Tales from "The Big Outside World": Ann Beattie's Hemingway

Like many other contemporary writers from the school of literary minimalism, Ann Beattie writes in a style that seems to owe much to Hemingway's fictional method. Indeed, Beattie has acknowledged Hemingway's influence on her, and even written one short story, entitled "The Big Outside World," as a direct response to a Hemingway story, "Cat in the Rain." This essay examines this pair of stories as a means toward highlighting important stylistic and thematic connections between Hemingway and Beattie. Specifically, it is argued that both writers employ metonymic modes of signification to depict isolated, dislocated protagonists.