SOURCE: Cohen, Milton A. “Soldiers' Voices in In Our Time: Hemingway's Ventriloquism.” The Hemingway Review 20, no. 1 (fall 2000): 22-9.

In the following essay, Cohen identifies the universality of combat experience and the difficulty of adjustment after the war as unifying themes in Ernest Hemingway's short fiction collection In Our Time and contends that different voices in the various stories represent Hemingway's view of war.

In Our Time echoes with the voices of soldiers—soldiers from different nations, ranks, battle theaters, even wars. Of the fourteen stories, sixteen chapters, and introduction (“On the Quai at Smyrna”), twelve pieces, evenly dispersed between stories and chapters, concern or allude to war. We hear the voices (or voiced thoughts) of thirteen separate soldiers and encounter one poor listener, Rinaldi. (For reasons I'll explain shortly, I'm counting each appearance of Nick as separate.) In those pieces that deal directly with war, three voices are...