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epilogue | 159| 159 Hemingway once said that a writer’s job is not to say what is on his mind but to write it (Nobel Prize in Literature Banquet Speech 1954). His oeuvre stands as a clear testament to his investment in this credo and as a fantastic example of what wasonhismindformuchofhisliterarycareer:masculinity,nationality,andrace. But in looking at past and present criticism, and the dearth of related commentary , one would never know the extent of this man’s entanglement with the issue of race. To be fair, by and large, Hemingway’s classic novels—those novels read by students and casual readers alike—are not novels about race. For example, A Farewell to Arms is not, on its face, a book about race. In fact, in that novel and in his other most prominent titles, Hemingway’s eyes and mind seem focused elsewhere. I would argue, however, that even there in those prominent spaces where our author seems least connected to what Du Bois anticipated would be the then-new century’s principle hounding issue, race is very present; one need only look. I spent the better part of my examination forging connections among many works with express racial moments—including several that have received scant attention, and a couple that have been altogether overlooked—to demonstrate Hemingway’s lifelong racial cognizance. Perhaps, then, that warrants a reassessment of the works we know, or think we know, so well, and perhaps when these texts are subjected to such scrutiny, conversation will follow. In what directions might our questions carry us if we interrogated such texts for their racial content (or for its apparent absence)? A brief revisit might show us. Two of his most classic works, A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, would certainly benefit from such a reading. A Farewell to Arms’s Frederic Henry is a man very much bent on crafting meaning for himself. His world is shaped by the Great War, by his love affair with Catherine Barkley, and by a faith epilogue Contextualizing Hemingway’s Grand Complication 160 | epilogue that’s tested in the midst of everything. A Farewell to Arms is a novel about love, about war, about death, and about faith, or its apparent absence. Given the current parameters and criteria engaged in assessing the novel, most readers would assuredly, comfortably even, assert that this is not a novel about race. However, given the parameters set forth by this examination, we could easily make this a novel about race. And the leap is an easy one to make. We need only look to the story’s protagonist. Henry is young, he is American; he is also clearly white. Yet never in the text are we told this. This is a text operating on reader assumptions. Moreover, Hemingway need not offer an express homage to whiteness here for us to appreciate his (and Frederic’s) investment in the racial medium. A critical point in the narrative demonstrates this well. As Frederic’s love for Catherine becomes most apparent to her, to the reader, and most importantly to Frederic himself, Catherine exposes her lover’s growing dependency and insecurity; as such, she mocks his apparent jealousy of all things that consume her time and keep her from him. In doing so, she compares him to the Moor Othello in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, and he clearly resents the comparison , as his retort evinces; a solitary line carries with it all the racial angst of a generation. While the general and Frederic may share common geographic space (Italy) and a uniform, “Othello,” Frederic declares, “was a nigger” (257). Never again is blackness mentioned in the text, but to the wary eye, the potential effect is great. Although it is but a single line in over three hundred pages of text, its implications are several and its weight is grand, given our knowledge of Hemingway’s lifelong racial investment. Like Jack Johnson in “The Porter” or in “The Light of the World,” Othello’s function here is that of phantom; like Iago’s whispered counsel in Shakespeare’s play, mention of the Moor here is a planted seed meant to grow in the reader’s mind and serve as an apt dialogic reminder of a binary world in flux. It is a world, Hemingway reminds us, that falls apart at the seams, lest we consciously forge meaning for ourselves. And like Nick Adams before him, Frederic Henry, in part, relies...

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