No Explanations: Hemingway on the Making of Decisions

Abstract:Throughout his literary career, Ernest Hemingway shows characters making fateful decisions. But, at the same time, he is careful not to imply or account for how these decisions come about. His narrators and protagonists—Frederic Henry, Jake Barnes, Robert Jordan, and others—make life-defining choices but do not realize how momentous these are until much later. About the process (if there is one) by which they make the decisions that determine the course of their lives, Hemingway is silent. For their and, by implication, our own decisions, there is, in Hemingway's view, no explanation.