The Psychology of Ernest Hemingway : A Writer's Personality and How It Is Displayed in His Work

Abstract

How is a writer s personality reflected in his work? In Ernest Hemingway s case, many critics and scholars believe that he used his writing partly as a therapeutic healing of his unstable psyche and his vulnerable self-esteem. This notion is explored from four different angles in the first chapter of this thesis: wounds of war and the Lost Generation , wounds of war and psychoanalysis, androgyny/gender confusion, and Jackson Benson s what if -theory, and I emphasize the factors leading to Hemingway s mental illness and how the illness affected his writing. The question of to what extent Hemingway s heroes reflect their creator s personality has been central when dealing with the autobiographical content of his work, and the answers have been varied. In the next two chapters, I discuss some of Hemingway s critically successes and some of his failures to see how the interpretations of different critics have thrown light on our perception of the writer s personality and his work.