Two masters of modern literature, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, are not merely central figures in American literature in this century but have gained world renown, their works by now having been translated into many languages and read all over the globe. Both have enjoyed so broad a readership because both deal, in their very different and separate ways, with some of the fundamental conditions of human life and with some of the perennial themes of all great literature: love, adventure, courage, defeat, vice and virtue, honor and dishonor. Grounded in particular experiences and in specific times and places, their fiction nevertheless has its timeless and universal aspects. Whether we are with Nick Adams at an Indian settlement in upper Michigan, with Robert Jordan in the Spanish Civil War, with Ike McCaslin hunting a bear in the backwoods of Mississippi or with Quentin Compson in his dormitory at Harvard, we sense unerringly that these characters and their experiences are, in microcosm, symbolic of human beings and their travails everywhere.
Both Hemingway and Faulkner, moreover, were writers who developed, each for himself, a distinctive idiom, a tone, a style - unmistakably theirs and uniquely suited to each writer for the stories he wrote. The laconic dialogue of the Hemingway hero, the convoluted thoughts of the Faulknerian protagonist seem to us totally appropriate in the separate universes they inhabit.
Both Hemingway and Faulkner portray in their fiction the difficult, perhaps insoluble plight of 20th century mankind, living in an era where the beliefs, standards, traditions, and values of the past have become increasingly shattered by the cataclysmic events of our times and where, as yet, no new synthesis of widely shared belief has yet emerged. To put it in other words, both Hemingway and Faulkner take, at bottom, a tragic view of man’s fate. This is not to say that their fiction is humorless (there are amusing scenes in most of Hemingway’s novels and there are jest and ribaldry galore in Faulkner), but the pervasive tone in both writers speaks to the vanity of human wishes, the inevitable defeat of great aspirations, the dominant sense of loss. Not despair, however. For in the works of both writers there are almost always individuals who survive, who come to terms with the worst that life can offer, who find at least some fragments (to quote T. S. Eliot) to shore up against the ruins. To read these writers, then, is to undergo a complicated experience: both are highly skilled in the art of telling a story, both will engage your interest (Faulkner, at times, may irritate you with what seems deliberate obscurity), and both will broaden your appreciation of great literary artistry. Both will, moreover, confront you with moving, sobering experiences as, indeed, so much of great literature always does. Shakespeare delights us in All’s Well That Ends Well, but the great tragedies like Hamlet and Lear are what move us profoundly and endlessly to speculate about the meanings of human existence. To read Hemingway and Faulkner is also to plumb the depths.
GUIDE TO READING: Commentary and Suggested Study Questions
The study aids provided for each of the assigned books are intended to guide you in heightening your perceptions, enhancing your understanding, chapter by chapter as you read the book. These aids include both commentary and suggested questions. My commentary, as you will see, varies in purpose: to supply occasional background information, to clarify an allusion, to explain implications, to make comparisons, or - in a variety of ways - to point to significant details of characterization, "meanings," narrative technique, style, tone, or structure. The suggested questions ask you to reflect on your reading as you go along so that you will have more than a merely passive experience. Don’t send in answers to your questions - they are intended solely as a help to your understanding.
Whether you consult these study aids before reading each chapter or afterward (or even after the reading of several chapters) will depend on your own inclinations. Decide for yourself what works best for you.