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INTRODUCTION

Existentialism is a term applied to a group of attitudes current in philosophical, religious,

artistic thought during and after World War II, which emphasizes existence rather than essence. It
focuses on the condition of human existence, and an individual‘s emotions, actions, responsibility
and thoughts, or the meaning or purpose of life. Existential philosophers often focus more on what
they believe is subjective, such as beliefs and religion, or human states, feeling and emotions, such
as opposed to analyzing objective knowledge, language or science.
Existentialism is a philosophy that began to emerge in the early eighteen hundreds. It is
actually a philosophical stance that emerged out of the attempt to find meaning in life without
acknowledging the existence of God. While there is no single existentialist position, there are
certain themes that define the philosophy. The writings of existentialists tend to focus on the topics
of existence, change, freedom and self-awareness. The primary doctrine that ties them all together
is that everything is subjective and that ―being‖ is prior to ―doing‖.
In its modern expression, existentialism had its beginnings in the writings of the 19th
century Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. He is regarded as the Father of Existentialism. He
maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for
living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions
including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation and boredom.
The term ―existentialism‖ seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel
Marcel in the mid 1940s and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945 discussed his
own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenance in Paris. The lecture was published
and did much to popularize existentialist thought. The label has been applied retrospectively to
other philosophers for whom existence and, in particular human existence were key philosophical
topics. Due to the exposure of existentialist themes over the decades, when society was officially
introduced to existentialism, the term became quite popular almost immediately.
Soren Kierkegaard and Freidrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers who focused
on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science,
which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Two
of the first literary authors important to existentialism were the Czech Franz Kafka and the
Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky. Kafka created surreal and alienated characters who struggle with
hopelessness and absurdity, notably in his most famous novella, and in his master novel, The
Trial. Dostoevsky finds the same ―tremendous cry of hope‖ expressed by religious existentialists
such as Kierkegaard and Shestov.
In the early 20th century, all those pre-existential reflections were formulated into a system
by another German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The main point in the Heideggarian system is
the question of being. To that question Heidegger answers that time is the truth of the being. To put
more clearly, man is a being who exists in time, a temporal being who is perpetually a presence.
His interpretation of the time as horizon of any comprehension of the being has opened the door to
the doctrine of existentialism in 1927. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger influenced other
existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvior and Albert Camus. They
also described existentialist themes in their literary works. In the first decades of the twentieth
century a number of philosophers and writers had explored existentialist ideas. Spanish philosopher
Unamuno brought this philosophy in his novels, poetry and dramas. Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov
and Nikolai became well-known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in
Pairs.
In German, the Psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers described existentialism as a
Phantom created by the public, called his own thought, heavily
influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzscle. For Jaspers ―Existenz‖-philosophy is the way of thought
by means of which man seeks to become himself. This way of thought does not cognize objects,
but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker.
Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant
philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers,
Jean-Paul and Albert Camus, who wrote best- selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as
well as theoretical texts. 2
Simonde de Beauvior, an import existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre‘s
partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works. Frantz fanon, a Martiniquan
born Critic of colonialism, has been considered an import existentialist. Paul Tillich applied
existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped to introduce existential theology to the
general public. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard‘s and Heidegger‘s philosophy of existence to
demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau an existential phenomenologist was a companion of Sartre for a time. His works
greatly influenced Sartre.
At the end of the Second World War, the term ―existentialism‖ has mostly been
associated with a cultural movement that grew out of the wartime intellectual atmosphere of the
left Bank in Paris and spread through fiction and art as much as philosophy. The theoretical and
other writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvior, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon in the
1940s and 1950s are usually taken as central to this movement, as are the sculptures of Alberto
Giacometti, the paintings of Jean Dubuffet and the plays of Samuel Backett from this time.
Existentialism is frequently viewed, therefore, as an aesthetic movement rooted in certain
philosophical thoughts and supplanting surrealism at the centre of European artistic fashion.
The term has also been applied retrospectively to various thinkers whose concerns and
ideas chime with this movement. Most notably, the nineteenth- century philosophy Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche are usually taken to be the early existentialist. One a devout Christian, the other an
ardent atheist, these thinkers are united by their emphasis on the individual rather than society as a
centre of concern and value. Some scholars find existentialist themes and ideas in the works of
William Shakespeare, for example, and many Christian theologians have argued for an
existentialist understanding of certain passages in the New Testament.
Central themes of existential thought therefore include the reliability of everyday views of
oneself and other people and the relation between objective facts and subjective experience. It also
signifies of the temporality and mortality of life the basic nature of relationships between people
and the role of society in the structure of the individual. This central theme makes clear that
existential thought is not another brand on the philosophical tree along with metaphysics,
epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and politics, but rather a lens through which these topics can be
viewed. The nature of reality and the limits of knowledge are important, according to this approach
and they enlighten about the structure of our own existence.
Existentialism, as Sartre defies it, is an ethical theory. It is a form of humanism, which
means that it takes humanity as the central ethical value. But it is distinguished from other forms of
humanism in the way it understands humanity.
The ethical aims should not be to increase the numbers, lengthen the lives, satisfy the desires and
preferences, or improve on the achievements. The relation between existentialism and existential
philosophy therefore justifies the similarity of the two terms; existentialism seeks the flourishing
of the human individual, where this is understood as the unfettered realization of the most
fundamental nature of human beings.
Existentialism therefore has much in common with the ethical theory propounded by
Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Both see the aim of ethics as promoting human flourishing
and both understand this as required that the underlying nature of human existence. Aristotle
argues that human beings are essentially national animals, so sees flourishing in terms of the food
exercise of the rational faculties, and understands ethical virtue as the set of dispositions
manifested. This is the central inspiration for the tradition that has become known as virtue ethical,
according to which the centre of the ethical concern should not be the intentions with which
individual actions are performed or the consequences of those actions but rather the character traits
that human beings possess and that are manifested in our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and
action.
