Old School

by

Tobias Wolff

Ernest Hemingway Character Analysis

Real-life author Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) is the narrator’s favorite writer. Hemingway is known for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls; the narrator also loves his short story collection In Our Time. The narrator is particularly affected by Hemingway’s understated writing style; his vulnerable but hardened characters; and the themes of loss, war, and death that underscore much of his work. The narrator and his classmates also believe that Hemingway was friends with Dean Makepeace during World War I, though the final chapter of the novel reveals that this is false. Hemingway is meant to be the third of the three visiting writers at the narrator’s school over the course of the year, and he chooses the narrator’s plagiarized story “Summer Dance” as the winner of one of the school’s literary contests. However, Hemingway never ends up visiting the school: he is too sick to travel, and he kills himself soon after.

Ernest Hemingway Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Ernest Hemingway or refer to Ernest Hemingway. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1: Class Picture Quotes

I’m not exaggerating the importance to us of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers, I read about writers. I knew that Maupassant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcomed by other writers. [...] I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5: Slice of Life Quotes

I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Dean Makepeace, Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: The Forked Tongue Quotes

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman , Ruth Levine
Page Number: 125-126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: When in Disgrace with Fortune Quotes

A steady line of wilted-looking passengers jostled past me into the carriage. Time to make a move. I pushed through to a forward-facing window seat, claimed it with my overnighter—my gladstone—took out In Our Time, and made my way to the smoking car.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Mr. Ramsey
Related Symbols: Cigarettes
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: One for the Books Quotes

Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Master Quotes

Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.

I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace (speaker), The Narrator, Ernest Hemingway, The Headmaster
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:
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Ernest Hemingway Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Ernest Hemingway or refer to Ernest Hemingway. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1: Class Picture Quotes

I’m not exaggerating the importance to us of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers, I read about writers. I knew that Maupassant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcomed by other writers. [...] I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5: Slice of Life Quotes

I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Dean Makepeace, Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: The Forked Tongue Quotes

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman , Ruth Levine
Page Number: 125-126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: When in Disgrace with Fortune Quotes

A steady line of wilted-looking passengers jostled past me into the carriage. Time to make a move. I pushed through to a forward-facing window seat, claimed it with my overnighter—my gladstone—took out In Our Time, and made my way to the smoking car.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Mr. Ramsey
Related Symbols: Cigarettes
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: One for the Books Quotes

Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Master Quotes

Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.

I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.

Related Characters: Dean Makepeace (speaker), The Narrator, Ernest Hemingway, The Headmaster
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis: