The Iceberg Theory (also known as the "theory of omission") is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway began his writing career as a journalist and in the 1920s, while living in Paris, worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. As a journalist he learned to focus only on events being reported, and to omit superfluous and extraneous matter.
The theory is this: The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface. For example The Old Man and the Sea is a meditation upon youth and age, even though the protagonist spends little or no time thinking on those terms.
Background
Like other American writers such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, Hemingway worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. After graduating from high school he went to work as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star,[1] w
here he quickly learned that truth often lurks below the surface of a story.[2] He learned about corruption in city politics, and that in hospital emergency rooms and police stations a mask of cynicism was worn "like armour to shield whatever vulnerabilities remained."[2] In his pieces he wrote about relevant events, excluding the background. As foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, while living in Paris in the early 1920s, he covered the Greco-Turkish War. He wrote 14 articles for the newspaper, but as biographer Jeffrey Meyers explains, he wrote in such a way that "he objectively reported only the immediate events in order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focus—a spotlight rather than a stage."[3] From the Greco-Turkish War he gained valuable writing experience that he translated to the writing of fiction. He believed fiction could be based on reality, but that if an experience were to be distilled, as he explained, then "what he made up was truer than what he remembered."[3]
[edit]Definition
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon [4]
In 1923 Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story "Out of Season". In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoirs about his years as a young writer in Paris, he explains: "I omitted the real end [of "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything ... and the omitted part would strengthen the story."[5] In the opening chapter of Death in the Afternoon he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg.[5]
Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[6] Furthermore, Baker explains that in the writing style of the iceberg theory the hard facts float above water, while the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.sort out the facts[6]
Iceberg theory is also referred to as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer
could describe an action such as Nick Adams fishing in "Big Two-Hearted River" while conveying a different message about the action itself—Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not to think about the unpleasantness of his war experience.[7] In his essay "The Art of the Short Story", Hemingway is clear about his method: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit."[8]
From reading Rudyard Kipling he absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in "The Art of the Short Story": "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."[9] By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the "quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the auth
or eliminated."[9] His style added to the aesthetic: using "declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world" with simple and plain language, Hemingway's became "the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century" according to biographer Meyers.[9]
In her paper "Hemingway's Camera Eye", Zoe Trodd explains Hemingway uses repetition in prose to build a collage of snapshots to create a entire picture. Of his iceberg theory, she claims, it "is also a glacier waterfall, infused with movement by his multi-focal aesthetic."[10] Furthermore, she believes Hemingway's iceberg theory "demanded that the reader feel the whole story" and that the reader is meant to "fill the gaps left by his omissions with their feelings".[10]
Hemingway scholar Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night?
What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" By separating himself from the characters he created, Hemingway strengthens the drama. The means of achieving a strong drama is to minimize, or omit, the feelings that produced the fiction he wrote.[11]

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