Hemingways The Handle: Death and Deliverance :: essays research papers

The labyrinthine structure of what is perhaps Hemingways least-anthologized novella, "The Handle," belies its peremptory dismissal by many critics as a hastily written jumble of void dialogue wrapped around a poorly-contrived plot. "The Handle," a posthumously make novella that Hemingway penned in the frustrated years following his Nobel prize in literature for "The Old Man and the Sea," is the story of a farmer, set in a sleepy fictional province of rural Ohio, whose yearnings for a to a greater extent transitory lifestyle be offset by a impression of obligation to the land and the house and the profession of his father, his grandpa, and great-grandfather before him.Although the fields of Joseph Mallort are now little more than raw clumps of rock, tilled for generations until, as Hemingway writes, "the nation finally refused to yield," the farmer continues to plow his dusty, heat-cracked fields, hoping against hope to eek what little sustenanc e they power still provide. Although one may be tempted to draw the conclusion that Hemingways barren fields are little more than a thinly-veiled expression of go up self-doubt about the authors own creative abilities that becomes prevalent in Hemingways later years, to dismiss the story as nothing more than a straightforeward fabrication is to do an injustice to its more intriguing thematic elements.Joeseph Mallort is a widower, life alone in the creaky old farmhouse of his father, who awakens in the predawn hours to milk the cattle and get the plowing underway before the murderous sun overcome down on him. By most afternoons he has succumbed to something that might be diagnosed as mild heat-stroke today, and wanders the fields aimless and slightly confused, murmuring slanting conversations with his deceased wife, father, gandfather, and the original settler of the farm. Although the dialogue of "The Handle," represents a tenuous structural departure in that all of the secondary characters are either curtly ghosts or mild halucinations, it is still chock full of the brisk versimilitude rendered in simple prose that is the hallmark of Heminways finest passages.After a blight of cow-fever leaves Joseph without the chores of milking and feeding, he cut into a mass grave for the cows and buries them under a big money of earth. Several days later, hes walking the perimeter of his fields, mending the barbed-wire fence, when the ghost of his grandfather begins to taunt him for wasting his time on the fence when all the cows are dead.