The deepest roots of the perceptions, thoughts and feelings, therefore are neither fixed
facts about us due to our genetic inheritance or early childhood nor the mechanical effects of our
material and social environment, but rather the goals that we choose to pursue and can choose to
abandon. Sartre allies this teleological understanding of character with an indeterminist theory of
freedom. Freedom is radical in the sense that it is freedom over the deepest roots of our behavior
and caused determinism is incompatible with this freedom. 3
Some philosophers think this would not really be freedom, since our initial goals would
come about without our control and then ultimately determine
whatever else we did. Others argue that it is rather Sartre‘s indeterminist picture that leaves our
fates beyond our control, by leaving entirely to chance whether or not we continue to pursue a
given project a any given moment. This is just an application of the general debate over the
compatibility of freedom and determinism. Sartrean existentialism, the paradigmatic form of
existentialism, is the ethical theory that we ought to recognise that our values are rooted in the
projects we freely pursue and so promote the freedom to pursue their projects.
Fanon mixes philosophical reflection, literary criticism, political polemic and poetry to
address issues of identify and interaction with the goal of liberating us all from the constrain,
distorting, oppressive influences of colonialism and racism. Fanon, is not however, simply
applying Sartrean philosophy. His work draws on a wide range of other sources, including
psychoanalytical work on the unconscious that Sartre considered to be based on a confused and
somewhat arbitrary understanding of human motivation and behaviour. Fanon criticizes Sartre‘s
discussion of encounters between people for failing to take account of the backdrop of prejudices
and power relations against which they occur, moreover, and sees his own encounter with Sartre‘s
work.
The example of Fanon‘s writings should make clear that problems can be generated by
classifying a thinker as an existentialist. The existentialists are concerned with the problem of
meaning. Human beings crave meaning.
Existentialism is the philosophy that makes an authentically human life possible in meaningless
absurd world. But existentialism isn‘t the study of everything that
exists; it‘s the study of existence itself. It‘s also the study of what it means for something, as
opposed to nothing, to exist at all. Existentialism is rooted in a naturalistic worldview and is,
therefore atheistic. Interestingly, however, there is a secular version and a religious version too.
Of the variations of existentialism, the secular variety is the largest. It has no religious
orientation in any sense. This group includes such people as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and
Jean-Paul Sartre. It‘s major themes include the following:
Being – Being is identified as concern, existence and moods. The human being‘s essence
lies in his Existence. An individual is free to choose different kinds of ―being‖ for himself.
Angst – Angst refers to anxiety, dread, hopelessness and fear of the future. It is the dread
that comes from an individual‘s realization that his very existence faces an undetermined future.
The emptiness that comes from that sense of
hopelessness must be filled by the individual‘s freely chosen actions.

Death – There is no existence before or after death. The person, who recognizes this
fact, freely accepts the inevitability of death and seeks nothing beyond this life.

Absurdity – Life is absurd. If life is to have any meaning at all, the individual must
create that meaning for himself.
Freedom – There is no outside entity or authority to define man. He must define himself
and has absolute freedom to do so.
Fulfillment – Man makes his own fulfillment. He can create whatever he likes, and in so
doing will determine for himself what is fulfilling.
Forlornness – This is a state that people find themselves in when they understand that
they are alone and must determine their own being.
Experience is the basis of understanding – Existentialist philosophy arises from
―existential‖ experience that which is based on observable or experimental evidence. This
experience is unique to each person. Existence is the most important thing to try and understand-
While it is the most important thing to understand, it is often quite difficult to grasp what is meant
by the word existence. Essentially it is understood to be that which consciously exists. In their
definition of the term, man is alone faces his situations and understands from experience.
Existence precedes essence – A thing must be aware of itself in order to exist in the way
that Existentialist speaks of it. Man is pure subjectivity and he is not part of a transcendent life
process-There is no transcendent being who gives 4
meaning to man‘s existence. Man creates meaning on his own by living life and by personally
interpreting his own subjective life experience. There is an inter- dependence between man and his
world- an individual is incomplete in and of himself. Man‘s nature ties him absolutely to the world
and to other people.
Intellectual knowledge is of low value-All existentialists deny the distinction between subject and
object. Because of that, intellectual knowledge is seen to have little value. True knowledge is not
achieved by the intellect, but through subjectively experiencing reality.
The term ―existentialism‖ ceases to distinguish one writer or group of writers from another.
Existentialism can appear in a number of different forms. Because it is not a single school of
philosophy, existentialist ideas and perspectives can become integrated into any number of other
philosophical schools, ideologies, and even religions. Sometimes this existentialist trend is self-
conscious and deliberate; other times it is simply an expression of common human questions and
problems. Existentialist plays, novels, and other works are popular even among people who don‘t
realize they are existentialist and have no idea about the existentialist philosophy behind them. This
was intentional by the existentialist authors because they wanted to reach a wide audience, not just
scholars and academic philosophers but lay men also. Works aimed at the former are typically
heavy and philosophically complex, while works aimed at the latter are plays or novels. This is
how, existentialist thought came into Literature and Art.
American literature at first was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were
Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of fortune, is credited with
initiating American literature. His chief books included A True Relation of … Virginia … (1608)
and The generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Daniel Denton‘s
Brief Description of New York (1670), William Penn‘s Brief Account of the Province of
Pennsylvania (1682), and Thomas Ashe‘s Carolina (1682) were only a few of many works praising
America as a land of economic promise.
The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies, treatises, accounts of
voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a
widespread prejudice against these forms. All 17th- century American writings were in the manner
of British writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic literature,
Bradford echoed the cadences of the King James Bible, while the Mathers and Roger Williams
wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne Bradstreet‘s poetic style derived from a long line
of British poets, including Spenser and Sidney, while Taylor was in the tradition of such
Metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne.
