Prelude to Fame: Trauma Theory in the Early Short Fiction of Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

While it is commonly acknowledged that the primal traumatic events of Hemingway’s time as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I had a profound influence on his works of fiction, there has been relatively little exploration of the notion that the “working through” which occurred in the recovery from his own personal trauma manifests a complex and interwoven relationship with the writing process. This is certainly not unknown territory for scholars; when Hemingway first embarked upon the earliest fiction writing of his professional career, biographical research indicates he was once again enduring a traumatic experience of sorts. Yet formal trauma theory has rarely been applied to the study of Hemingway’s most intensely autobiographical short fiction. It is my contention that the “working through” of Hemingway’s writing process demonstrated in his published and unpublished Nick Adams stories was prompted by both his defining war-time trauma experience and his later, more private hardships.