Anderson And Hemingways Use Of The First Person Essay
quot;It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. quot;At
one point in his short story, quot;Big Two Hearted River: Part II quot;, Hemingway s
character Nick speaks in the first person. Why he adopts, for one line only, the first
person voice is an interesting question, without an easy answer. Sherwood Anderson
does the same thing in the introduction to his work, Winesburg, Ohio. The first piece,
called quot;The Book of the Grotesque quot;, is told from the first person point of
view. But after this introduction, Anderson chooses not to allow the first person to
narrate the work. Anderson and Hemingway both wrote collections of short stories
told in the third person, and the intrusion of the first person... Show more content on
Helpwriting.net ...
Nick tries as hard as he can, but the fish snaps the line and escapes. Then, as Nick
thinks about the fate of the trout which got away, Hemingway writes, quot;He felt like
a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one.
By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of. quot; This sudden switch to first
person narration is startling to the reader. Until this point Hemingway had solely
used third person narration, but he did it so well that the reader feels as one with
Nick. It is not definite whether this is Nick or Hemingway speaking. It could easily
be either of the two.
Hemingway doesn t include, quot;he thought, quot; or, quot;he said to himself, quot;
and so it is unclear. The result is the same regardless. Using first person narration at
this point serves to make the story more alive, more personal. It jolts the reader into
realizing the humanity of Nick; he is no longer the object of a story but a real
person. If Nick is making so much stir over it that he speaks directly to the reader,
he must feel passionately about it. Or if Hemingway is so moved by the size of the
trout that he exclaims at its size, I can only accept that Nick also feels this excitement.
The sudden intrusion of the first person narrator makes the story more complete and
its only character more life like. It also brings the reader into the story as a listener.
Sherwood Anderson s collection of short stories, Winesburg,