Both the content and form of the literature of this first century in America were thus markedly
English.
In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather,
Jonathan Edwards, initiator of the Great Awakening, carried on the older traditions. But Mather
and Edwards were defending a doomed cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise
and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes
in his amusing Diary, covering the years 1673–1729. Though sincerely religious, he showed in
daily records how commercial life in New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly
attitudes.
The twist of the American Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing
between American and British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that
rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to find the new nation‘s government,
they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers, such as Samuel Adams and
John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph Galloway. But two
figures loomed above these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
A different group of authors, however, became leaders in the new period— Thomas
Jefferson and the talented writers of The Federalist papers, a series of eighty five essays published
in 1787. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Poetry became
a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals. The most
memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems are
Revolutionary War satires, which served as effective propaganda.
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In the years toward the close of the 18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical
importance were produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first
American comedy presented professionally was Royall Tyler‘s Contrast (1787). William Hill
Brown wrote the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed authors how
to overcome ancient prejudices against this form by following the sentimental novel form invented
by Samuel Richardson. A flood of sentimental novels followed to the end of the 19th century. Hugh
Henry Brackenridge succeeded Cervantes‘s Don Quixote and Henry Fielding with some popular
success in Modern Chivalry (1792–1815)
After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers
were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very
respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper,
and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half-century of literary development.
Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John
Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. The authors who began to come to prominence
in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War—the humorists, the classic New
Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—did their work in a new spirit, and their
achievements were of a new sort. Particularly full of vivid touches were the writings of two groups
of American humorists whose works appeared between 1830 and 1867. One group created several
down-east Yankee characters who used commonsense arguments to comment upon the political
and social scene. The most important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell Lowell, and
Benjamin P. Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and character of New England at that time as
no one else had done. In the old Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus
Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George
Washington Harris drew lively pictures of the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in the
common man that was a part of Jacksonian democracy.
Concord, Massachusetts, a village not far from Cambridge, was the home of leaders of
another important New England group. The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a
theological system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th century had replaced Calvinism as the
faith of a large share of the New Englanders. Ralph Waldo Emerson, most famous of the Concord
philosophers, started as a Unitarian minister but found even that liberal doctrine too confining for
his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist who, like other ancient and modern Platonists,
trusted to insights transcending logic and experience for revelations of the deepest truths. Henry
David Thoreau, was closer to the earthy and the practical than even Emerson was. Associated with
these two major figures were such minor Transcendentalists as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley,
Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very. Fuller edited The Dial, the chief
Transcendental magazine, and was important in the feminist movement.
A worldwide movement for change that exploded in the revolutions of 1848 naturally
attracted numerous Americans. Reform was in the air, particularly in New England. At times
even Brahmins and Transcendentalists took part.
William Lloyd Garrison, ascetic and fanatical, was a moving spirit in the fight against slavery.
The greatest writer associated with the movement—was John Greenleaf Whittier.
History also figured in tales and romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New
England fictionist of the period. Another great American fiction writer, for a time a neighbour and
associate of Hawthorne, was Herman Melville. An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan, Walt
Whitman saw less of the dark side of life than Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian
democracy. Inspired by the Transcendental philosophy of Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the
first edition of Leaves of Grass.
The Civil War was a turning point in U.S. history and a beginning of new ways of living.
The rise of modern America was accompanied, naturally, by important mutations in literature. A
group of comic writers that rose were Charles Farrar Browne, David Ross Locke, Charles Henry
Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw, and Edgar Wilson Nye wrote, respectively, as Artemus Ward,
Petroleum V. (for Vesuvius) Nasby, Bill Arp, Josh Billings, and Bill Nye. Thousands of
Americans in their time and some in later times found these authors vastly amusing. Samuel
Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was allied with literary comedians and local colourists.
Despite his flaws, he was one of America‘s greatest writers. He was a very funny man.
Other American writers toward the close of the 19th century moved toward naturalism, 6 a
more advanced stage of realism. Hamlin Garland‘s writings exemplified some aspects of this
development when he made short stories and novels. Other American authors of the same period or
slightly later were avowed followers of French naturalists led by Émile Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for
instance, treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier realists and, like other Naturalists,
illustrated his own beliefs by his depictions of characters and unfolding of plots.
An excellent short-story writer, James nevertheless was chiefly important for novels in
which his doctrines found concrete embodiment. Outstanding were The American (1877), The
Portrait of a Lady (1881),were international novels dealing with the psychological processes of his
characters. Writers of many types of works contributed to a great body of literature that flourished
between the Civil War and 1914—literature of social revolt. Two poets embodied criticisms in
songs. Edwin Markham‘s ―Man with the Hoe‖ (1899) was a protest against the exploitation of
labour and William Vaughn Moody‘s ―Ode in Time of Hesitation‖ denounced growing U.S.
imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles.
The later 19th century and early years of the 20th century were a poor period for American
poetry; yet (in addition to William Vaughn Moody) two poets of distinction wrote songs that
survived long after scores of minor poets had been forgotten. One was Southern-born Sidney
Lanier, a talented musician and the other poet was a New Englander, Emily Dickinson. A shy,
playful, odd personality, she allowed practically none of her writings to be published during her
lifetime.
Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years
before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint
upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama,
poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments.
Eugene O‘Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement.
He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His
dramas were remarkable for their range. No other dramatist was as generally praised as O‘Neill,
but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including
Maxwell Anderson, Marc Connelly, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder and William Saroyan.
At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social
spectrum to encompass both high and low life and sometimes connected to the naturalist school of
realism. Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In
1909, Gertrude Stein (1874– 1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an
innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in
contemporary art and music. Stein labeled a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris
in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Lost Generation".

