remained consistent. The classic “Hemingway Hero” is either a code hero or a wounded hero. The coded hero attempts to find meaning in a meaningless world by living according to a personal code. The wounded hero is, as the title obviously reveals, a hero who has been injured physically or psychologically. The two heros come and enter into a student-teacher relationship. The code hero is the teacher who reinvigorates the wounded hero by initiating him into his code.…
The prominence of alcoholism in American literature, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, and the relationship between great authors and alcoholism has become somewhat of a literary cliché. Icons such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac are as famous for their work as they are infamous for their drinking habits. These authors have created a legend out of themselves just from their notorious habits of drinking. Of the seven native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, five were alcoholics. The list of other twentieth-century American writers also affected with alcoholism is very long. I researched these authors’ lives to find out how they all were infected with the same disease, alcoholism. Some said that drinking boosted their creative abilities, while others thought of it more of an escape from the confines of their own imagination, to which they were bound for all hours of the day. Drinking does fit the loner lifestyle that many of these authors had. It was viewed as a cure for writers block, an escape from their own minds, and most importantly, as a tool to cure the emotional hardships that they endured. It is not a coincidence that the greatest writers and artists also had very troubled childhoods and adult lives. Look at Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Van Gogh; both were both severely troubled emotionally and depressed, and yet they still produced artistic and literary genius. So what is this connection between alcoholism and the great authors of the early 19th century? I will take an in-depth look at a few of the most influential alcoholic authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. I will look at factors that may have led them to their alcoholic habits, such as their childhood, troubled lives, or depression. From there, I will then look at how alcohol affected their works, positively or negatively. And as we all know, alcoholism was also…
While scarcely a sentence, Hemingway's work of Flash Fiction “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” is indeed a story. It contains the expected attributes of a story, neatly wrapped up in a super compact form. After showing said work has a beginning, middle, end, setting, an array of characters and conflict, it becomes hard to deny its place among other stories.…
In conclusion, in Hemingway’s the Sun Also Rises, it is clear that alcohol dependency is a main theme.…
Poe’s writing draws significantly from personal experience; in particular his writing about mental illness draws significantly from his own experience with bipolar disorder. Interestingly enough, many creative innovators like Poe also suffered from bipolar, including other writers such as Ernest Hemingway, musicians such as Chris Brown and Kurt Cobain, and mathematicians such as Ada Lovelace and Georg Cantor, who created the beauty that is modern set theory.…
The concept of a drastic shift in mood being classified as an illness was first described by the French psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Farlet in 1851 (Marmol, 2008). Farlet coined the term “Folie Circulaire” to label a disorder characterized by manic and sad episodes separated by symptom-free intervals (Marmol, 2008). As time passed, the description along with the classification changed, altering from an entity on its own to a unified disorder with other mood disorders (Marmol, 2008). As it stands today, bipolar disorder (BD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by cycling depressive and manic episodes (Federman, 2010). It also encompasses many other cognitive symptoms…
For instance, when Mr. Elliot tells his wife how he learned to kiss he said he “learned that way of kissing from hearing a fellow tell a story once” (Hemingway 86).…