Forrest Robinson is affiliated with Western Illinois University. In the following excerpt, he argues that the reader's revelation in Hemingway's "In Another Country" "can be seen only through the consciousness of the invisible first-person narrator who—in the creative act of giving a form and a focus to his own past experience—resolves a conflict implicitly disclosed in the process of narration."

Hemingway's "In Another Country" offers unusual evidence of the essentially heuristic and therapeutic nature of his storytelling. His thematic concern— that a person "find things he cannot lose"— takes on considerable significance when the distinction between the protagonist and the first-person narrator is clarified. It is the protagonist who, along with the Italian major, faces the wall of despair and death after being wounded in Italy during World War I. It is the narrator, however, who epitomizes Hemingway's hero in this...