In 1920 critics noticed that a new school of fiction had risen to prominence with the success
of books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s This Side of Paradise and Sinclair Lewis‘s Main Street,
fictions that tended to be frankly psychological or modern in their unsparing portrayals of
contemporary life. Novels of the 1920s were often not only lyrical and personal but also, in the
despairing mood that followed World War I, apt to express the pervasive disillusionment of the
postwar generation. Novels of the 1930s inclined toward radical social criticism in response to the
miseries of the Great Depression, though some of the best, by writers such as Fitzgerald, William
Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Nathanael West, continued to explore the Modernist vein of the
previous decade.
Three authors whose writings captured the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the
1920‘s were Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Hemingway‘s early short
stories and his first novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), were full of
the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates. The Spanish Civil War, however,
led him to espouse the possibility of collective action to solve social problems, and his less-
effective novels, including To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),
embodied this new belief. He regained some of his form in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and
his posthumously published memoir of Paris between the wars, A Moveable Feast (1964).
Hemingway‘s writing was influenced by his background in journalism and by the spare manner and
flat sentence rhythms of Gertrude Stein, his Paris friend and a pioneer Modernist, especially7 in such
works of hers as Three Lives (1909). His own great impact on other writers came from his
deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and from his tough but
vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World
War II generation.
Ernest Hemingway saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War
I, and the carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut
out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on
concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized grace under pressure,
and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1953, he won the Nobel
Prize in Literature
Ernest Hemingway is a legendary figure of America, had his affiliations with the writers of
the Lost Generation. The bravado of his characters, the stirring exoticism of his settings, and his
much admired spare, bold writing style, established his fame. His canon is filled with themes of
war, disillusionment, futility, despair and the inevitability of death. His heroes are usually tragic
ones; his exotic settings often host scenes of violence and brutality, and his spare writing style is
often notable for the anguish it leaves unexpressed.
Hemingway, though an adventurer, risk-taker, and world traveler, is also a philosopher
deeply influenced by currents of existential post-world war I thinking. As such, he is an unofficial
spokesperson for his ―Lost generation‖, a group of American expatriates who came of that age
during the Great War and subsequently suffered profound intellectual disillusionment and
dislocation because of war traumas. Though Hemingway, with characteristic bravado, dismissed
the term ―lost generation‖ as an overstatement, many of his fictional characters are forced to search
for meaning, purpose and happiness in the midst of depression and futility, the classic existential
quest of the lost directionless individual.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of
Chicago. His father Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall-
Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well-educated and well-respected in the conservative
community of Oak Park. Hemingway
mirrored his mother‘s energy and enthusiasm. She insisted him to learn and play the cello
became a ―source of conflict‖ but he later admitted the music lessons were useful in his writing,
as in the ―Contrapuntal structure‖ of For Whom The Bell Tolls. He attended Oak Park and River
forest High School from 1913 until
1917 where he took Part in a number of sports-boxing, track and field, water polo, and football-had
good grades in English classes, and performed well in school Orchestra. In his junior year, he took
a journalism class, which was structured, as though the classroom was a newspaper office. The
better writers in class submitted pieces to the Trapeze, the school newspaper. Hemingway‘s first
piece, published in January 1916, was about a local performance by the Chicago symphony
Orchestra. He continued to contribute to The Trapeze. Thus he was a journalist before becoming a
novelist.
Hemingway graduated from Oak Park schools and worked six months as cub reporter for
the Kansas City star. He was enlisted in 1917 as a Red Cross ambulance driver for service in
World War I, since he saw insufficient action in northern Italy he requested a transfer to the
Eastern front by Fossalta Di Piave. There, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday, while he was
distributing cigarettes and chocolates in a listening post, he and three Italians were struck by an
Austrian trench mortar shell. Two of the Italians were immediately killed.
Hemingway had some 227 shell fragments removed from his legs, along with two machine gun
bullets, probably acquired while he was being carried to an aid station. His active service of some
five weeks over, he was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with an American
Red Cross nurse, who later jilted him, the romance forms the core of his A Farewell to Arms
(1929).
At not yet 20 years old, the war had created in him a maturity at odds with living at home
without a job and the need for recuperation. That summer he spent time in Michigan with high
school friends, fishing and camping; and in September he spent a week in the back-country. The
trip became the inspiration for his short story Big Tow-Hearted River in which the semi- 8
autobiographical character Nick Adams takes to the country to find solitude after returning from
war. He worked in Toronto star as a freelancer, staff writer and foreign correspondent.
In Chicago he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal cooperative
commonwealth. Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra pound
who could help a young writer up the rungs of a career. Since his first visit to see the bullfighting
at the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona Hemingway was fascinated by the sport. He saw in it
the brutality of war juxtaposed against a cruel beauty. The trip inspired Hemingway‘s first novel,
The Sun Also Rises. It epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, received good reviews and
is recognized as Hemingway‘s greatest work.
Upon his return to Key West in December, Heming way worked on the draft of A Farewell
to Arms. In1933 Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa. The 10-week trip provided
material for Green Hills of Africa, as well as the short stories ―The snows of Kilimanjaro‖ and ―The
short Happy Life of Francis Macomber‖. Gellhorn inspired him to write his most famous novel,
For Whom The Bell Tolls, which he started in March 1939, finished in July 1940, and was
published in October 1940. This became a book-of-month choice, sold half a
million copies within months was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1948 Hemingway traveled to
Europe. In Italy he returned to the site of his World War I accident, and shortly afterwards began
work on Across the River and into the Trees, which he continued through 1949. It was published
in 1950. The next year he wrote the draft of Old Man and the sea in eight weeks, considering it
―the best I can write ever for all of my life‖ (TOEAL-vol 2 204). The Old Man and the Sea became
a book of the month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer
Prize in May 1952. In October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The same year that he had been in two plane crashes in Africa on two successive days.
