Tales to Tells

Author's Note: This is my piece on Ernest Hemingway, working on the skill of text analysis. Comments appreciated.

Professional poker players make a living off of reading people. They learn that most players react when they get a good hand. This is called a tell. But authors can have tells too. Take Ernest Hemingway for example. A careful reader can easily tell when something is important in a Hemingway story by looking for his tells.

One such tell is something that would seem obvious. When reading a Hemingway story the word down often is a sign of something bad, or perhaps with a deeper meaning.  In "Hills Like White Elephants" as Jig and her friend begin to talk about the operation she looks down "at the ground the table legs rested on" this is Hemingway's way of telling you the seemingly innocent operation is something a little deeper, and perhaps a little darker, than it appears.  Or in the story "Indian Camp" when the boy and his father go "down the river" you ca tell that something bad is going to happen.  And the one many would over look, in the untitled short story (informally called 6) the time is "half-past six", the time when the hands on the clock both point down. This is certainly an omen of things to come.

Another seemingly obvious one would be the dark. This is famously shown by the short story "A Clean Well-Lighted Place". In this story we see first a man described as "sitting in the shadow's of the leaves". This man is later revealed to be a dark character, one that almost committed suicide. In the same story one of the waiters describes himself as one of "those who need a light for the night" this man is interpreted as a person who hides or has escaped from darkness and so is some one who needs a light.

The final tell however is one that is unique to Hemingway. He often uses the phrase against the wall to show something bad or dangerous. One instance this is shown is in the story "Indian Camp". In this story the husband "roll[s] over against the wall". This apparently innocent line is however where the reader guesses that he slits his own throat, unable to stand the things happening around him. Or in "Hills Like White Elephants" when the two people are sitting at a table against the wall as they speak of the operation.

Overall Ernest Hemingway is a rather simple and usually predictable author, giving the reader a few easy tells to see what is going on in his stories. However not all authors are this simple to read. I get the idea that Hemingway wouldn't be a very good poker player.