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Ernest Hemingway as photographed for the 1940 edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation.
The iceberg theory has been termed the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer could convey an object or concept while writing about something entirely different. In "Big Two-Hearted River" he elaborates on the mundane activities Nick carries out.
In A Moveable Feast Hemingway wrote that "Out of Season", written in 1924, was the first story where he applied the theory of omission, known as his Iceberg Theory. He explained that the stories in which he left out the most important parts, such as not writing about the war in "Big Two-Hearted River", are the best of his early fiction. [ 33 ]
He cut out the story's ending, which he meant to be tragic, on his theory of omission that "you could omit anything if you knew you omitted [it] and the omitted part would strengthen the story". [9] Expecting the birth of their first child, the Hemingways returned to Toronto in October. [ 10 ]
The piece is an early experiment in Hemingway's "theory of omission"—later to be known as the Iceberg Theory—in which nonessential information is left out or barely hinted at. [9] The story has attracted little attention from literary critics and much of that examines the allusions to Renaissance painters. [ 10 ]
Hemingway's prose has been extensively analysed for its minimalistic style, which came to be known as the Iceberg theory of omission. According to Meyers, a respected biographer of Hemingway, Hemingway believed the quality of an author's work is assessable by the respective quality of the words eliminated.
According to the book Hemingway's Cats, Hemingway wrote the story as a tribute to his wife Hadley. The couple had only been married a few years and lived in Paris, where she was often left alone for hours at a time while her husband worked. She asked for a cat, but he told her they were too poor.
The Torrents of Spring is a novella written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. Subtitled "A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race", Hemingway used the work as a spoof of the world of writers. It is Hemingway's first long work and was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.