His health deteriorated in late 1950s possibly from a depressive disorder and mental instability
inherited from his father. Shock treatments at the Mayo clinic did little good, and Hemingway
committed suicide nineteen days before his 62nd birthday thirty-three years after his father had.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) occupies a prominent place in the annals of American
Literary history by virtue of his revolutionary role in the arena of twentieth century American
fiction. By rendering a realistic portrayal of the inter- war period with its disillusionment and
disintegration of old values, Hemingway has presented the predicament of the modern man in a
world which increasingly seeks to reduce him to a mechanism, a mere thing. Written in a simple
but unconventional style, with the problems of war, violence and death as their themes, his novels
present a symbolic interpretation of life.
Although Hemingway's larger-than-life presence—both in life and after his dramatic
suicide in 1961—has often threatened to overshadow his work, it is generally agreed that
Hemingway is, in James Nagel's words, ―one of the finest prose stylists in English,‖ an author
whose work ―gave rise to the minimalist
movement in American fiction, to the work of Raymond Carver and Susan Minot,‖ (TCLC-vol 115
147) as well as many others, including Richard Ford. The presenter of the 1954 Nobel Prize in
literature said:
With masterly skill [Hemingway] reproduces all the nuances of the spoken word, as
well as those pauses in which thought stands still and the nervous mechanism is
thrown out of gear. It may sometimes sound like small talk, but it is not trivial when
one gets to know his method. He prefers to leave the work of psychological
reflection to his readers and this freedom is of great benefit to him in spontaneous
observation. (MpAL 169)
In his book, Genius, Harold Bloom pronounced Hemingway a ―minor novelist with a
major style‖ (Genius, 37); in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short
Story, Peter Mascuch called him ―one of the great innovators of twentieth-century form.‖ (123)
At the Hemingway Centennial celebration at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, essayist
Joan Didion declared,
This was a writer who had in his time made the English language new, changed the
rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would speak and
write and think. (TCLC vol 203 118)
At the same conference, poet Derek Walcott called the best of 9

Hemingway's prose ―(TCLC vol 203, 120) an achievement superior to anything in poetry.‖ In a
centennial article by Steve Paul, a journalist with the Kansas City Star (where Hemingway was a
cub reporter from 1917-1918), author Russell Banks praised ―the sheer beauty of [Hemingway's]
sentences.‖ (TCLC vol 203, 120)
Charles Johnson told Paul, ―I think it is impossible not to work in Hemingway's shadow, either as
an imitator of his approach to prose writing or in strong reaction against it.‖ (TCLC vol 203, 121)
In a keynote address at the Seventh International Hemingway Conference, Terry Tempest
Williams stated: ―Hemingway has been a powerful mentor, in terms of what it means to create a
landscape impressionistically on the page, to make it come alive, pulse, breathe, to ‗make the
country so that you could walk into it.‘ (TCLC vol 203, 122). Novelist E. Annie Proulx, who
confesses she is not a fan, nevertheless called Hemingway's work ―important‖:
It cast a shadow over nearly forty years of American literary history and set
countless imitators a-scribbling, liberated writers from nineteenth-century sentence
styles as tightly packed and convoluted as intestines in a hog. (TCLC vol 203, 122).
Although recognized primarily as a stylist and innovator of form, Hemingway also embraced a
distinctly modern, existentialist worldview that influenced twentieth- century literature
Existentialism, the philosophical system that influenced Hemingway‘s writing and that of
many of his expatriate colleagues, came into vogue following World War I. The best-known
example of Hemingway‘s existentialist philosophy is his novels and his short stories explore
many themes relevant to his particular brand of existentialist. A clean, well-Lighted place
describes the depressed thoughts of a middle-aged Spanish waiter who believes that life is
meaningless, and that though one may try to impose meaning and order on one‘s own existence
by inhabiting a ―clean, well-lighted place‖, this endeavor, is ultimately futile as death inevitably
overtakes us all.
In ―The capital of the world‖, Hemingway describes the tragic accidental death of a young
Spanish waiter aspiring to be a matador. His hero Paco, ―died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of
illusions. He had not time to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of
contrition‖ (MpAL, 546). Paco, in contrast
to many of the ―second-rate‖ bullfighters who inhabit the hotel where he works, believes in the
romance and the honor of bullfighting. It is better for Paco, Hemingway implies, that he died
trying to accomplish his dream of becoming a matador rather than eventually rotting away as a
disillusioned bullfighter in a town full of disillusionment.
Hemingway‘s existential themes also appear in his African stories. In ―The snows of
Kilimanjaro‖ one of Hemingway‘s best known stories, dying writer Harry realizes too late that he
has failed to fulfill his potential as a writer, choosing instead to make his living by marrying a rich
woman. He has neglected to live by his own self-imposed value system, and he suffers all the
anguish of a failed existential hero who knows death is upon him. In ―‖The short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber‖, the title character is a cowardly, henpecked husband whose wife openly
insults him by sleeping with the couple‘s guide white on safari in Africa. Macomber is sorely in
need of something to give his life purpose and to allow him to reclaim his masculinity, he finds it
in the act of hunting buffalo on the plains. Just as his confidence begins to return, Macomber is
killed, cutting short a promising existentially authentic career.
Hemingway also explores existential themes through his semi- autobiographical hero Nick
Adams, who appeared in a number of Hemingway stories. In ―The killers‖ Nick risks his life to
warn Ole Anderson, a former prize fighter with a shady past, that hit men are after him. Anderson
displays a remarkable lack of alarm at the news, choosing to go about his business just as it nothing
had happened, though this means he will inevitably be assassinated. This type of fatalistic heroism
or heroism or heroic fatalism is a favorite theme of Hemingway. It is a major theme of
existentialists where the protagonist realizes the essential meaninglessness of life and the futility of
fleeing death. His final
existential act is to face his fate with dignity. Taken in Hemingway‘s terms, such death is not
necessarily a defeat, on the contrary, it is a display of one‘s courage in the face of a brutal, chaotic
world.
