Hemingway's Naturalistic Style: Gender and Class Themes
This paper examines Ernest Hemingway's naturalistic writing style as demonstrated in four short works: "Hills Like White Elephants," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "The Killers," and "The End of Something." The paper begins with a brief overview of Hemingway's life and semi-autobiographical influences before analyzing how his minimalist, iceberg-style prose forces readers to infer character motivations, emotional states, and social dynamics from spare dialogue and setting. Special attention is given to recurring themes of male dominance, female submission, and class-based attitudes toward despair, showing how Hemingway encodes social critique beneath deceptively simple surfaces.
- Introduction: Hemingway's Naturalistic Approach: Overview of Hemingway's minimalist, naturalistic writing method
- Hemingway's Life and Literary Influences: Biography and semi-autobiographical roots of his fiction
- Gender and Power in 'Hills Like White Elephants': Male dominance and coerced abortion decision in the story
- Class and Isolation in 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place': Class attitudes toward despair explored through café waiters
- Minimalism and Fatalism in 'The Killers': Spare dialogue reveals inevitability of a man's death
- Male Dominance and Relationship Dynamics in 'The End of Something': Nick's breakup reveals masculine need for power and control
- Conclusion: The Underlying Meaning in Hemingway's Work: Naturalism encodes class and gender critique beneath sparse prose
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds each thematic claim in specific textual evidence, quoting dialogue directly and then interpreting what the quoted lines reveal about character power and social dynamics.
- It maintains a consistent analytical lens — naturalism and the iceberg principle — across all four stories, giving the essay structural coherence rather than treating each work as an isolated summary.
- The biographical context in the second section is kept concise and purposeful, used only to explain the semi-autobiographical roots of Hemingway's style rather than becoming a digression.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading: rather than paraphrasing plot, the author selects key lines of dialogue and unpacks the social and psychological subtext beneath them. For example, the analysis of Jig's final words in "Hills Like White Elephants" — "I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm fine" — treats surface-level reassurance as evidence of coerced resignation, modeling how literary argument is built from textual detail.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis introducing naturalism as Hemingway's defining method, followed by a brief biography. The body then moves through four stories in separate sections, each applying the same analytical framework. The conclusion synthesizes the findings, restating the iceberg-style thesis and connecting it to recurring social themes. This pattern — introduce framework, apply consistently, synthesize — is a reliable model for comparative literary analysis.
Introduction: Hemingway's Naturalistic Approach
Ernest Hemingway specialized in what is known as naturalistic writing. He tells the reader only the basic information about what is going on in a particular short story or novel. Much is said about the natural settings of the stories, but very little is given about the characters themselves. Instead, facts about the people — including their personalities and characteristics — must be inferred through close readings of the texts in question. In addition, Hemingway's novels and short stories use the interactions between characters to reveal the underlying relationships between genders and classes that were present in society during the time he was writing. This idea of naturalism — both in terms of landscape and in terms of character interaction — can be seen throughout Hemingway's various writings, including "Hills Like White Elephants," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "The Killers," and "The End of Something."
Hemingway's Life and Literary Influences
Ernest Hemingway's life was filled with adventure. Most of the stories that appear in his short fiction or novels are semi-autobiographical, drawing on his own experiences, including his war stories. Hemingway began as a journalist and an ambulance driver during World War I. In 1918, at the age of 19, he was seriously injured and honorably discharged (Oliver 140). He would use his wartime experiences to write his first novel, A Farewell to Arms, establishing the pattern for the rest of his life.
He traveled internationally and wrote about everything from the "Lost Generation" of expatriates living in France and the bullfights of Madrid to the Spanish Civil War and the people he encountered who would inspire his fictional characters — such as the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was present at some of the most important moments of twentieth-century American history, including the landings at Normandy and the liberation of Paris during World War II (Oliver 192). Personally, he became consumed by his passions, continually hunting and even pursuing big-game shooting on safari in Africa. "Papa," as he was often called, struggled with alcoholism in his later years and, after dealing with years of crippling depression, ended his life by shooting himself in the summer of 1961, at age 62.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. "The End of Something." Repeat After Us. 2010. N.p. Web. 15 June 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants Complete Story." Gummyprint. N.p. Web. 15 June 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. "The Killers." Sleuth Sayers. 2011. N.p. Web. 15 June 2013.
Oliver, Charles. Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York, NY: Checkmark Publishing, 1999. Print.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.