In the following excerpt, from an essay that was origingally published in 1989, Strychacz discusses the ways in which Hemingway's characters enact masculine identity and explores the meanings and difficulties of masculinity in In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises.

In the following essay, Brogan investigates the genre and aesthetics of In Our Time.

In the attempt to get at the "truth" of real-life experience and to attain the ideal of writing a "classic" that he initially posed for himself, Hemingway began in his early volumes of short stories to describe the adventures of a boy on the threshold of manhood. As Philip Young and Carlos Baker have pointed out in their studies, half of the stories of In Our Time (1925), the first short story collection, are devoted to the development of Nick Adams. They are arranged chronologic...

Very probably [Hemingway] intended [the title of In Our Time] as a sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase from the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer: "Give peace in our time, O Lord." At any rate the most striking thing about the volume is that there is no peace at all in the stories. The next most striking thing about them … is that half of the stories are devoted to the spotty but careful development of a crucial but long-ignored character—a boy, then a young m...

There are, as criticism has come slowly to recognize, not one but two Hemingway heroes; or, to use Philip Young's designations, the "Nick-Adams-hero" and the "code-hero." The generic Nick Adams character, who lives through the course of Hemingway's fiction, appears first as the shocked invisible "voice" of the miniatures of in our time; he grows up through Hemingway's three volumes of short stories and at least four of his novels, sometimes chan...

In Our Time incorporates [the Nick Adams stories in a broad] … unity of form and theme and in a complexity of structure well worth exploring. Reading the book for these qualities yields unexpected and exciting dividends, for it reveals that In Our Time is indeed a consciously unified work built on a noble model and containing the careful artistry and the central vision of the world and the human condition which characterize Hemingway's writing from beginning to end. As such, In Our Time is not...

In the following essay, Bordinat focuses on passages from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time to define two types of battle narrative: "actual," in which a soldier's real terror is disclosed, and "acceptable," in which the facts of war are recorded without reference to individual response.

In the following essay, Cohen contrasts the treatment of a central female character in an unpublished draft entitled “Exodus” against its published version within In Our Time.

Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time was an odd and original book. It had the appearance of a miscellany of stories and fragments; but actually the parts hung together and produced a definite effect. There were two distinct series of pieces which alternated with one another: one a set of brief and brutal sketches of police shootings, bullfight crises, hangings of criminals, and incidents of the war; and the other a set of short stories dealing in its principal sequence with the growing-up of an American bo...

Hemingway's short stories [in In Our Time] belong with cubist painting, Le Sacre du Printemps, and other recent work bringing a feeling of positive forces through primitive modern idiom. The use of the direct, crude, rudimentary forms of the simple and primitive classes and their situations, of the stuffs, textures and rhythms of the mechanical and industrial worlds, has enabled this new American story teller, as it enabled the group to which he comes a fresh recruit, to achieve peculiarly sharp, dec...

[In Our Time] does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man's life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent. (The "mottoes" in front seem a little affected.) And these few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need know no more. Nick is a type one meets in the more wild and woolly regions of the United States. He is the remains of the lone trapper and cowboy. Nowadays he is educated, and through...