Another story in which this fatalistic heroism makes an appearance is, ―Old Man at 10 the
Bridge‖, a story that began as a 1937 news dispatch from the Spanish Civil War. A seventy six year
old man, who has just been forced to give up his
life‘s work, was looking after a number of animals in drifting aimlessly along with a stream of
refugees. He is existentially empty and directionless, without family and without destination. He
had to leave the animals he looked after behind in his hometown because of artillery, fire and his
life is consequently without purpose.
He sits by the side of the road, too tired to walk a short distance to escape the coming onslaught of
fascist forces. His attempt to get up and walk to safety ends in failure. Instead of panicking or
begging passerby for help, he remains stoically, fatalistically sitting by the bridge in an arguably
heroic acceptance of his inevitable death.
Hemingway was a major figure to a number of generations. It was nearly impossible to
write in the same way. Ford Madox Ford, a fine stylist himself, wrote that ―Hemingway‘s words
strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each
in its place.‖ (TCLC vol 203, 190)
He influenced a great number of writers to one degree or another in the middle of the 20th
century and beyond, including James M. Cain, James T. Farrell, John O‘Hara, William Saroyan,
Horace McCoy, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, Irwin Shaw, Norman
Mailer, James Jones, Ralph Ellison, J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford
and others, in English.
He also had a significant impact, for better or worse, on existentialist writers in France,
including Albert Camus in particular and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the later practitioners
of the French ―new novel.‖ German writer Heinrich Boll is considered to have been influenced
by Hemingway.
His writing was immensely popular in the Soviet Union, where more than a million copies
of his books appeared. Yevgeny Yevtushenko paid him poetic tribute and the critic Ivan Kashkin,
considered the leading Soviet expert on his writing and with whom Hemingway corresponded,
explained his attraction for younger writers:
The fact that he can look at life without blinking; that his manner is all his own;
that he is ruthlessly exacting on himself, making no allowances, and
straightforward in self-appraisal; that his hero keeps himself in check, and is ever
ready to fight nature, danger, fear, even death, and is prepared to join other people
at the
most perilous moments in their struggle for a common cause. (TCLC vol
115, 196)
Hemingway remains best known for his three most important novels, The Sun Also Rises
(1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), as well as numerous
short stories and nonfiction works on a host of subjects, including bullfighting in Spain and big-
game hunting in Africa. In his fiction and nonfiction he wrote about the two world wars and the
Spanish Civil War.
One of the most persistent existentialistic themes of the twenties was the death of love in
World War I. All the major writers recorded it, often in piecemeal fashion, as part of the larger
postwar scene; but only Hemingway seems to have caught it whole and delivered it in lasting
fictional form. His intellectual grasp of the theme might account for this. Where D.H. Lawrence
settles for the shock of war on the Phallic Consciousness, or where Eliot presents assorted glimpse
of sterility, Hemingway seems to design an extensive parable. Thus, in The Sun Also Rises, his
protagonists are deliberately shaped as allegorical figures: Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are two
lovers desexed by the war; Robert Cohn is the false knight who challenges their despair; while
Romero, the stalwart bullfighter, personifies the good life which will survive their failure. Of
course, these characters are not abstractions in the text; they are realized through the most concrete
style in American fiction, and their larger meaning is implied only by their response to immediate
situations. But the implications are there, the parable is at work in every scene, and its presence
lends unity and depth to the whole novel.
Barnes himself is a fine example of this technique. Cut off from love by a shell wound, he
seems to suffer from an undeserved misfortune. But as most readers agree, his condition
represents a peculiar form of emotional impotence. It does not involve distaste for the flesh,11as
with Lawrence‘s crippled veteran,
12
Clifford Chatterley; instead Barnes lacks the power to control love‘s strength and durability. His
sexual wound, the result of an unpreventable ―accident‖ in the war, points to another realm where
accidents can always happen and where Barnes is equally powerless to prevent them. In Book II of
the novel he makes this same comparison while describing one of the dinners at Pamplona: ―It was
like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a
feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.‖ (SAR. 63)
This fear of emotional consequences is the key to Barnes‘s condition. Like so many
Hemingway heroes, he has no way to handle subjective complications, and his wound is a token
for this kind of impotence. Thus, as Barnes presents them, they pass before us like a parade of
sexual cripples, and we are able to measure them against his own forebearance in the face of a
common existing problem. Whoever bears his sickness well is akin to Barnes; whoever adopts
false postures, or willfully hurts others, falls short of his example. This is the organizing principle
in Book I, this alignment of characters by their stoic qualities. But, stoic or not, they are all
incapable of love, and in their sober moments they seem to know it.
All the characters have been damaged in some fundamental way by the war—physically,
morally, psychologically, or economically—and their aimless existence can be traced back to it.
The people in The Sun Also Rises fervently want meaning and fulfillment, but they lack the ability
and means to find it. These are the existentialistic views of Hemingway.
A Farewell To Arms (1929) is narrated by Frederic Henry in the first person but sometimes
switches to the second person during his more philosophical reflections. Henry relates only what he
sees and does and only what he could have learned of other characters from his experiences with
them Hemingway‘s apparent attitude toward the story is identical to that of the narrator as it is the
autobiographical work. The main themes are the grim reality of war, the relationship between love
and pain, feelings of loss and death.
The protagonist, Frederic Henry, in Ernest Hemingway‘s A Farewell To Arms undergoes a
self-awakening into the ideas of existentialism. In the beginning of the novel, Henry is a drifter
unconsciously searching for a meaning in life. As Henry is slowly discovering the trivialities and
horrors of life, he becomes
―authentic,‖ which means discovering the existential idea that life has no meaning and learning to
deal with it.
