Jake the Narrator

In preparing to write my pastiche, I was looking closely at all of the little quirks of Hemingway's writing style. Apart from the "slapstick" dialogue, Hemingway's distinctive feature is his tip-of-the-iceberg narration. Throughout the entire novel, Hemingway gives the reader flat descriptions that require many inferences to fully understand the story. This "less is more" approach works well for Jake as a narrator.

Jake Barnes is the kind of person that mostly likes to observe and stay out of the action. He describes those around him rather than talks about himself. Like we've discussed, he seems almost like a third wheel in many situations. In chapter V, Robert Cohn and his wife get into an argument during dinner. In chapter VII, Brett and the count discuss the events of the previous evening. During these two conversations, Jake fades into the background and assumes only the narrator position and we forget that he also has opinions.

Though he doesn't blatantly state anything, Jake's selectively detailed descriptions reveal many of his thoughts and feelings. On page 232, Jake describes the morning after the fiesta. We're given flat descriptions and dialogues of Bill and Jake cleaning up and making plans.

"Let's get a car and all go as far as Bayonne. You can get the train up from there to-night."

"Good. Let's go after lunch."

"All right. I'll get the car."

We had lunch and paid the bill. Montoya did not come near us. One of the maids brought the bill. The car was outside.

In the middle of these simplistic statements, Jake makes an observation that seems a little out of place: "Montoya did not come near us." The syntax of this sentence is very similar to the rest of the passage in the way that it is a straight-forward declaratory statement. It blends in to the rest of the text. However, it isn't an action in the same way that the rest of the sentences are. All the others move forward and with this, Jake pauses to point out that Montoya was avoiding them. This shows that Jake is very much aware of Montoya's resentment. We have to infer that this has to do with him setting up Brett, a woman with a reputation, with Pedro Romero, Montoya's prized bullfighter. The sentence is still ambiguous since we don't know how much this loss of status bothers Jake. We can assume that it was important enough to him to mention it, but not enough to regret helping out Brett.

Hemingway fills pages with short but dense writing. He seems to trust that the reader will fill in the gaps. That's something to keep in mind as I summon my inner Ernest Hemingway.