Hemingway's Iceberg Principle

"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 the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." -- From Death in the Afternoon

As you think about your inquiry topic for this week, keep this principle in mind. It's interesting to me that the principle works on at least two distinct levels: 1) as a method of writing fictional prose--of discerning through the drafting and revision process the absolutely vital words, details, information and cutting all the rest as an ultimate act of respect for an intelligent reader; and 2) a critical tool for analyzing and interpreting the stories, which so often offer us a small detail or action as a substitute for a greater whole. For example, think of the ruins that open both "End of Something" and "Big Two-Hearted River"--both subtle, visible reminders of deeper scars within Nick's psychological landscape, his psyche. Once you wrap your head around these concepts, a story like "Big Two-Hearted River" ceases to be a story about nothing and becomes as alive as Nick seems to feel in returning once again to the restorative natural landscape of his youth.

Think of the initiations in your life to date. Not the usual, the expected, the cake-and-ice-cream variety. Think of the ones that caught you off guard--those moments in which life revealed itself to you in all its befuddling, blistering complexity, leaving you feeling exposed in the presence of something beyond your ability to describe it, to give it a name.

In this Nick Adams sequence, a major thread in In Our Time (1925), Hemingway places his evolving, developing protaganist in a series of circumstances that challenge him to embrace some difficult truth about his own humanity or about the world around him. Sometimes Nick resorts childishly, naively to romantic illusions about the world as he would have it look; in other moments Nick takes steps forwards into life's murky swamps.

Pay very close attention to the signs on the surface of these iceberg-stories. Notice the lack of a detached narrator here, a voice that shapes our opinion of a character or even goes so far as to spell out "the moral of the story." The radical innovation of Hemingway's prose is the amount of trust he places in the barest of details to lead us much deeper into Nick's psyche (which, as we will see, is itself a symbol for our collective human psyche, for he is "Adams"--the original man, the everyman, the American man).

As you read these stories, spend time noting and thinking about details that might lead us from the visible to the invisible portion of the iceberg. What exactly is that bass that jumps out of the warm, rippling water just as Nick fantasizes about his own immortality in "Indian Camp"? What does that gate through which Dick Boulton and friends enter and leave represent in "Doctor"? What do the two rods featured at the end of "End of Something" represent? And what of the orchard and the Wagner apple that begin "Three-Day Blow"?

These are just sample questions to get you started. These stories are loaded with small details that lead in some way to the heart of the story and to the life lessons and mysteries Nick encounters on his journey to adulthood.