As the title of the novel makes clear, A Farewell To Arms concerns itself primarily with
war, namely the process by which Frederic Henry removes himself from it and leaves it behind.
The few characters in the novel who actually support the effort—Ettore Moretti and Gino—come
across as a dull braggart and a naïve youth, respectively. The majority of the characters remain
ambivalent about the war, resentful of the terrible destruction it causes, doubtful of the glory it
supposedly brings.
From the beginning of the novel, nearly every character has a habit to which he or she
turns to help alleviate his or her private suffering. Mourning the death of her fiancé, Catherine
plays a distracting game of seduction with Henry. Rinaldi loses himself in the comforts of women,
while the priest uses his faith in God to ease the pain of the war and the ruthless taunting of the
soldiers. Nearly all the characters rely heavily on alcohol to numb the daily assaults of the war,
both physical and emotional.
The most appealing of all of these comforts is love, which Hemingway explores for its
power to endow characters with a sense of security. Upon meeting, Henry and Catherine imitate
conventional courtship, speaking words that seem stolen from a scripted romance. They engage in
such behavior, they admit, in order to take their minds off the war. As their love grows stronger and
more legitimate, they continue to treat it as a protective shelter: Henry abandons the army and ends
up living in the supposed safety of neutral Switzerland.
In the end, however, nothing offers lasting protection. Rinaldi, Henry suspects, has
succumbed to syphilis, reflecting the degenerate nature of Rinaldi‘s values. The priest‘s
philosophies regarding God are outdone by Henry‘s belief in the hollowness of lofty abstractions.
Catherine, despite her all-consuming love, dies in childbirth. The novel suggests that no matter
where characters turn for solace from the harsh circumstances of the world, the need for comfort
and protection can never be fulfilled.
13
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) takes place during the Spanish Civil War, which ravaged
the country throughout the late 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was involved
in the production of two Loyalist propaganda documentary films. Later in the conflict, he served
as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. For Whom the Bell Tolls
expresses
Hemingway‘s strong feelings about the war, both a critique of the Republicans‘

leadership and a lament over the Fascists‘ destruction of the earthy way of life of the Spanish
peasantry. The novel is set in the spring of 1937, at a time when the war had come to a standstill, a
month after German troops razed the Spanish town of Guernica. At this point, the Republicans still
held out some hope for victory and were planning a new offensive. For Whom the Bell Tolls
explores themes of wartime individuality, the effects of war on its combatants, and the military
bureaucracy‘s impersonal indifference to human life.
Ernest Hemingway wrote about independent people who lead rugged lives and resist
conforming to society's expectations of what a good citizen should be. The protagonists in his
novels, like the author himself, resist authority by drinking too much, fighting too much, traveling
a lot, and taking many risks. Hemingway's fiction—which challenges tradition and authority—
reflects an existentialist point of view. This may be true in describing Hemingway and the
protagonists of his early novels; Jordan in the beginning of the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1940) is the quintessential rugged individualist, he later falls in love with a woman and merges his
identity with hers, becoming someone stronger than before. Through Jordan, Hemingway shows
how it is possible to retain one's individuality while acquiring a new, stronger identity through love
of others. This attitude towards the power of love to absorb and transform people in positive ways
sets Jordan apart from earlier protagonists in Hemingway's fiction and sets Hemingway apart from
much secular existentialist thought, as reflected in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The heroes in Hemingway's novels follow a pattern of development, beginning with Jake
Barnes and Frederic Henry, who reflect secular existentialist values. Later, when Robert Jordan
appears in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway introduces readers to a very different
character, someone who departs greatly from important values often associated with secular
existentialism.
As this introduction suggests, the character Robert Jordan does not resemble the
protagonists Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry of Hemingway's two previous novels. It explores in
greater depth how secular existentialism, as presented by Jean-Paul Sartre, helps to explain the
actions and motivations of Barnes and Henry, but not Jordan. It explores the uniqueness of Jordan,
using sound models of responsibility presented by the Christian existentialist philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard and social psychologist Erich Fromm, pointing out how Fromm's theory best captures
the essence of Jordan's character. It reflects a lasting change in Hemingway's values, present in
Jordan. Jordan's life is in contrast to the lives of Barnes and Henry, both of whom appear mired in
Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage of moral development. Nonetheless, Jordan—because of his rejection
of God—does not ascend to Kierkegaard's final stage, the religious stage. Jordan lives within his
own worldly, ethical system.
It is one that he, not God, controls. Although Jordan represents many of Kierkegaard's
moral values, he does not trace his value system to a divine source. The social theories of social
psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm provide a helpful perspective for interpreting the
uniqueness of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The title is a constant reminder to the reader that death, and the impact of death, is the
central theme of this novel. The phrase ―for whom the bell tolls‖ is borrowed from the
seventeenth-century British poet and religious writer John Donne. From John Donne‘s
Meditation XVII, Hemingway excerpts a portion of
the essay in the epigraph to his novel. ―Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.‖ (2)
―For whom does the bell toll?‖ is the imaginary question of a man who hears a funeral bell
and asks about the person who has died. Donne‘s answer to this question is that, because none
stands alone in the world, each human death affects all alike. Every funeral bell, therefore, ―tolls
for thee.‖ The third paragraph of Donne‘s meditation, begins with the equally well known line, ―No
man is an
island,‖ signifying the second theme that Hemingway draws upon in his novel: human beings 14
cannot act alone.
