Hemingway: Direct and Oblique

by Richard K. Peterson

Hemingway: Direct and Oblique is a rhetorical analysis of Hemingway's work which attempts to relate his direct expression of ideas, themes, and attitudes to their indirect expression through style, imagery, technique and presentation of characters. It suggests that the "meaning" of Hemingway's style reflects primarily an attitude toward life, of which the style is the supposed "objective correlative." It considers an early and a later style in Hemingway's work, differing broadly according to their concern with understatement and indirection in the first and with greater expansiveness and directness of statement in the second.