Big Two-Hearted River - Style - Iceberg Theory

Iceberg Theory

Hemingway was inspired by Pound's writings and applied the principals of imagism to his own work. Pound's example is considered highly influential in the formulation of the stripped-down style characteristic of Hemingway's early fiction. Hemingway said that Pound "taught more about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive". A second influence was Joyce, who instilled in him the idea of pared down work stripped to its bare essentials. The scholar Jackson Benson holds that the short stories written in the 1920s adhere to Pound's definition of imagism, and biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". The technique is called the iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

The iceberg theory has been described as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer could describe one object or concept while writing about something entirely different. In "Big Two-Hearted River" he examines Nick's mundane activities in depth, a device which deliberately masks the emotional turmoil below the surface. The story is filled with seemingly trivial detail: Nick catching grasshoppers, Nick making coffee, as well as the climactic event when he catches and loses a large trout—the excitement and tension of which is so strong that he has to take a break.

While the prose is full of densely compacted discriptions, the story has only the barest plot. Hemingway deliberately employs elaborate surface details to mask the deep inner turmoil of Nick's return home from war. Hemingway said of it, "'Big Two-Hearted River' is about a boy beat to the wide coming home from the war .... beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had been were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war is omitted." Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora believes that in "Big Two-Hearted River" the concept of the iceberg theory is more evident than in any other piece written by Hemingway.

According to Paul Smith, Hemingway was still experimenting stylistically by In Our Time. Smith believes the minimalist style of the piece came about not so much from tight editing as that Hemingway's sentences "began life as scrawny little things, and then grew to their proper size through a process of accretion." He avoided complicated syntax to reflect Nick's wish that the fishing trip be uncomplicated. An analysis of the text shows that about 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination—and that repetition is often substituted for subordinate thoughts. Furthermore, the repetition creates prose with a "rhythmic, ritualistic effect" that emphasizes important points. The length of the paragraphs varies with short paragraphs intensifying the action. Benson writes that in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway's prose was sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and that by employing simple sentences and diction—techniques he learned writing for newspapers—the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality.