Masculinity And Style In Hemingway And Carver - 1604 Words

Masculinity and Style in Hemingway and Carver. The following will present the themes of masculinity in relation to style in Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Both are major figures of 20th century US fiction, and both write about characters that struggle with male or masculine identity and social expectations. These struggles often mean that other characters in their stories are the victims. In other words, the problems that the characters experience, are both internalized but also externalized toward others and this will be examined with specific author selections. It will be argued in the following that there is a minimalism recognized at many levels of the style for both authors, but this essay will explore the minimal†¦show more content†¦There is workplace degradation that happens to male characters in Carver stories, and these characters are in turn, viewed as expressing these personal frustrations on those around them (Hall 177). Hemingway wrote extensively about a character that will be examined in the following named Nick Adams, and their own biographical parallel is a First World War experience that results in a dynamic that gets played over and over. The character of Nick Adams like the figure of Hemingway, had to return to a world after a shattering emotional war experience, and a good dimension of that world is defined by the male expectations of it. The following will examine the theme of masculinity in relation to style using two specific RC short stories. Cathedral and Why Don t you dance? are very similar in structure and are useful for comparison. Both characters involve the dynamic of a couple with a challenged relationship who encounter another male. In both stories, it is a younger couple, and in both stories, the older male is partially defined by some eccentric and important features. In Cathedral, the blind friend of a wife and her husband meet for the first time and there is a tension between the couple over a few dif ferences of expectations. In Why Don t you dance?, a young couple walking along together encounter an older man who has