Hemingway’s Suicides: A Psychobiographical Approach to Literature

Draws on Freud’s theory of psychobiography to examine the devastating effect of the suicide of Hemingway’s father on the author’s life and writing. Opens with an explanation and history of the approach before moving into a commentary on Hemingway’s equation of suicide with cowardice and the numerous references to it in his works, including Death in the Afternoon and To Have and Have Not. Berman focuses primarily on For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its masked suicide of Robert Jordan, reading the novel as Hemingway’s meditation on his father’s death. Concludes that the author’s inability to write at the end of his life contributed to his suicide