Text Analysis

E. Hemingway. “A Very Short Story”

“A Very Short Story” is a story written by the American author and journalist Ernest
Hemingway. He was one of the representatives of “Lost Generation” writers. Ernest Hemingway was
famous for his laconic and simple way of the narration and avoiding of the complicated syntax. His
writing style is called the “iceberg principle” the main aim of which is to show only 1/3 of meaning
of what he wanted to say in the story and the other part the reader has to get to the meaning on his
own.
“A Very Short Story” is about the love affair between a soldier and a nurse named Luz in a
period of the World War I. They fall in love during the war, they shared good things, planed their
future together. However, one quarrel decided their destiny. After he went back home and she stayed
in Italy each of them moved forward. Luz opened a hospital in Italy and he stayed in Chicago.
This story belongs to the belles-lettres functional style, the main aim of which is to give the
reader aesthetic pleasure, to make them think and to entertain them by appealing to their emotions.
The author uses the language of everyday life and avoids the complex bookish words and phrases. It
is told in the third person from the viewpoint of an omniscient anonymous narrator. Dialogue is
absent and author’s narration is neutral.
The scene is laid in Italy and the USA, suggestive of which are such spatial markers as the
names of the Italian cities – Padua, Milan, Genoa, Pordonone, and Italian words – arditi, Duomo,
and the names of the American cities – New York, Chicago, and places of interest – Lincoln Park.
They are all direct spatial markers.
The duration of time in the story is approximately a year. The author mentioned four seasons:
“hot evening” indicates summer; phrase “after the armistice” shows that it was autumn – November
1918. Then there was “muddy, rainy town in the winter” and then spring when Luz “expected,
absolutely unexpectedly, to be married”. The prevailing tense of the story is Past Tense, but when the
characters speak about their plans the Future in the Past is used.
The author does not say which war is mentioned in the story, but it easy to understand that it
was WWI. Such words as battalion, major, searchlights, arditi – belong to the semantic group of
“the war”. With the help of these words author describes the time the events of the story took place.
Hemingway’s style is not abandoned in stylistic devices and certain language means are made use of
in the short story in order to convey the authors massage. There is a stylistic device of epithet (“she
was cool and fresh”, “silly, talky time”, “dim in the church”, “muddy, rainy town”) with the help of
which the author produces vivid description of the places and the characters. Such syntactical stylistic
devices as polysyndeton and parallel constructions (“They were all about the hospital, and how much
she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing
him at night.”) creates a monotonous rhythm of the narration and add up the idea of loneliness and
emotional suffering of the protagonist. The lexical repetition of words “good-bye”, “boy and girl
affair”, “boy and girl love” are used in the story two times in order to lay an extra emphasis on these
very notions and what they meant for the characters.
The attachment “It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends
or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married.” underlines the importance and the desire
of the protagonist to come back to normal peaceful life. The peculiar feature of the story is that
sentences are mostly short and simple, complex and compound ones are practically absent.
 There are some geographical names and the proper name of the female character Luz. This
proper name is a homophone of the verb “to lose” which can be considered one of the key words
together with the words “affair”, “good-bye” that explains us the authors massage. In Spanish Luz
means “the ray of light” and it can be considered as a symbol of hope, a ray of light in the tragic
soldiers life.
In this story author used such stylistic device as sustained irony. It is created by a number of
statements and can be seen in such phrases: “…she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married
in the spring.” but “The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time.” And in a final
sentence “A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store
while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.” that explains us how their relationship ends and
there is no hope for their future together.
The title is a stylistic device of a pun in which “story” means “a piece of writing” on the one
hand, and a “love affair” on the other. The title conveys the idea that such relationships without a
happy end are a normal, ordinary thing during the wartime. The indefinite article “a” in the title
suggests that this love story is one of many similar love stories during the war.
Within the help of such stylistic devices and expressive means the author massage is explained
to the reader, which is – the war affects not only the geographical map, but people’s lives and souls,
it ruins theirs future.