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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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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.
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories is a posthumous collection of Hemingway's short fiction, published in 1995. Introduced by James Fenton, it is published in the UK only by Random House as part of the Everyman Library. The collection is split in two parts.
According to Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel. [31] Furthermore, Baker explains Hemingway was unaware that those close to him agreed with the majority of critics. For example, his wife Mary, who disapproved of Across the River and into the Trees, said: "I kept my mouth shut ...