Hemingway and Narrative

As a writer, as a human being, over the past few months, I have been retrogressing from a preoccupation with complication—images, foreshadowing, symbols, hidden themes in my writing—to a primarily narrative-concerned state of things. When I read a book, or when I write one, why can’t a red car just be a red car? What I mean is, we inject far too much into things; not that deep meanings or thematic notions aren’t there, but that so often we lose the bigger picture, and in my mind, the thing that matters only: relationships. I’ve noticed this change just quite recently; firstly, a friend noted a difference in music taste that I’ve been going through—from Counting Crows (who, don’t get me wrong, I still practically worship) to other bands, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, U2, to name a few. The more recent development, however, has been my taste in literature. I’ve discovered Hemingway.

 

All that matters is loving God, loving people, and being loved; syntactically, I see this simple truth most manifested in the simple prose of Hemingway, not the depth and complexities of Joyce’s or—I hate to say it—Faulkner’s writing. Though I do relish in the ability of a writer to manipulate the words on a page, I see what matters most (relationships, in my mind) more easily in simple forms of art, in the Hemingway novels and story songs.