Point of View

Most of the stories in the collection are told in the objective third person. This is in line with Hemingway's objective, straightforward descriptive style. Most of the third-person stories do allow the reader access to Nick's thoughts, however, and the narration often never leaves him, though there are exceptions (such as "The Last Good Country").

Hemingway drops the third-person in other stories, such as "Light of the World" and "Now I Lay Me." There does not appear to be just one reason for this stylistic choice, but it is an effective way of entering into Nick's thoughts, especially in a story such as "Now I Lay Me," which is composed mainly of the mental games Nick engages in to stay awake. However, in other works which focus on Nick's thoughts, Hemingway adopts a third-person stream-of-consciousness style of writing, such as in "On Writing" and, to a...