Literature Reflection
Literature has been known by many faces since its creation so many years ago. Since its birth, it has become a living breathing organism, constantly growing and adapting, granting its unparalleled knowledge and power to those who would take the time to learn its ways. For it is true “The pen is mightier than the sword.” You can murder and destroy with the sword, but with the pen, can imagination and thoughts endure. Everyday we use written word to express thoughts, emotions, questions and greetings. Literature has grown with human understanding and perception, expanding its limits and possibilities, changing every few hundred years or so. It is a strange thought that in a hundred years or so, a large migration of literary thought might occur once again.
Near the beginning of our junior year we were introduced to the American Author Project, which was to span the course of several months, bridging the two semesters. Justin Wells, our World Literature teacher, explained that each of us would be selecting a famous American Author from any time period in America’s history. For a few weeks everyone researched multiple authors and picked one whom they found particularly interesting. With this author we each created a one slide presentation outlining the author’s life and a few pieces of their literary work, and presented it to the class. Jack London had been my original author of interest; however upon hearing about the stories and life of Ernest Hemingway I quickly decided to study the timeless Hemingway. There was something about his tragic suicide, and renowned skills in writing that drew my attention.
The next step in the American author process was to pick three literary pieces, be it books, screenplays or short stories, and a biography. After reading multiple summaries and reviews on Hemingway’s many books and short stories I decided upon; The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises and The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. For a biography I picked out A Historical Guide to: Ernest Hemingway. Over the next three months or so, all juniors remained on a rigorous reading schedule.
Only to regret later, I did not make any notes or literary analysis while reading his arguable best known book, The Old Man and the Sea over winter break. All I did remember was Hemingway’s attention to how all our senses perceive nature and the plain language used, both in conversation and in the general text. If you are familiar with Hemingway’s work, you know this straightforward and simple language was one of his trademarks; well The Old Man and the Sea exemplifies this.
As a side note for my growth in my reading and literary analysis, as I write this review I am seeing connections and things I hadn’t before. It would make sense for this old fisherman, who is nearing his end, to interpret the world in such simple terms. Life has been good to old Santiago, his mind regressing which only fueled his stubbornness and turned kind and wise words towards the young boy who so aspires to him.
Continuing on after that interlude; attempting to amend my previous mistake, I read the other two books by Hemingway taking notes on sections of heavy plot progressions. So when it came to wrestling with what I wanted to make my thesis for this glooming ten page paper, I took a look at my notes. They gave me a starting point for my thinking; however I wish I had focused more upon literary analysis throughout the book rather than plot summaries. It was at this point that I started reading the biography A Historical Guide to: Ernest Hemingway, because I had fallen a bit behind on the reading schedule. We were supposed to have been finished with all the books plus the biography by now, but I’m a slow reader and slacked off a little towards the end.
Undeniable the most difficult part of this project was creating the all important thesis, from which the rest of the paper will stem. Many a night was spent at my desk flipping through the different books looking for something, anything that I felt I could persuasively write about, that wasn’t the broad obvious statement, “Hemingway’s life directly affected his writing.” As the deadline for a complete thesis statement was coming up I was looking online for ideas, and found a site that talked about the males of the Hemingway family, specifically Ernest and his father, Clarence. I began thinking of the father figures presented throughout his works, helping me formulate my thesis which you have most likely read in my paper.
Now I will attempt to explain the strenuous thought processes I went through working on my essay. Working on the American author paper I found myself constantly contradicting myself, as counter arguments appeared in my analyzing. Countless times I wanted to throw my thesis to the wayside, and begin from the beginning. There were two problems to this, time was running out and I was not sure where the beginning was anymore. With every sentence I wrote it felt like I was trying to stretch my arms around Hemingway’s world, and I just wasn’t able to do it. Things like “I don’t know enough,” and “Maybe my thesis is totally wrong” kept going through my head; going back, rewriting sentences, then paragraphs, then entire pages.
My thesis was not growing because I was looking so hard for counter arguments because I was paranoid my thesis had completely missed the mark. Instead of trying to rewrite my thesis to fit all the information from both sides of this spectrum of support, and contradict, I should have been looking instead for arguments to strengthen my main point. As I learned later, even what you may conceive as a counter argument at first, looking deeper you may easily be able to adapt it to support your claim. And that’s what a thesis is, a claim. It is not necessarily right or wrong, but a personal interpretation based upon your own experiences and knowledge. To this day I do not know whether the father figures, Hemingway created that I made reference to in my paper, were truly based upon Ernest’s own relationship, or lack there of, with his own father.
I guess my paper was unsuccessful in that it did not even persuade me into believing what I wanted other people to believe when they read it. However what I learned from this project went far beyond Ernest’s relationship with his father, in learning both about myself and in deepening my understanding of literature as a whole. Out from the constant inner struggle that ensued from that thesis statement I made over a year ago came a new light in my literary journey.
