One could easily list the particular moments that Hemingway chooses to focus on in his short stories and nearly always they will be found to be moments of crisis, tension and passion. This is not to say that they are epiphanies in Joyce's sense, but rather that they deal with moments of pain, shock, strain, test, moments of emotional heightening of some kind. It may be an ageing courageous bull fighter facing and succumbing to his last bull, it may be a man listening to his wife say that she is leaving him to go off with a woman: the subject matter varies widely, the emotional pitch of the characters is almost uniformly high. And it is at such moments that the details of the encompassing world seem saturated with relevance in an unusually intense way. They do not become symbolic, it is a weakness in the later Hemingway that he pushes them too far in that direction: they can be full of mute menace (as rain, for instance, always is in his stories): but usually they function as the recipients of the characters' intense attention. The character's emotion and the surrounding concrete details interpermeate. In A Farewell to Arms there are at least three detailed accounts of meals, detailed to an extent which would be boring if they were simply meals taken by habit for sustenance. But they occur—immediately before the hero is bombed; while he and Catherine are enjoying a snatched few moments of ecstasy away from the war; and while he is waiting to hear the result of her fatal delivery. In the first case the vividness is retrospective: the moment frozen and etched in the memory before the shattering upheaval. In the other two cases the mundane minutiae are included because the intensity of the hero's emotions has so sharpened his sensory faculties that details are elevated from the mundane to the significant. It is as though anything he touches or smells or sees becomes a temporary reflector, even container, of his emotion. The scrupulous registration of details will give the most accurate morphology of the feeling…. What the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls ponders to himself is in some way relevant to [all Hemingway's major characters]: 'I know a few things now. I wonder if you only learn them now because you are over-sensitized because of the shortness of the time?' Most of Hemingway's characters (and a very large number of major characters in American fiction) exhibit this 'over-sensitization' in the face of the world. In Robert Jordan's own case it is the danger of his mission and the love of Maria that sensitize him, prompting his senses to an almost awed alertness and efficient clarity…. The book abounds in … brilliantly perceived particulars: it is because the sights, smells, sounds and tastes are recorded with such resonant accuracy that the book has such a rich surface texture. It is because it contains little more than that that it lacks any overarching structure. It is interesting to see how Hemingway tries to give his material an externally derived historical significance which the book in fact belies: 'that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn' argues Jordan to himself to invest his task with a sense of purpose. But Hemingway's and Hemingway's heroes' interest lies elsewhere. They are not interested in the capillary movements of history, in progress, in the slow erosions and rehabilitations of time, in the fall and survival of societies. They are committed to their own moment-by-moment experience and what Jordan says of his relationship with Maria could be said by all of them of their relationship with the world: he intends to 'make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and continuity'. And they would agree that if your senses are properly attuned and at work 'it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years'. And because of this belief in the great truth and value of the intense momentary sensory experience the Hemingway hero is committed to 'the now'. 'You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.' Such an attitude is at bottom indifferent (though not hostile) to the large palpable social historical stirrings around it…. And of course it is this elevation of intensity over continuity, the 'now' over history, and the evidence of the senses over the constructs of the mind that determines the whole point of view and strategy of Hemingway's prose and explains his essential preoccupation with what we might call the 'oversensitized hero'. (pp. 231-34)
Abstract concepts only have any meaning for Hemingway if they are translated into sensory particulars. Hemingway's prose is based, among other things, on a 'nausea of untruth' and for him the only verifiable truth is the evidence of the senses. Hence his prose is calculated to resist any tendency towards abstract words which somehow suggest that qualities and meanings have a super-personal life of their own, irrespective of individual incarnation and sensory recognition. Hemingway denies the Platonic idea of 'Courage'—but there is a certain smell to a brave man, an unmistakable odour to his actions which he will testify to and describe by comparing it to other natural sensations. This, of course, avoids any theoretic analysis of the quality, and it is this avoidance of analytic explanation which is one of the striking aspects of Hemingway's style. Meticulous description takes its place…. For Hemingway … description is definition. (pp. 234-35)
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