Across The River and Into The Trees - Themes

Themes

Hemingway biographer and scholar Carlos Baker writes in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist that in Across the River and Into the Trees the overriding theme is that of "the three ages of man." Furthermore, Baker considers the writing of the book a necessity for Hemingway to objectify his war experiences. Jeffrey Meyers, author of Hemingway: A Biography, believes Hemingway saw Adriana as a representation of Venice, that she "connected" him to Italy, and that theirs was a type of father-daughter relationship which Hemingway romanticized. As she appears in the novel, Renata is physically the same as Adriana, and Baker presents the probability that Hemingway used Cantwell's fictional relationship with Renata as a substitute for his own relationship with Adriana.

Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented via a series of commonalities and differences. Death in Venice is set in the summer on the Lido; Hemingway places Cantwell in Venice in the winter. Mann's protagonist is a writer; Hemingway's a soldier. Both face death, and in the face of death seek solace in a much younger character. Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (the 18 year-old countess with whom he spends his final days) focuses on the present. According to Cantwell "Every day is a new and fine illusion" in which always lies a kernel of truth. Baker considers Cantwell as a character with opposing qualities: he is a tough soldier and he is a tender friend and lover. The two Cantwells are juxtaposed and at times overlap and bleed into one another. Moreover, Baker explains that Hemingway added yet another layer in which the 50-year-old Cantwell of 1950 is "in an intense state of awareness" of the young Cantwell of 1918: they are the same character yet different.

Charles Oliver, author of Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, writes that the novel shows a common Hemingway theme of "maintaining control over one's life, even in the face of terrible odds." Cantwell knows he is dying and faces death "with the dignity which he believes he has maintained throughout his military service." The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and Stoltzfus argues that in Hemingway's fictional characters achieve redemption at the moment of death if death is faced with authenticity which is a form of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre believed the to live well was accept death and to face death well is to live a heightened existence.

Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" For example he describes his experiences in the World War II battle of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest succinctly as "Passchendaele with tree bursts."

In "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life" Benson argues that critics must ignore finding connections between the author's life and fiction and instead focus on the manner in which biographical events are transformed into art. He believes the events in a writer's life might have only a "very tenuous relationship" to the fiction in the manner of a dream from which a drama emerges. Hemingway's later fiction, Benson writes "is like an adolescent day-dream in which he acts out infatuation and consumation, as in Across the River." Meyers agrees that parallels exist between Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, but he sees more similarities with Hemingway's friend of many decades "Chink" Dorman-Smith, whose military career was undermined resulting in his demotion.