1 - Hemingway, Sartre, and the Secular

Summary

An Introduction

Ernest Hemingway has long been considered either a nihilist or a secular existentialist. “A vast number of critics,” writes Joseph Prud’homme, “have deemed Ernest Hemingway a nihilist. As an individual, they contend, Hemingway spurned religious truth and espoused absurdist nihilism… . The art and artist express the same worldview.” Robert Penn Warren writes that Hemingway's protagonist in the 1933 short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is “obsessed by … the meaninglessness of the world, by nothingness, by nada.” William Bache likewise asserts that the story's protagonist represents a “nihilistic way of life.” And Judith P. Saunders argues that the story's protagonist experiences “existential panic” in the face of his mortality when confronted with the old man's suicide. She says that his “cynical parody” of two Roman Catholic prayers—the Hail Mary and the paternoster—is “insistently blasphemous.” But existentialist interpretations of Hemingway's fiction extend far beyond “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” One can look to a handful of his better-known short stories—like “The Killers,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—to see that Hemingway at the very least sympathized with an existentialist worldview. As Warren states elsewhere, “The typical Hemingway hero is the man aware, or in the process of becoming aware, of nada.” Hemingway's own confrontation with mortality, meaninglessness, and the freedom to make of this life whatever one chooses profoundly shaped his worldview, and you can see this influence throughout his body of work. As José Antonio Gurpegui notes in Hemingway and Existentialism, a search of the combined “words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘existentialism’ in Google showed 354.000 results on August 2013.” As of December 2022, that number has grown to 481,000.

Writing decades apart, Ben Stoltzfus and John Killinger take an existentialist interpretation of Hemingway's fiction a step further. As an unbeliever, Hemingway was not a Kierkegaardian existentialist, but neither would he align himself with Nietzsche, despite the considerable overlap in their views. Rather, Hemingway's own brand of existentialism resembled that of his contemporary, the twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like Sartre, Hemingway did not believe in God or a spiritual afterlife.