Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action

Identifying Hemingway as a psychological novelist, Cirino examines the role of consciousness within a range of texts, including “Big Two-Hearted River,” A Farewell to Arms, Islands in the Stream, and The Old Man and the Sea. Cirino focuses on the protagonists’ internal struggles with present crises and past traumas to reveal the author’s astute understanding of the modern mind’s emotional and cognitive complexity, concluding that the “Hemingway hero is introspective enough to know his own impulse to think about things, which often leads to overthinking things; this tendency becomes the constant struggle that dominates the Hemingway text.” Draws on the theories of Freud, James, Bergson, and others to explicate the function of consciousness