Point of View
Though there are two main characters, the point of view is almost entirely Liz's. Jim only speaks five sentences, and readers get only a few brief glimpses inside his head. Liz has fallen in love with the "things" of Jim—his mustache, his white teeth, his walk—but knows nothing about him as a person. Hemingway sympathetically explores her conflicting emotions. He understands the adolescent fantasies of this naive young woman, even as they lead to a brutal conclusion. Like many young women before and after her, she is surely disillusioned, but she will learn from her painful experience. Jim, on the other hand, will wake up and not remember a thing.
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Famous quotes containing the words point of view, point of, point and/or view:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.”
—Iain Sinclair (b. 1943)
“When we are in love, the sentiment is too great to be contained whole within us; it radiates out to our beloved, finds in her a surface which stops it, forces it to return to its point of departure, and it is this rebound of our own tenderness which we call the other’s affection and which charms us more than when it first went out because we do not see that it comes from us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)