Hemingway and Woolf: Different Faces of Modernism Lorena Suarez College

Although Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf belong to the same literary period, Modernism, their styles are quite different. Modernism is a literary period characterised by variety of ideas, styles, techniques, theories, and tendencies that result from the epoch’s social and cultural reality. Thus, we can find many schools or artistic movements in the same period, such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Expressionism. While Hemingway can be considered a representative of Symbolism, Woolf is a major Impressionist writer. A close analysis of Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and of Woolf’s “The String Quartet” may help us illustrate these authors’ differences as regards style, methods or technique, and theme.

In ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway’s style is marked by his use of symbols of associations, (e.g. the snow, the summit, the carrion eaters, and the leopard) and by the use of the third person omnipresent narrative device, plus the insertion of dialogues and flashbacks. The theme in this short story is an ethical one; in the words of Carlos Baker, the story deals with “the achievements and loss of moral manhood” (Weeks 118), or...