In Our Time (book) - Themes and Style

Themes and Style

According to Hemingway scholar Wendolyn Tetlow the vignettes, interchapters and short stories published as different permutations of "In Our Time" are united thematically. In August 1923, after the publication of first six and the finalization of the next 12, Hemingway described them in a letter to Pound: "When they are read together, they all hook up....The bulls start, then reappear, then finish off. The war starts clear and noble just like it did...gets close and blurred and finished with the feller who goes home and gets clap." He went on to tell Pound, "it has form all right".

The first interchapter was written as a single paragraph and first published in The Little Review. Reflective of the style of the finished work, it is tightly compressed showing Hemingway's utilization of Pound's imagist theories, and in its detachment, echoes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The small paragraph shows Hemingway, as Pound had done in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, treating WWI with bitterness. Moreover, Hemingway took Pound's advice and used words sparingly—achieving the spareness of style for which he was to become famous.

Hemingway biographer James Mellow believes In Our Time to be Hemingway's most experimental book in that it transcends a mere collection of stories, and that it presents a "narrative form in which seemingly disconnected episodes and events made up a chronicle of events". He believes that in this, Hemingway's first published book, he established the primary themes to which he returned during his career as an author. The stories in the book establish themes such as initiation rites and early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life, and the importance of male comradeship. The in our time vignettes, or interchapters, concern war, bullfighting and crime—all topics Hemingway returned to in his later work. Mellow believes the invention of Nick Adams was "vital to Hemingway's career". From the first story, "Indian Camp", which introduces Adams as a young boy, the character is a doppelgänger, a conduit through whom Hemingway expresses his own experiences. The second story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", considered by Mellow as one of Hemingway's major stories, is important because through Nick, Hemingway regales his childhood experiences with his parents.

"The Big-Two Hearted River", a two-part story, finishes the collection. It was designed and written to be the concluding and climatic piece of In Our Time. In describing the piece to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway wrote he was "trying to do the country with Cézanne." Nothing much happens in the story—nothing much is meant to happen. The surface details mask the deep inner turmoil Nick Adams feels after returning from the war; the sojourn on the river is to function as a place of tranquility and rehabilitation for him.