SOURCE: Gajdusek, Robert E. “Harder on Himself Than Most: A Study of Hemingway's Self-Evaluation and Self-Projection in His Work.” In Hemingway in His Own Country, pp. 357-67. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

In the essay below, Gajdusek explores how some of the characters in Hemingway's fiction represent a “self-projection” of the author's own history and background, asserting that Hemingway “lets himself … stand in for the failures and delinquencies of twentieth-century man,” and “descends into his own unconscious to gain what insight he has into and what evidence he has for the basic moral failure of his age.”

It would be too great fortune to have the time here to go through a rereading of stories from In Our Time, one in which I would emphasize the ironies and judgmental overtones that go into the moral groundwork of a Hemingway portrait. I would like to do...