Points of View

On occasion, as in Chapter V, in the memoir about the cabinet ministers who were shot standing against the wall of a hospital, the point of view is unknown, and in fact in this case, Hemingway was not present at this event but wrote about it a few months after it actually happened using two newspaper reports as sources. The feel of the piece, nevertheless, with its precise description of carefully selected details, tends to make the reader assume that the writer was present at the event. The prevalent point of view, however, in the memoirs is that of a first-person narrator, either in the "I" or "we" persona. It is likely that in most cases, the narrator is Hemingway himself, but on occasion, he "replaces" himself with Nick Adams in the memoir, and the piece is narrated in the typical novelistic omniscient point of view...