SOURCE: "Supernaturalism and the Vernacular Style in "A Farewell to Arms'," in PMLA, Vol. 94, No. 2, March, 1979, pp. 311-18.

In the following essay, Dekker and Harris find evidence of "second sight" and other ghostly folk notions in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

The doric voice of Hemingway's twenties protagonists, though communally that of the vernacular tradition in American fiction,¹ is so much his own that words like "tradition" and "community" sound foolish or a cheat when applied to it. It creates a fictional world in which, seemingly, there is no place for literary allusions or intimations of a supernatural order. And it does this so successfully that readers coming to his work for the first time may be surprised, even a little annoyed, to be told that "Hemingway's reading is as important to his art as that of Coleridge";² that the author of "In Another Country" was a...