4 - Hemingway’s Masculine Hero

Summary

There Are No Happy Endings

Hemingway's animalization of human beings follows his war-time observations of dead and dying soldiers, none of whom exited the world in a dignified way. As a young ambulance driver, Hemingway was shaken by the grotesque manner in which both soldiers and civilians were killed; he was likewise disturbed by the process undergone by their decaying bodies. As discussed at length in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, Hemingway was raised as a devout Congregationalist in the tight-knit community of Oak Park, so when he saw that God's beloved creatures, who were made in his image for a special purpose, could themselves rot above ground without proper ceremony, he realized that human beings are inherently no different from the cargo mules drowned at Smyrna. Both animals and humans (an animal species themselves) end up in the same place, and, in this sense, they are equals, he reasoned; there is no hierarchy of value. By the time Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, the concept of negative equality had already taken hold of the writer, as we see in his sardonic appraisal of Mungo Park, the traveler and natural theologian. At some point in his discussion with the old lady, Hemingway tells her a story about a monogamous bull who is sent to the ring and deemed useless after he stops mating with the entire herd. The old lady calls it a “sad story,” and Hemingway replies:

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion. There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.