English Essay On Ernest Hemingway

English essay

 

Hemingway

 

Rewrite

 

The Plight of the Code Hero in the Works of Ernest Hemingway         In his novels Ernest Hemingway suggests a code of behavior for his characters to follow: one that demands courage in difficult situations, strength in the face of adversity, and grace under pressure.  Termed the “code hero,” this character is driven by the principal ideals of honor, courage, and endurance in a life of stress, misfortune, and pain.  Despite the hero’s fight against life in this violent and disorderly world, he is rarely the victor.  The code that the hero follows demands that he act honorably in this uphill battle and find fulfillment by becoming a man and proving his worth.  Hemingway himself lived his life trying to show how strong and unlimited he was, a trait reflected in his novels as his heroes struggle through.  They are all martyrs to their cause, suffering but triumphantly ending their lives because they do not falter and show no weakness.  Destroyed, they are nevertheless winners because they do not give in.  “Success is that old ABC — ability, breaks, and courage” (Luckman n. pag.).                  Hemingway’s heroes succeed precisely because of these characteristics.  Hemingway’s heroes are not Marvel Heroes; they do not leap over tall buildings in a single bound, nor do they shoot spider webbing from their hands.  They traverse life and endure the pain dealt them, surviving with a moral and spiritual, but not material, victory.  They are not flat cardboard characters but real people who are heroes because they overcome a problem, not because they have a special ability.  The key trait that they have is the retention of their dignity.  The code heroes in The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls all suffer their share

 

 

of indignities and manage a moral victory.  Santiago, Jake Barnes, and Robert Jordan all endure suffering and defeat in what they do-accompanied by feelings of weakness and helplessness-but they prove themselves to be the strongest of the bunch, willing to muster the courage to accept their existence and to hold their chins up.               In the novella, The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is an unlucky fisherman who has not caught anything in 84 days.  Yet he sets out alone on the 85th day to try again.  For three days he struggles with a large marlin which he finally kills; but, despite his best efforts, he loses the fish to repeated shark attacks. Still, Santiago returns to his small fishing village with the skeleton of the fish.  He achieves a spiritual victory instead of  a material one, surviving the ordeal of battle, and arriving with proof of his struggle strapped to his boat-the skeleton of the fish.  Rather than a huge profit from such a large fish, he gains the admiration of the town for his valorous fight.  Violence and disorder prevail, but Santiago honorably defends his catch in the midst of what will be a losing battle. Oscar Wilde once said, “Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot.  In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you” (n. pag.).  Santiago finds fulfillment by proving his manhood and his worth to both the town and Manolin, a local boy who admires him greatly.                  Hemingway’s description of Santiago includes symbolism of Christ, a figure with a similar fate as that of the code hero.  He was both humiliated and executed by the Romans, but he proved his worth; we still hear about him 2000 years after his death.  Hemingway gives a reference to the nail-pierced hands of Christ by stating that Santiago’s “hands had deep creased scars” (45).  Hemingway also parallels Santiago’s suffering to that of Christ by stating that “he

 

 

settled…against the wood and took his suffering as it came” (125).  Even more profound is the description of Santiago’s response when he sees the sharks: “just a noise such a man might make, involuntarily feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood” (150).  When Santiago arrives home, he carries the mast across his shoulders as Christ carried the cross to Calvary.  Also, like Christ, Santiago can not bear the weight and collapses on the road.  When he finally reaches his cabin “he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up” (173).  As Jesus gains the admiration of men for his struggle, the old man earns the respect of the village and succeeds in teaching Manolin the lessons of faith and bravery through his virtual crucifixion.                  Not all of Hemingway’s heroes are tested in a battle as obvious and deadly as that with the sharks, and while such a battle is a definite mark of a true Hemingway hero, life itself often provides enough challenges.  In post-World War I Europe, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises takes part in the relentless partying and is a keen observer of the nonsensical sexual promiscuity of the time.  Jake tries, more than his friends, to understand what is good and of lasting value, which is honorable and courageous in his life of misfortune and pain.  His misfortune stems from a wound to his groin suffered on the Italian front during World War I.The wound is not specifically explained, but it is clear that this wound prevents him from having sexual relations, though he still has desires.  He and his girlfriend Brett both become frustrated that they can not make love while in love.  He constantly wrestles with his desire for Brett and his frustration at his inability to gratify her sexually.  Unable to keep the woman he loves, Jake finds himself standing on the sidelines, watching her have affairs with his friends.  In an effort to satisfy her, he finds her another man, a