Hemingway's choice of John Donne`s poem as the source of the novel's title and epigraph
emphasizes a major theme of For Whom the Bell Tolls: "No man is an island," that is, no person
can exist separate from the lives of others, even others living in far-away countries. The theme is
demonstrated most clearly by the actions of Robert Jordan. Throughout his participation in the
Spanish Civil War, he has fought actively for a cause- not the cause of communism, as he says, but
the cause of antifascism. As the novel progresses, his involvement with the guerrilla band, and
particularly his love for Maria, teach him the value of the individual as he or she affects a larger
society. The abstractions of an ideology are lifeless without the people they represent; concepts
have no meaning except for the ways in which they affect human beings.
For Jordan, Maria represents human love, the first he has ever known. It is for her that he
stays behind to allow the rest of the band to escape, demonstrating his realization that others
depend on him as he has depended on them. His decision not to commit suicide at the end of the
novel represents his ultimate understanding that he must fight for the people whose lives are
affected by the cause, not purely for the cause as a generalized ideology. Both Pablo and Pilar
represent minor variations of the theme of interdependency. Pablo is full of greedy self-interest
now that he owns horses. His decision to betray the guerrilla band is due to his need to survive and
thrive. At the last minute, however, he seems to understand how his actions will affect those whom
he once led, and he returns to help them.
Pilar, on the other hand, is almost blindly devoted to the cause. She will do whatever it takes to win
for the Republic. Yet she, too, comes to understand the severe toll the guerrillas' mission is likely
to take, and for the first time she expresses doubt about the cause that prompted the demolition.
Apart from the relationship of individual and society, death is another theme. The main
topic of the novel is death and violence as effected by war. Though it is a story of war, it is also the
tale of the sudden but passionate love between an American volunteer and a Spanish girl brought
together for three (and a half) days by a military operation. Each is unprepared for and
overwhelmed by the "earth-shaking" experience of romantic love between two people, which
neither has ever felt before. Their experience gives to each a new reason for living – the other
person – and suggests that the aloneness of the individual can be lost in total union with another.
Yet from the beginning it is clear to each that their love may have no future. Hemingway writes
about several kinds of love in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The most important theme which is the integral part of Hemingway‘s novel is heroism,
especially code-heroism. To be a hero, Hemingway believes that a man must display grace under
pressure. Most of his characters put themselves into dangerous situations and then act with
remarkable bravery in the face of danger.
Finally, there are other existentialistic themes ranging from the power of superstition and
divination as in Pilar, suicide as in Jordon‘s father, the Spanish War and its tragedy and
hypocrisy and theme of solidarity as in Robert Jordon. Jordan laid down his life for a cause but
the irony of the situation is that he couldn‘t make a total commitment to his ―cause‖ for the
Fascists to be killed are, also human beings. ―No man is an island‖. Thus the novel takes a pure
ironical stand in the situation of Spanish War.
These novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls are
populated by men who are, in Hemingway's words, ―hurt very badly; in the body, mind, and
spirit, and also morally.‖ (EAL, 510) These novels are a
tremendous success, not only among Hemingway‘s friends but also with everyone who
experienced the moral and spiritual vacuum that existed in Europe after the war. According to
Philip Young, the ―Hemingway code‖—exemplified by Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises,
Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), and the
fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea (1952)—involves qualities of stoicism, courage,
honor, endurance, and self-control. In his interview with the Kansas City Star, Banks described the
Hemingway hero as a ―sort of existential hero‖ who reflects the
―romantic alienation that [Hemingway himself] seemed to be emblematic of and that he
manifested in his style as well.‖ (AWC –vol 1, 327)
Critics have also remarked upon the psychological effects of violence depicted in
Hemingway's novels and short fiction, which is ever-present in his descriptions of war, 15
bullfighting, big-game hunting, and surviving in the wilderness. Hemingway's fiction is at its
strongest in its portraits of male characters struggling to define their identities and find honor in a
chaotic world. The protagonists in the beginning of the novels, searches for a meaning in life and
slowly towards the end discovers the existential idea that life has no meaning.
They learn the absurdity of life and also the hopelessness of the lost generation. Both stylistically
and thematically, major themes of existentialism such as aimless wondering, absurdity, death,
struggle and dissatisfaction, existence preceding essence, angst and alienation can be traced in his
novels. These major themes are the essence of mankind he faces in his day to-day life and they are
dealt in sociological, biological and psychological aspects by applying the existentialistic
philosophy in this thesis.
The present study entitled ―A Study of Existentialism in the Select Works of Ernest
Hemingway‖ is based on these three novels. The chapter one
―Introduction‖ is an account of the basic elements of existentialism. It highlights the definition of
the term, historical evolution and the existential principles. It tells about the author, main themes
in his works and how his works reflect existentialistic philosophy by expressing the sufferings of
mankind.
The second chapter entitled ―The Lost Generation‖ makes an attempt to analyze the
existentialism in Hemingway‘s select novels. The existentialistic theme, which expresses the
feelings and emotions of the characters are analyzed sociologically, physiologically and
psychologically.
The third chapter entitled ―Alienation and Absurdity of Life‖ is an endeavour to give an
analysis of the existentialistic themes. The characters feeling of loneliness and meaninglessness of
life are analyzed in this chapter. One of the most profound themes of literature is the isolation of
self. Separation and alienation from society can be as encapsulating as the physical remoteness of
one trapped on an island. Psychological isolation is one of the most prominent and complex themes
in literature. Often, there is no escape, or at least no complete escape. This is one of the major
themes of the existentialists.
The fourth chapter under the title ―The Impact of War‖ makes an attempt to analyze the
traumatic war experiences of the protagonists to establish the existentialistic themes. The years
immediately following World War I was characterized by anger, discontent, and disillusionment.
Society had been devastated by a global conflict that resulted in unprecedented death, destruction
and resentment. This existentialistic theme is studied threadbare in this chapter.
The concluding the fifth chapter deals with the assessment of Hemingway‘s existentialism.
This chapter recapitulates the important points and issues discussed in the previous chapter briefly.
It sums up all the themes chapter-wise. It also gives suggestions for further studies.