Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote In Our Time in 1925, and its critical acclaim established him as a literary force. Critics currently argue over whether it should be considered a novel or merely a compilation of short stories and vignettes. In fact it has no defined genre, and ever since its publication, readers have had trouble coming to terms with its form. Still, many do see it as a novel, or as D.H. Lawrence called it, a “fragmentary novel,” and Hemingway maintained that the pattern and structure of the book is so tight that deleting or replacing even one word would ruin the unity. The overall meaning of the narrative is created by the positioning of each story and vignette in relationship to others, but these juxtapositions also create its confusing structure. Each concrete image is set against another without the benefit of any real transition. The final version of In Our Time originates from the publication of a collection of chapters titled In Our Time in 1924. These earlier sketches are interspersed between the chapters in the 1925 In Our Time edition.

The short vignettes are primarily concerned with war, crime, politics, and bullfighting, while the chapters are more personalized narratives. The chapters contain a constant thread of violence, but not nearly as prominently as in the vignettes, which also concern the characters' responses to violence. The chapters tend to concern themselves more with the problem of relationships, either romantic relationships between couples or family relationships--usually between father and son. Hemingway claims that he wrote the short vignettes of the 1924 edition in order to place them between the longer chapters of In Our Time, but many critics claim that at the time he wrote them in 1923 the idea for In Our Time (1925) was not yet conceived. The short vignettes are explosive in their explicit violence, while the chapters are softer and slower in their narration and imagery. By alternating the two forms he magnifies the impact of each, and