The Stylistic Mechanics of Implicitness: Entailment, Presupposition, and Implicature in the Work of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O\u27Brien.

The discipline of linguistics has identified three patterns through which unstated information may be conveyed: entailment, presupposition, and implicature. Using these theoretical constructs, analysts may determine systematically how propositions which are never asserted may nonetheless be communicated. In the old writers\u27 maxim Show me; don\u27t tell me, showing corresponds to implicit communication of unstated material, while telling corresponds to the overt assertion of the proposition of interest. Examination of texts by Hemingway and O\u27Brien reveals carefully controlled use of the linguistic strategies of implicitness to suspend meaning between and behind the fixed points of the words on the page. This implicitness relates to the ambivalence both authors felt toward their artistic projects: Hemingway with regard to expressing emotion and O\u27Brien with regard to telling the truth about Vietnam. The linguistic mechanics of implicitness may explain the intuitions of Reader-Response Theory that meaning occurs in the interaction of reader with text. They are also related to Gestalt theory, quantum mechanics, and vorticism