Hemingway and Faulkner

At first, it seems that Hemingway and Faulkner are entirely on opposite sides. Hemingway's style is simple and direct, and he uses almost no adjectives. Faulkner's style is ornate, complicated, with many long adjectives. Further, Hemingway simply gives you the story, without making you think about how the story is told. His presentation is impersonal, cold, distant--like the eye of a movie camera. But Faulkner tells you the story using a narrator, and the narrator brings his own questions and complications to the story. For example, in "A Rose for Emily," we saw that the narrator doesn't really give us the facts of what happened in a clear, logical way. Instead, he begins at the end, with Emily's death, and then gives us a lot of memories that seem unconnected to each other, and then finishes, again, with the end, with Emily's death.

With Faulkner, we have to think about how the speaker remembers what he is talking about. We also have to wonder about whether he knows the central fact of the story, which is Emily's poisoning of H.B. This guy who is telling the story--is he really so stupid that he doesn't understand the meaning of the facts that he tells us? Or is he actually trying to hide the truth, by not speaking about it? And why hide it? Because the act of murder for love is so terrible? Because he knew Emily or H.B. personally? We don't know any of this, and we cannot know it; the story gives us no information here.

The story also gives us no information about Emily's feelings and motives, the reason why she killed H.B. From the ending, from the last shocking line, "we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair," we may think that Emily regrets killing H.B., because she lies down next to his dead body, she lies down on the same bed with a skeleton. But is that really what she must feel, regret? Or is she still in love with him, still obsessed, still crazy, in the same way that she was crazy when she decided to kill him? Maybe she is so crazy that it makes no difference whether he is alive or dead? We simply don't know.

And here is where Faulkner is similar to Hemingway. In Hemingway also, when we step back from the bare facts of the story and consider "the big picture," we are aware that we do not know as much as we would like to know, we don't know as much as we really need to know. For example, in "The Hills Like White Elephants," what do we know about the history of these two lovers? How long have they been together? Are they happy together, or do they fight a lot? Is the man married to someone else, maybe? Is the girl trying to marry him because he has a lot of money, or is the girl simply too young, foolish and lost? We meet these people for only five minutes. Can we judge them from those five minutes? And what about the man? We saw in the story that the girl is really unhappy about having an abortion. We sense that she doesn't want to kill her baby. And the man is cold, insensitive. He doesn't see her suffering. Or is he maybe only pretending that he doesn't see it? Maybe he is also suffering, inside himself, but trying to appear tough on the outside? And maybe the narrator of "A Rose for Emily" is like that as well--suffering on the inside, but pretending to be confused on the outside?

Both of these stories are dense, both of them are packed with information. But in the end, despite giving us so many facts, these stories leave us with a sense that we need to know a lot more. When we finish these stories, we are shocked at our own ignorance. How is it possible that this is all that we will ever know? How is it that we will never know more? This is a very modern feeling.

We might say that in both of these stories, at the center we find an empty space. However, I don't think that these stories are trying to cheat us, pretending to give us something and then not delivering. Instead, they are telling us something--that life is something mysterious and puzzling. And that seems true, doesn't it?