Another story that deals with inner conflict is "Now I Lay Me." This story is completely internal and it becomes the narrator's way to keep from losing his mind as he fights insomnia. He is suffering from shell shock. The conflict is the narrator's inability to sleep as well as his fear that if he does sleep, his soul will leave him. He admits to having "different ways of occupying" (Hemingway 276) himself while he lies awake with the most amusing thing is remembering a trout stream he fished when he was a boy. On some nights, he makes up streams, some of which were "very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming" (277). His imagination is so vivid, he forgets which streams are real and which are made up. One the nights he cannot fish he says his prayers "over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known" (277). His reason for doing this was because if he prayed for everyone, "saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light" (277) and then he could go to sleep. Another way of dealing with the sleepless nights was remembering everything that ever happened to him before he went to war. He admits to not even being able to remember how to pray on some nights, however and trying something else to think about. He must keep his mind engaged in order to maintain control and not fall asleep. Margot Sempreora writes that the "imaginary waters of his insomniac search offer more fish than have been apparent on the first pass, and repetition of the familiar is a comfort to this narrator, whether of trout in streams or words in text" (Sempreora). Indeed, Nick seems to have found a way to help him find peace and quell the demons that fight for his mind. This conflict may be one of the most terrifying because there is no release from what is going on in the mind.
Hemingway knew how to write but the thing that made him a successful writer was his ability to connect with readers on a personal level. He knew how to get into the minds of his characters and make his readers feel as if they knew exactly what he was talking about. Hemingway never tried to talk down to his readers but instead, he wanted to talk to them and provide an escape...
Hemingway If literary genius can be described as one person's ability to influence the thinking of others and to do it only with written words, then Ernest Miller Hemingway was certainly deserving of the title. With his direct, declarative and streamlined style of writing, a style he first learned while writing as a newspaper journalist, Hemingway observed the world around him and the people in it, and then wrote of his
Naturalism in Literature Naturalism and realism was a literary movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s which focused on trying to recreate the real world in works of fiction. Many works from the period tried to reflect the attitudes and the psychology of their society through fictional characters. During this period, women were treated very poorly by male domination and were not allowed to have power outside of their homes.
The world would now be required to accept socialism, Leninism, and eventually Stalinism, as part of the European landscape. With the defeat of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire; the shift in the balance of power moved toward the only major participant not devastated on its own soil by war -- the United States. The U.S. grew in economic power after Versailles, assisting not only its former allies in rebuilding,
" (the Kenyon Review, pp. 285) Faulkner uses some common themes in most of his works including the aforementioned conflict. He frequently employed the literary devices of symbolism, foreshadowing, anti-narrative etc. To create desired atmosphere and to achieve maximum desired results. His style appears complex to many as Clifton Fadiman writes, "[Faulkner's method is] Anti-Narrative, a set of complex devices used to keep the story from being told... As if a
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