Lean, Mean, Prosy Machine
Before he started writing fiction, Hemingway worked as a journalist in Michigan, and the lessons he learned at his newspaper job stood by him throughout his career. His stories don't include many adjectives or adverbs, with the primary focus normally on the action. Sometimes this can lead people to assume that his writing lacks emotion, but we think it's just a more artful way of building emotion. Feeling is created and conveyed without the narrator having to name it and, as in this story, that emotion can feel more authentic because it goes unnamed.
Another unfortunate assumption about Hemingway's style is that it's simply…well, simple. This can lead readers to be less attentive than they should be to the art and beauty of Hemingway's lines. Take this one from the first paragraph of "Cat in the Rain"…it's beautiful and quite lovely:
The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. (1)
That right there is one single, fluid clause: no commas, no modifiers. This sentence is one "long line," just like the sea it describes. If you read it to yourself aloud, you can hear and feel the movement of the waves, slipping back, only to break again; it's the way the sentence moves. This is an example of the incredible artistry of Hemingway's style: his sentences might be simple, but they can also embody the essence of what they are describing. They can make the thing, the movement, the feeling they are describing actually happen in your mind and body as a reader.
Clearly, this is something more artistically advanced than a newspaper article. As prosy as Hemingway's writing style is, you might say that it's actually almost like poetry. So take a moment, pretend you're in an art gallery, stop looking at your computer screen and worrying about your paper. With stories like this, you are looking at the art of language: simple, but in no way plain.