Hemming the Way

Some people give so much detail to their stories, you feel like you know way too much about them. Ernest Hemingway is one of those people for he is always painting the picture down to the ugliest wrinkle on someone’s face so that the reader can get a glimpse of what life was like for him in his novel. He is very particular in describing people’s faces; whether they looked warm and pretty, or were just unbearable to look at it. He has no shame in admitting he judges people very harshly for their looks, yet supports his initial judgments with more background on the particular character. For instance, when he first meets Fitzgerald he describes him in detail, “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty,”(Hemingway 153). Hemingway does not say whether Scott was particularly ugly or handsome, more in between. This judgment coincides with his relationship with Scott for it is very strange full of moments of complete disgust and other moments of being best friends.

Hemingway focuses on the seasons of the year, for his feelings and life go along with the weather. He has harder, poor and starving times in the winter yet is very hardworking and happy in the spring. Specifically in A Moveable Feast, each chapter does not necessarily go in order; more show important stages in his life and how he evolved as a writer and a person. The season of winter itself is what he considers to end his time in Paris, and therefore end the novel. Thus, the work is very much an example of form following content; the content is misplaced and incoherent, so the novel is set up following seasons of his emotions and specific people who impacted Hemingway’s life.

AP Lang centers on the words and tone an author uses and how they change one’s argument on a subject. Hemingway’s works seem, from a distance, to be just detailed stories of people forming relationships and drinking, but when analyzed from an AP Lang viewpoint, we can reveal how his specific word choices and straightforward tone really reveal another layer to the novel. We can understand his raw emotions, and how the confusing format of the book shows Hemingway’s evolution as a writer through his different experiences and friends he met along the way.

The novel fits under the genre of autobiography for Hemingway portrays events that according to him really happened and show how he grew. His novel reads more like a journal than a book, for it is a combination of mixed events and people that is hard to follow yet all were important to Hemingway at some point.

Work Cited

Hemingway, Ernest.  A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.