Although modernist literature began before World War I, it was greatly influenced by the devastating effects of that war. Modernism had begun as experiments in style that sought to more fully capture the truth of human experience than the old, worn-out Victorian writing based on omniscient narrators and detailed outward descriptions of places and people.
This experimentation continued and accelerated after World War I but was conjoined with a sense of despair, pessimism, and alienation that reflected the coming apart of the old faith that the world was a coherent place ever getting better.
In both style and substance, "In Another Country" reflects a modernist point of view. Like most of Hemingway's writing, it is spare and cut down. Unlike Victorian and Edwardian literature, it does not over-explain. A typical sentence uses spare, simple words and almost childlike cadences:
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.
In terms of substance, the story reflects the alienation and despair that World War I engendered. We learn that both the Italian boys and the narrator, probably Nick Adams, are alienated from the rest of society by their war experiences:
We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital.
Even the soldiers themselves only have the war in common.
Further, all of the soldiers are wounded. This symbolizes the wounded psyches of the generation—called the Lost Generation—that came of age during World War I and felt, as a result, that all the old sureties had been lost.
Finally, the death of the major's wife, which he ends up accepting with stoicism, reflects a modernist despair with the future. The major advises Nick not to marry, because nothing is certain in the modern world.
As a leading American writer of the Modernist movement, Ernest Hemingway's work was informed by WWI and its psychological aftermath. Modernist novels and short stories were often scant in providing exposition, thus requiring readers to construct meaning on their own. Likewise, works of this movement frequently lack a traditional conclusion, leaving readers with questions about the resolution of conflicts and the fate of the characters. Modernists sought to capture the uncertainties present in life, part of the zeitgeist of the post-WWI period.
"In Another Country" is representative of the Modernist perspective in that it brings focus to the aftermath of WWI battles. Without going into much detail about what brought the soldiers to the hospital for their rehabilitation, Hemingway injects the reader into their lives and keeps the focus on their feelings of disillusionment. They don't believe in the efficacy of the machines meant to restore their injured bodies. There is no suggestion of how their injured psyches will ever be restored, or what the war was meant to accomplish.
The Modernist period is closely related to the Lost Generation, a term poet Gertrude Stein, a friend of Hemingway, coined to describe the men whose lives were so deeply compromised by WWI.
In Ernest Hemingway's "In Another Country," the author uses several modernist techniques and viewpoints. Modernism, itself, was an attempt by authors to overturn what was traditional, in terms of literature, through new techniques and ideologies.
Common themes in modernism are technology, the past in relation to the present, and alienation. "In Another Country" happens to touch on all three of these themes.
Technology comes into play with the thought of the medical machines being untrustworthy. The narrator muses, "I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines." Here, in the early parts of the century, many of the soldiers hold a great distrust of machines, themselves, preferring to rely on human labor. Later, when the story ends, the narrator remarks that, while there are photographs showing the result of using such machines, the machines actually hadn't been used enough for the results to be known so well.
"In Another Country" also frequently discusses the past. The doctor asks the narrator what he liked to do before the war, and the narrator later recalls the men's distrust of the machines.
Lastly, there is a widely pessimistic approach in the story. The major tells the narrator repeatedly than a man is not to marry, because "he should not place himself in a position to lose." As it turns out, the major's wife had recently passed away, but this is a significant plot point that is neither resolved nor analyzed very heavily. This anti-climax also strays from literary tradition and strays into modernism.
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