Point of View and Narration

The type of narration Ernest Hemingway typically uses, the author himself said in an interview with George Plimpton, was fashioned on the "principle of the iceberg . . . for seven eighths of it is under water for every part that shows." In A Moveable Feast (1964), his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, he expands on this. "You could omit anything," he writes, "if the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." Hemingway's characters usually bury not only their feelings about their pasts but their pasts, as well, and his narrators—usually thirdperson narrators who see inside the heads of the main character—join along in this act of burial. In most of his best short stories, the protagonists are carrying some deep psychological hurt that they will not even think about to themselves. Their minds are...