Old Man at the Bridge

Hemingway’s streamlined, minimalistic writing style separates him from his contemporaries and distinguished him as a unique voice in the early years of the 20th century. Many attempt to link this style to his early training as a journalist. He said that working as a reporter for The Kansas City Star as a young man was helpful in that “you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone” (Gourevitch, Philip, ed. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1. Picador, 2006). He then went on to say, however, that his goal was not necessarily to be journalistic so much as “to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened” (Gourevitch 57).

Hemingway’s continual stripping down of the text results in an economy of both description and dialogue that can be mistaken for simplicity. While Hemingway’s diction and syntax are intentionally easy to scan, they imply complexity of characters and situations that are revealed through thoughtful reading. His writing also imitates reality in the sound of both the dialogue and the thoughts conveyed. His characters are depicted as realistically human in that they often have difficulty expressing themselves in conversation, particularly if the situations or ideas being grappled with are painful, fraught, or complex. Sparse, simple, and often guarded words or phrases depict characters stumbling inarticulately toward ideas, feelings, and themes that are beyond their ability to understand or express in the moment. However, Hemingway provides minimalistic clues in the dialogue and description that can be compiled to convey larger ideas about the context, plot points, or characters.

Hemingway refers to his strategy of writing as “the principle of the iceberg.” In a 1958 interview about his writing style with The Paris Review, he said that just as seven-eighths of the iceberg is unseen under the surface, most of what is happening with his characters is not shown. He is quick to point out that he knows everything about his stories and his characters from their childhoods to the time of the narrative, and it isn’t because he can’t write about those things that he leaves them out. Instead, the type of novel that shows every detail has already been written, and written well. Thus, Hemingway states his desire to do something different. Only the most essential information, the tip of the iceberg, is seen by the reader, but Hemingway attempts to present it in a way that implies vast, complex depths below the surface (Gourevitch 57). This generates dialogue like that of “The Old Man at the Bridge”; its simple, repeated words and phrases can seem uncomplicated, but they suggest a profundity of feeling and psychological torment lurking below the surface of the conversation.

Additionally, Hemingway is part of a group of writers known as the Modernists. Modernism is a broad term that encompasses many types of writing and artists from various countries and disciplines from the early 1900s to around the early 1940s. What unites them is an intentional break from their predecessors. In literature, Modernism and the separation from the past manifest in many ways. Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narration is a famous example of these innovations. Hemingway’s minimalistic work aligns him with his contemporaries, and his intentional severing from styles of the past qualifies him as a Modernist.

Hemingway is also often associated with a second style of writing called Realism. His goal of trying to show a true human situation is similar to that of a writer Hemingway admired, Mark Twain. Twain was an early American Realist who sought to capture what he perceived were the true sounds, lives, and feeling of humanity around him. Hemingway referred to Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the book from which all modern American writing begins, and his dialogue and description reach toward a similar realistic goal. His story “Hills Like White Elephants,” published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women, is presented to make the reader feel as if they are eavesdropping on a conversation at the next café table; minimal context is provided, and the discussion is not conveyed from start to finish. This style, as well as the conversation in “The Old Man at the Bridge,” also adheres to Hemingway’s theory of the iceberg. The characters can articulate only a fraction of what they feel and mean. Thus, the dialogue is full of stops and starts, awkward repetitions, misunderstandings, and declarations in an imitation of reality.