ABSTRACT
The distinctive writer is an obsessed man and he deals in his work with an immense effort to clarify that obsession. Hemingway has felt more than most writers the force of an obsession, and its finished form and significance explains his durable reputation. Hemingway's themes of disillusionment are therefore in the tradition of ironic realism, those dramas of rebuffed subjectivity characteristic of the work of Flaubert and Joyce, who are the masters of the school. The Hemingway hero retreats to games, in order to enact the virtues and regain the nobility which life has lost. The Hemingway hero is also blocked by the power and blankness of the antagonist, but he turns more completely to a salvation in character, as if the recourse were the essentially solipsistic gesture, the action which is its own justification. Nowhere in Hemingway does the heroic movement go beyond its abortive, doomed conditions.
