The Hemingway Style in "The End of Something"

In The End of Something, I noticed the typical writing style of Hemingway much more than in the previous stories. I will tell you right now that I am no expert on Hemingway as I have only read The Sun Also Rises, but I could definitely see some similarities between this story’s structure and that of The Sun Also Rises.

The first attribute of Hemingway’s writing that I noticed was how he never outright states the character’s problem. Throughout The End of Something, we are given hints that Nick is not happy about something, and although at the end of the story we see it is because he is ending it with Marjorie, we are never really told why. The way that Hemingway manages to evade telling us why Nick is having issues with his now ex girlfriend is typical. He does the same thing in The Sun Also Rises with respect to a certain injury of Jake’s that is a huge part of the book. Since the reason Nick breaks up with Marjorie and Jake’s injury are so critical to the story, I expected that those facts would be stated at some point, but instead we are left to infer. The fact that we don’t know anything about the relationship is eluded in the name of the story The End of Something where the “something” is very vague. Typical Hemingway.

The second attribute is in the way that the dialogues are written. He makes them short, and keeping with the first attribute, they skirt away from telling us exactly what is going on. Another facet of the dialogues is that they are repetitive. An example of this is when Marjorie and Nick first start fighting:

       “I know it,” Marjorie said happily.

       “You know everything,” Nick said.

       “Oh, Nick, please cut it out! Please, please, don't be that way?”

       “I can’t help it,” Nick said. “You do. You know everything. That’s the trouble. You know you             do.”

       Marjorie did not say anything.

       “I’ve taught you everything. You know you do. What don’t you know, anyway?”

In this dialogue, we see the short sentences as well as the repetition. Nick says “You know you do” twice and all of his sentences have very similar messages. The end product of this type of dialogue is that we get limited information on what is happening.

From my limited experience with Hemingway, I have noticed a couple of trends in his writing and for some reason these trends were more prominent in The End of Something than in the other Hemingway stories we have read so far.

The Things They Carried and Attention to Detail

     In The Things They Carried, there is an interesting focus on certain atrocities rather than others. There a lot of different scenes that we read and find disturbing, such as the death of one of the platoon members when he stepped on a trap, but only a few scenes are focused on by O’Brian. The best example of a time that a lot of detail incorporated into the description of the atrocity was when Rat Killey brutally murdered the buffalo. This section is especially gory when you compare it to the amount of detail incorporated into the scene about the death of Rat’s Friend. The only description we are given is that he was shot, and there does not seem to be much more information.

     The interesting thing is why O’Brian chooses to give more information at some points rather than at others. Although I can never know for sure the real reason, I believe that the author is trying to represent war in a unique way. He focuses on telling stories that differ from the normal “hero based” way. We see this in how he generally talks about the time between battles rather than the battles. Back to the point, by showing the dark side of the war through unusual atrocities, O’Brian creates stories that do not glorify the war. 

      Examples of this is not only the buffalo story but also in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. In this story we are given an immense amount of detail on the hut of the Greenies and Marry Anne’s change. All of this information gives us the idea of a group of savages rather than the normal army life we are shown in other stories. This area is compared to what we are shown of the rest of the base, and in my opinion shows how O’Brian is trying to show the bad side of war. Overall, O’Brian masterfully uses his stories as well as the amount of detail in them to shed light on how war is not what other stories make it out to be.