 

 

bullfighter named Pedro Romero.  While Jake feels her sexual antics are wrong, he maintains his high level of self-discipline and suppresses all emotional expression.                  Jake is an archetypal tough-guy hero, a man who doesn’t show his feelings.  He loves to hunt and fish, and he is proud.  He is a cynical, clear-sighted realist, but is also soft at the center.  He holds his feelings in, except when he falls apart at night from the strain of being impotent.  He curses the wound that makes him less than a man and curses Brett for tempting him.  He even curses the Catholic Church, in which he once believed, because it can no longer help him.  Finally, in tears, and with a nightlight burning to ward off the dark, he falls asleep.                  Despite Jake’s failure to maintain a relationship, he looks beyond this.  He has courage and the gift of friendship without love, faith or purpose, which are all lacking in the post-World War I European world.  And in the end he wins, because he maintains his dignity in a world that fails to show faith or purpose.  Since he lacks both as well, he meets the standards of his life.  He demonstrates that he can and does make it through life despite his setbacks, and he maintains his image as it appears to others.  Albert Einstein said, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value” (n. pag.)  Jake becomes a man of value, in friendship and dignity.  Through the ordeal of impotence, he maintains his dignity by not showing weakness to others, though impotence is a secret few men relish.                  Another code hero in The Sun Also Rises is Pedro Romero, the bullfighter.  He is something of a Superman who succeeds where others fail.  Through his bullfighting he symbolizes tradition and faith in a devastated world.  Pedro dominates the bulls while in the ring and does so with style and little arrogance, but Pedro’s grace under pressure also extends beyond the life-

 

 

threatening confines of the bullring and into his personal life.  When Robert Cohn (who has had a brief affair with Brett) repeatedly attacks him for being intimate with her, Pedro continues to rise and face the former boxer after each devastating blow until Cohn lies weeping and apologetic at his feet.  Here Pedro does not falter.  He holds his own and succeeds though physically battered.  In the end he performs the final bullfight of the fiesta perfectly in spite of his aching and painful body:  “The fight with Cohn had not touched his spirit but his face had been smashed and his body hurt.  He was wiping all that out now” (Sun 219).  His dignity, his strength in the face of adversity, and his success despite his shortcomings all mark him as a Hemingway code hero.                  Pedro is a purer example of the code hero than Jake, because he holds true to the ideas of unfaltering strength in the face of adversity.  But what he does not do is face the real world.  We do not know if the real world will hit him and destroy his heroics (for example: if he gets together with Brett, she might corrupt him), and we do not find out.  Jake Barnes has the outline of a hero, but he is weak, impotent, and a party to the corruption of Pedro.  Hemingway shows Pedro as a pure, uncorrupted man surviving adversity-a “perfect” code hero.  Jake is filled with the problems of the real world, riddled with anxieties, ultimately unsure of himself and his manhood, and unable to hold to his masculine archetype.  He is the hero corrupted by the realities of life.                  In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls Robert Jordan deviates from Heminway’s other code heroes.  Jordan is an American who leaves his home in order to fight for democracy with the Spanish Republicans against the fascist armies during the Spanish Civil War.  He is sent to blow up a bridge so that the approaching fascists will lose a valuable supply line.  Like other Hemingway heroes, he seems to understand that dying well can be even more important than living

 

