Briefly discuss Ernest Hemingway's art of fiction: his writing style and his attitude towards life in his works respectively known as "iceberg" and "grace under pressure."
A. Typical of the “iceberg” analogy is Hemingway’s style. He thinks good literary writing should make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down every particular feeling without any authorial comments, without emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.
B. His style is polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative.
C. He develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are well presented and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.
D. Hemingway deals with a limited range of characters in similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as “grace under pleasure,” an attitude towards life that he had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway Code heroes.
E. In the general situation of his novels, man is always fighting a losing battle. It is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.
