Hemingway
uses third-person omniscient point-of-view in this story, but the key point is that his narrator
only offers externals. He never gets inside the characters' heads to tell you what they are
thinking. He instead relies on the dialogue and outwards cues to convey emotion and situation.
Hemingway doesn't even use the kind of explanatory cues common to most writers, such as
"she sighed" or "he said with exasperation." It's good to imagine the
narrator as simply a video camera recording a scene. There is no voice over, no explanation to
give us context, just the raw footage placing us in the scene and letting us overhear what the
two characters are saying to each other. This makes the point of view seem detached and
objective.
This minimalist approach to narration means the reader has to be
more attentive to pick up on what is going on. Hemingway uses repetition and the response of one
character to what the other has to say to convey the insincerity, tension, and acrimony in
this...
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