By Marc K. Dudley, Ph.D., Professor of English and Africana Studies and
Suzanne del Gizzo, Professor of English and Editor of The Hemingway Review
Ernest Hemingway was fascinated by death. He actively sought out experiences that would allow him to become intimate with death and dying, from his presence on every major warfront during his lifetime to his study of ritualized death in the bullring.
For Hemingway, death was the absolute finality that heightened, sharpened, and reified his consciousness. He believed we are characterized by how we meet this stark reality, and in this sense, Hemingway is a profoundly existential writer. As he once wrote, only those who live in proximity to death live their lives to “the fullest.” His heroes are measured by how they manage themselves in the face of death, and they define themselves by how they construct meaning in the face of death’s certainty. They derive meaning from the concrete things around them, from their own particular lived experience and nothing else; the Hemingway hero has little use for abstract concepts, notions, or beliefs.
However, the study of death is a complicated and sometimes difficult business; and, although Hemingway used and even celebrated his brushes with death, experiences like his father’s suicide, the violence done unto him in the limited action he saw in WWI, the brutal battle he witnessed in the Hürtgen forest some twenty years later in WWII, and his injuries in two back-to-back plane crashes toward the end of his second African safari left an indelible imprint on him, until he confronted death directly in July 1961.
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