In Our Time

Earnest Hemingway’s In Our Time is the first book we’ve read that I can truly say seems like a collection of short stories.  While Dubliners seemed like much more of a short story collection than Country of the Pointed Firs, this latest book seems mostly like a set of individual stories.  Pointed Firs had a very chronological order with a continuous narrator, and Dubliners had a consistent setting and tone throughout.  In Our Time reads much more disjointed and choppy.  While Nick seems to be a character in a lot of stories, he is not a character in all of them.  Also, the setting changes between the stories fairly often. 

 

A consistent theme throughout book, as mentioned in the class presentation, is a failure in relationships.  In many of the stories, people either split or continue on together with dysfunctional interaction.  Early on in the stories, Nick’s mother and father seem to have a very detached relationship.  From there, the theme continues with Nick and Marge, the soldier and Luz, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, and even Joe and his father, along with others.  I relate this to the authors experience with war and the time period in which the book was written.  Obviously, war can be very wearing on relationships, and in some cases in these stories, war or violence seemed to be the cause of the dysfunction. 

 

I did have trouble with two pieces of this book in particular.  First, the journal-like chapter intros were often hard to follow and hard to relate to the rest of the stories.  Early in the book, I expected that all of intros would pertain to war, and while most of them did at least reference some sort of violence, they did not always center around the war in which the book is set.  Second, I had trouble understanding the meaning of the last two chapters, “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I” and “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II.”  They did not continue any of the themes I recognized throughout the book.  My best conclusion regarding these stories was they served as an escape from the dark tone of the earlier parts of the book – leaving behind the troubles.

 

I enjoyed In Our Time, but for different reasons than the previous short story cycles we have covered.  Where I have enjoyed the past books as a whole, I liked this book for its individual stories – some much more than others.