ABSTRACT
Ernest Hemingway, accordingly, is a fascinating and difficult subject for literary history. He is still subject to an acrimonious debate in which the literary and the non-literary continue to be confused. A literary parallel to his emphasis on death is the novelettish quality previously noted as a flaw in A Farewell to Arms, which is present even more embarrassingly in the late fiction. As a writer looking not for a useable past but for a useable present, Hemingway found that bullfighting offered objective material that was intrinsically interesting. In Hemingway's case, that event may be defined as the confluence of several sources of literary energy which had been coming into existence for a century in both the United States and Europe. Reader's reluctance to interpret the work in terms of religion, their preference for symbolism, is evidence of a basic anti-religious set of mind in the United States in the twenties and later.