 

well.  But unlike other Hemingway heroes, Jordan fights for something of personal importance rather than just living life.  Jordan appears to be the confident leader of the militia group, and he commands well, but he is unsure of his own mind.  He begins to question and reevaluate the very ideals that brought him to Spain.  During the mission he falls in love with a local woman, Maria, and they become affectionate.  With his newfound love, he doubts the success and necessity of the mission, and swaying and wavering, he experiences alternating moments of painful honesty and self-deception.  Jordan feels caught between new values emerging in his life and the duty to which he has committed himself.  At the conclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, dedication to an ideology is not as important to Jordan as it was at the beginning.  He changes from a believer in abstract ideas to a believer in the importance of the individual person, but despite his doubts, he continues to pursue his goal of blowing the bridge and winning a victory against the fascists.  “Hemingway had an intimate understanding of the fight against the monsters of the outside world; those who chase them most often in the real world know of how unkillable the monsters within are” -McConnell.                  In the last scene of the book, Jordan is blown off his horse by the shell of a tank, and falls to the ground, his leg minced and mangled.  He tells the others in the group to leave him behind with a submachine gun so that he can inflict as much damage as possible upon the approaching army, and Maria is dragged away kicking and screaming.  Jordan condemns himself to die, knowing full well that there is no chance of survival and that he has hurt the one he loves.  The pain in his leg tears at his mind, and he begins to lose consciousness.  He realizes that if he blacks out, the soldiers will revive him and torture him for information.  In his mind he weighs suicide

 

 

and sacrificing himself.  He realizes how cowardly it would be to commit suicide, and thinks “you can do nothing for yourself, but perhaps you can do something for another” (Bell 505).  Eventually he decides that, in Cosma Shalizi’s words, “‘Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than ’tis to gain honor by taking them” (n. pag.), and Jordan acts this out.  He dies on the pine needle floor of the forest while stalling the enemy army so that they can not capture his companions.              Despite his second thoughts and the “weak” and hindering emotion of love, Jordan manages to carry out his duty of blowing the bridge.  He also saves the lives of Maria and the others in the group through his own sacrifice.  He faced the weakness of a torn mind and a torn body, and though he died, “They never fail who die in a great cause” (Byron n. pag.).  Like a true code hero, he faces the ravages of life and the perils of his experience, and ends honorably despite losing everything.  He battles the monsters of doubt, fear, and weakness, and he wins.              Hemingway’s heroes err in the true nature of being human, and through their journeys they may end up worse off materially and psychologically.  But their success comes with their handling of that error: as long as they maintain poise, show no weakness, and lose no dignity, they win.  They lose their fish, their girlfriends, and even their lives, “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” (Hemingway n. pag.).  Victory today seems difficult.  In a battle between two forces, one wins and the other loses.  But in Hemingway’s world, the loser wins a different battle.  The loser has the courage to face the onslaught, going headfirst into a sea of trouble, and fights hard to keep his head above water.  The material winner may have all the goods and the women, but the psychological winner has the knowledge that he has struggled hard, fought a good battle, done the right thing, and retained his dignity.     Works Cited  Einstein, Albert. “Quotations Organized by Topic,” (18 May 1999).  Hemingway, Ernest.  For Whom the Bell Tolls.  USA: Scribners, 1940.  The Old Man and the Sea.  USA: Scribners, 1952.  “Quotations Organized by Topic,” (18 May 1999).  The Sun Also Rises.  USA: Scribners, 1926.  Lord Byron. “Quotations Organized by Topic,” (18 May 1999).  Luckman, Charles. “Quotations Organized by Topic,” (18 May 1999).  McConnell, Frank.  The Modern Novel in America, Regnery, revised edition,1963, pg. 814.  Rpt. In World Literature Criticism.   Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  “Oscar Wilde.” http://www.cp-tel.net/miller/BilLee/quotes/Wilde.html (18 May 1999).  Shalizi, Cosma. “For Whom the Bell Tolls,”   (1 May 1999).