Across The River and Into The Trees - Writing Style and Genre

Writing Style and Genre

Hemingway began as a writer of short stories, and as Baker explains, he learned 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 style is known as the Iceberg Theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight. The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission." Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface. Baker calls Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism. According to Meyers an example of omission is that Renata, like other heroines in Hemingway's fiction, suffers a major "shock"—the murder of her father and the subsequent loss of her home—to which Hemingway alludes only briefly. Hemingway's pared down narrative forces the reader to solve connections. As Stoltzfus remarks: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."

Hemingway constructed Across the River and into the Trees to allow time to be compressed in the novel such that "memory and space-time coalesce." For example, to move Cantwell into the extended flashback Hemingway uses the word "boy" to bridge time-present with time-past. Stoltzfus points out Hemingway kept the dialogue in the present tense, despite the time-shifts, and to "reinforce the illusion" he repeatedly used the word "now".