Les figures du héros chez Hemingway

Abstract

Hemingway’ Figures of the Hero 

In the works of Ernest Hemingway, the heroes, with the exception of Harry Morgan, hero of the novel To Have and Have not, always evolve outside the borders of their country of origin, America. They are all voluntary expatriates like Hemingway himself. Their experience is often marked by the confrontation or experimentation with an authentically American heritage bearing the values of an ancient European civilization in its origins and universal in its effects.
All his works reflect this confrontation, both gentle and violent, between now universal values and traditions. The interest of this theme also comes from the symbolic and historical significance of Hemingway's representation of "The Lost Generation".
This study first deals with The Sun Also Rises, whose importance does not come from its priority in the chronology of Hemingway's literary production but from the subtlety of the description of the picture of this broken youth. This theme makes this novel a fundamental work. It allows us to understand the concept of the lost generation as it also seems to strongly express the similarities between the author and the hero. Moreover, we have already noted the essential traits of the hero in Hemingway. They will be those heroes of the novels and short stories that will follow. This is how Jake Barnes, protagonist of The Sun Also Rises prefigures Frederick Henry in A Farwell to Arms. The works cited form the historical and romantic framework of the figures of the hero allows to arrive at the following conclusions: from the point of view of the identity of the character, we have noted in Hemingway’s hero a strong inner life struck by an exteriority  that calls it into question. This experience is once again confronted with a broader exterior: the singularity in the change of scenery. But is Hemingway's hero a disembodied hero? And did this disembodiment play into the tenacious search for purification through action: "All (Hemingway's heroes) experience the same needs in meeting the struggle and frustration of twentieth-century man, and even of all men of all times"? And would this purification ultimately culminate in the act of writing (writer Harry of The Snow of Kilimanjaro)? And isn't writing immortalizing? Would immortality then be the ideal of this hero of confrontation? Such seem to be the preoccupations of this hero of life.

 and romantic framework of the figures of the hero allows to arrive at the following conclusions: from the point of view of the identity of the character, we have noted in Hemingway’s hero a strong inner life struck by an exteriority