Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban." 

Nicole Diver is the only character that gets a chance at first person narration. This affords us a glimpse into her character that we are not given with the other figures of the novel.

I find it interesting that she acknowledges that even (or perhaps especially) in moments of solitude, she is not herself. Her inner monologue is controlled by men, just as her life and certainly her psyche have been controlled by the actions of the men around her. 

What are the implications of Fitzgerald privileging Nicole over the other characters in this way? The insights we as readers are given is complicated by the fact that Nicole has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Can we believe her narration? If "talk is men," who is she speaking as in these passages? 

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

"All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife -- second class -- and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked" (4).

As A Moveable Feast is a narrative focused on Hemingway’s youth, early relationships, and his development as a writer, I though it only fitting to explore how his writing in this text hints at that growth and how his relationship with Gertrude Stein and early methods of writing informed his stylistic and rhetorical choices. In doing so, I found myself drawn to several interpretations of Hemingway’s writing as reminiscent of the Cubism movement in art. Like Cubist painters, Hemingway is not bound to copying traditional form; instead, he presents a new reality by fragmenting sentences and phrases. A large portion of the novel is dedicated to exploring Hemingway’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, who was perhaps the most successful of "Cubist" writers. She manipulated the English language in such a way that its end results reflected those of modernist painters. Hemingway’s style was almost certainly influenced by the time he spent with Stein, and that influence can be seen in A Moveable Feast; the text is defined by Hemingway’s careful enjambment of descriptive language and commentary, and seemingly innocuous and insignificant observations broken up by pointed interpretation (as seen in the sentence above). 

The passage above is a perfect example of Hemingway's definitive use of simple but often difficult to decipher sentences. This example is emblematic of the deceiving simplicity of his sentence structure; unadorned, seemingly arbitrary observations interspersed with reflection. 

By looking at the similarities between what modernist artists like Picasso were attempting to do with image and what writers like Hemingway and Stein were doing with language, can we consider Hemingway to be a “Cubist” writer? How does his abstract narrative style incorporate elements of Cubism?

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein

"Hemingway, remarks are not literature."

It seems to me that the strength of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas lies in the power of its remarks - on Gertrude Stein herself, on the writers and artists she came in contact with, and on the nature of writing and its relationship with conversation. Remarks may not be literature, but this book seems to be an attempt to make them precisely that. Stein's genius lies in her ability to create complexity and poetry by exploring the interplay between conversational and written English. The story unfolds like a conversation between Toklas and Stein, and is all the more rich and dynamic for it. The style is a variant of Stein's own vernacular, and while the observations of the text may not be merely "remarks" without substance, there is a definite relationship between casual conversation and the commentary that exists within this pseudo-autobiography. At one point Stein (speaking as Toklas) maintains that "Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath," once again creating a parallel between the spoken and written word.

How are we to understand this discrepancy between Stein's words of advice to Hemingway and her own writing, and how does it influence our interpretation of the text?