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.
Read more about this topic: Up In Michigan
Famous quotes containing the words point of, point and/or view:
“How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death: O, how may I
Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The point is that nationalism, even in its latest madhouse frenzies under Mussolini and Hitler, is still, like advertising, an arm of big business. Nations as we know them today, were the invention of business and it is natural that business should still consider itself slightly above patriotism and that the strongest international should still be the international of profits.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“My tendency to nervousness in my younger days, in view of the fact of a number of near relatives on both my father’s and mother’s side of the house having become insane, gave some serious uneasiness. I made up my mind to overcome it.... In the cross-examination of witnesses before a crowded court-house ... I soon found I could control myself even in the worst of testing cases. Finally, in battle.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)