Jean-Paul Sartre, in a 1946 essay, wrote that "The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and1939 was

the discovery of Faulkner, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck.[] At once, for thousands of young intellectuals the American novel took its place together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States." Hemingway's use of dialogue, short declarative sentences and his emphasis on action (instead of inner monologue) appealed to Sartre and Albert Camus, both of whom wanted to express new sensibilities in keeping with the accelerated rhythms of the machine age. In La Forcedel'ge (ThePrimeofLife), Beauvoir writes that a great many of the rules that she and Sartre observed in their novels were inspired by Hemingway. Sartre was reading Hemingway when he realized that the hallmark of the French style could no longer mirror the complexities of the new era or the sense of the absurd generated by the events of WorldWarII.

In the 1920s, Russian formalists, a leading school of literary criticism, defined literariness as "defamiliarization," or "a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct, and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror." Through defamiliarization, the reader is forced to pay attention to language. Defamiliarization is a key character trait of the American modernist era, or the era of literature produced between the two world wars.

Something you may notice is the sparseness of Hemingway's prose. This is purposeful: in the light of the definition of defamiliarization, Hemingway, too, is forcing the reader to pay attention to the language he uses. In such a sparse style, every word is hand-picked, power-packed, purposefully chosen to convey the exact meaning Hemingway wants to convey. His greatest contribution, as the Nobel Prize committee acknowledged, was in the area of "prose style." In his use of the "zero ending," which goes counter to the traditional "well-made" ending, Hemingway has influenced the form of the modern short story.

Hemingway's stories run counter to the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century stories described as "well-made." They are usually elliptical in form, rarely tying up details in a neat bundle in order to bring the stories to a conclusion. The type of story Hemingway wrote reflects a belief in Anton Chekhov's "dictum that in both scene and character the selection of significant details, grouped so as to convey an image, is the vital thing."

Hemingway believed that the sentences of the language, along with the diction, imply more than they state and make us feel more than we know. In 1932, in the introduction to Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote that "if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer

had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only oneeighth of it being above water." The metaphor of an iceberg that Hemingway chose for his theory serves as well to suggest that the dignity of a visible talent depends on the submerged tradition beneath it.

After the publication of his last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway explained his "iceberg" theory of fiction writing in a Paris Review interview: If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

It is indeed of use on several counts to the Hemingway reader to approach any Hemingway story with an understanding of this "iceberg" theory, the principles of aesthetics that it embodies, and the assumptions about life that it entails. The stories, if read carefully, will reveal these assumptions, but to bring them to a work in advance often provides the key that unlocks what may at first appear to be the mystery of a Hemingway story, revealing the fourth and fifth dimensions that he usually achieves.