Hemingway's The Three Day Blow

In this narrative Hemingway uses a dialog between two main characters to set and move his story. The discussion between the characters is mostly inconsequential small talk between two old friends. Bill and Nick's conversation until Marge is mentioned serves the purpose of setting up the reader's understanding of their characters and relationship. The dialog is pretty much without much emotion or force or meaning and then Hemingway throws in this one profound paragraph on Nick's feelings about what has happened between him and Marge.

Nick said nothing. The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone. Bill wasn't there. He wasn't sitting in front of the fire or going fishing tomorrow with Bill and his dad or any thing. He wasn't drunk. It was all gone. All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had lost her. She was gone and he had sent her away. That was all that mattered. He might never see her again. Probably he never would. It was all gone, finished.

Here Hemingway's sentence structure is in short, to the point sentences. This gives the feeling of abruptness and importance. To me, each sentence was like a separate thought metaphorically hitting the character. It conveyed to me the desperation and sudden hopelessness the character feels.
Then Bill continues to congratulate Nick on his escape from marriage. The way the dialog continues with short sentences and fades back into inconsequential conversation. By doing this, Hemingway is highlighting and emphasizing the few non-dialog paragraphs which, to me, contain the really meaningful content.

Edger Allen Poe

Out of the three pieces of work the on that I found the most interesting would be the Edger Allen Poe piece, "The Tell-Tale Heart". I felt as if I was in the narrator's mind that all of his crazy rants, were mine also. The progression of the narrator's insanity is my favorite part of the story, it makes you wonder if you are the one going crazy. Poe's style of dark and mysterious, I believe is what appeals to people the most. That's why most of Poe's pieces of work are so popular, readers love the unknown and the suspense. As a reader when I come to the part about the narrator hearing the beating heart, it's as if I can hear the beating heart also. Poe makes the reader feel as if they are in the story that they are one of the characters in the story. The police showing up right after the narrator had finished killing the old man adds to the suspense and appeal.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allen Poe often uses very dark and shadowy images to formulate his stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems to be a sort of dialogue between the narrator and some unknown person. While the narrator continually tries to prove his sanity and innocence the story grows with a sense of disturbing images of watching an old man while he sleeps.

Poe writes with a bit of suspense as we watch the narrator describe the murder of the old man. The word choice and structure help shape the time frame in which the story was composed. For example, Poe uses words like hearken and mad instead of “listen” and “insane”. While the narrator persistently tries to prove his own innocence he in turn admits to having murdered the old man.

"The Tale-Tell Heart" also begins with a bit of forshadowing. "TRUE!" is presented as the first word in Poe's word to show the insanity of the narrator. As the officers inspect the home the mind of the narrator ran wild with terror of being blamed for the murder, so much so that her conscious eats at her and leads her to confess to the murder of the old man.

Other stories where I have seen Poe use these types of murky images are in “The Fall of Usher”. The strange and suspenseful techniques plainly demonstrate Poe’s writing styles.

the style of Edgar Allen Poe in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Well...

First things first, Poe's writing seems to be a bit dated. It may be just me, but so of the words and phrases he uses, such as in the line "I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased," indicate a sign of his literary style. Poe could have simply written, "I shared small talk with the cops, with an eccentric tone and body movements, but the noise was getting louder." His language is more prescriptive as opposed to colloquial.

His word choices also seem to grant the piece, and his style overall, as having this intelligent and well-versed linguistic style. The line, "No doubt I now grew very pale; - but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice," is such a brilliant way for him to convey a feeling of anxiety in the narrator. His choices of words, however, also seem to date his writing; words such as hearken, deed & mad, used in their context, give an idea of the time frame in which his writing occurs. Further contributions also stem from occurrences in the writing, such as the narrator using a lantern at night or him disposing of the old man under the floorboards.

Finally, Poe's style has this sensation of suspense and fear throughout. As you read you can visualize it as being in a film that displays noir characteristics, like that found in films such as Brick and Dark City. There is this mysterious and suspenseful tone that is omnipresent throughout the writing, which clearly contributes to the specific style of Edgar Allen Poe.

Three Day Blow (Hemingway)

Anyone familiar with Hemingway's style of writing usually point to his usage of dialogue to drive the story. We see short bursts of full-on paragraphs to conceptualize the setting, and get a general feel of the atmosphere in the story, but the main content is found in the conversation between two friends, Nick and Bill.

Another aspect we see with Hemingway's style is that the narrative voice is aloof. The narrative voice does not try to intrude the story, if not that much; it does not try to be omniscient. While Bill comforts Nick by telling him that he's better off, Nick just gives distant one word responses. Even then the narrator does not relay, "Well, this is what Nick really thinks: blahblahblah..." Instead, we are just given only what the narrator sees. In other words, the narrator is simply there to report. This is a style reminiscent of the journalistic approach of newspapers.

One last interesting note to Hemingway's style (at least in this story) is how he uses the every day normal moments to overlay a deeper issue. This is often one of the key signifier for Modern writers like Joyce or Woolf. What is the every day normal event? Two bros having a couple of whiskeys and scotch shots, talking about literature, baseball, and fishing. What is the underlying issue? Broken relationships, and how to drink yourself to happiness. Or perhaps how a broken relationship does not mean it is the end of the world, but a start of a new one.

Margaret Atwoods, "This Is a Photograph of Me"

I orginally chose to blog about Poe's work due to his usual gruesome and unique writing style. But when I scanned over Margaret Atwood's, "This Is a Photograph of Me," I was immediately intrigued wirth her seven paragraph story.

She allows the reader to mentally illustrate the photo of a small, country home along with some land. Atwood is extremely descriptive in her writing. I felt as if I was holding the older, soiled photograph in my hand, dim and grey as if the camera had no flash. She then unfolds the story piece by piece. First, your looking at a blurred photo, next a tree branch comes into vision, then the frame of a house and finally some hills and a lake.

After describing a simple photo, Atwood throws in a cliffhanger, "The photograph was taken the day after I drowned". She puts it in parenthesis as if to say, this is just a simple side-note, nothing to take seriously. This gave a gruesome, mysterious twist to her writing style and left me wanting to read more of her other work.

Margaret Atwood- style

In Margaret Atwood’s short poem, “This is a Photograph of Me”, her style comes across clearly and distinctively as her own. The overall format of the poem seems to go from with the lesser details of the photo s, to the main focus of the picture, then back to another small detail. In the beginning she describes the trees and slope. As the poem goes on, Atwood works her way to the center of the picture, the lake. Then she finishes the piece by adding that the narrator body is under the lake. This makes her poem her own by treating the main point of photo as a small detail. (This seems to be emphasized by the use of the parenthesis around the writing.) There also seems to be a nonchalant and casual flow to the poem in terms of style. It may seem odd for such a heavy and serious subject like death, but Margret Atwood carries this style in her other works as well. Another point to be made about the style of the poem is that the work itself tries to carry detail without actually accomplishing it. For example, in the sentence “a thing that is like a branch” (8 Atwood) the word like show that the object is similar to a branch, but is not one. Also, in “It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am”(20-21) Atwood seems to try and convey details of the body, but the writing comes across as ambiguous. Margret Atwood’s style of writing is certainly one all her own. Though her style might be a bit difficult for a novice or even intermediate writer to achieve, elements of this style can be very useful in many types of papers once learned.

Atwood, Marget. “This is a Photograph of Me”. Academy of American Poets. Sep 05 2010.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16220