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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Hemingway’s writing style in “In Another Country” is minimalist and unadorned, as seen in his consistent use of simple, descriptive sentences throughout the story. The story is told from the first-person perspective of a soldier recently wounded in war, yet Hemingway chooses not to include lengthy flashbacks to battle scenes or sections dedicated to the narrator’s inner experience. Instead, he focuses his attention on the mundane details of the soldier’s life as he goes to and from the hospital for physical therapy.
All of these stylistic choices are intentional. By stripping emotion and rich figurative language from his diction, Hemingway communicates to readers how emotionally detached and dissociated the narrator is after being traumatized by the war. He is cut off from his feelings, so readers, likewise, are cut off from them.
Another stylistic choice Hemingway makes is to have the narrator “flash forward” at one point in the story, as seen in the following passage (when the narrator describes an Italian soldier he meets who lost his nose in war):
They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it any more.
Here, the narrator reveals, for the first time, that he is telling this story from many years in the future, after the Italian soldier has had facial surgery and moved to South America. The fact that the narrator is still thinking about this time in his life—and still reflecting on it in a disaffected and alienated manner—suggests that, even though it was “a long time ago,” the narrator is still feeling the effects of the war. Here Hemingway suggests that, while World War I may have ended soon after this story, in a sense “there was always a war” for this veteran, and for other veterans unable to heal from their many wounds.
Related Themes:
