stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness technique was an unfiltered flow of thought, usually written in first-person point of view. The character often jumps from one thought to another or delivers uninterrupted tangents. This writing style reflected the fragmented social consciousness that pervaded the time period due to the feeling of disillusionment following World War I.
During the Modernist era, a method of poetry called free verse grew in popularity. Free verse does away with traditional rhyme and meter. Instead, the line breaks in poetry are based on the poet's own sense of prosody and feeling toward the subject matter.
These three techniques, fragmentation, stream of consciousness, and free verse, were characteristic of the literary movement called Modernism.
There were several historical events that led to the advent of Modernism as a literary movement such as industrialization, urbanization, and WWI.
2. Besides his terse style and the iceberg theory, Ernest Hemingway was known for writing from his own experiences, which made some ideas or symbols to repeatedly appear in all his works. He served in the military for most of his life and enjoyed drinking and reflected these characteristics onto his characters. Therefore, common themes in his works include heroic fatalism and disillusionment after warfare, and common motifs include excessive drinking and ideal masculinity.
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. true hero faces death with dignity. Efforts to avoid death are ultimately futile and this nihilism is not a product of surrender but of heroic courage. Heroic fatalism refers to being able to recognize impending death and to live life with dignity until demise.
This theme is most evident in his novella, Old Man and the Sea. Santiago, the protagonist of the story, sails further and further out to catch the biggest fish. He manages to catch a marlin after eighty-seven days from his last fishery after three days of battle, and even as he is returning home, he continues to fight off sharks from eating his prey though he knows that his battle is useless. This story is an epic about a man who refuses to dogmatically succumb to death and give up his meaning in life. During this journey, Santiago falls sick, gets injured, gets a sunburn, and is barely able to rest, but never gives up. He says,
“… man is not made for defeat … a man can be destroyed but not defeated."
... Thus revealing heroic fatalism. Indeed, Santiago’s soul as a true hero is not defeated by nature though his physical body is destroyed. Though he returns with only a fraction of the marlin, the townspeople, and the readers know that he is a true hero with dignity. Hemingway perceived struggles in life much alike with battles during wartime and, from his experiences, saw that man should die while fighting for his glory.
3. Arguably the greatest literary masterpiece, War and Peace is an amazing blend of philosophy, history, spirituality and love told through two families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. The Rostovs personify the Russian spirit. Count Rostov, a generous, kind spendthrift, can deny his family nothing. His countess is a warm, loving, overindulged woman. These characteristics are reflected in their children, while the austere Bolkonskys are duty bound. As normal human beings do, the three main characters grow, expand, and change over the course of fifteen years (1805-1820) beginning when Natasha Rostov is a young girl. It is a joy to watch her evolve into a beautiful, mature woman who loves two men: Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, an elegant, aristocratic army officer, and his friend, Count Pierre Bezukhov, a bear of a man who seeks answers to life in Freemasonry, mysticism, and superstition, and finally finding them in the philosophy of Platon Karatayev, an illiterate peasant soldier. Andrey and Pierre argue the plight of the peasants, the rights of the aristocracy, and the merits of war, mirroring Tolstoy’s own reflections. The main focus is Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his ignominious retreat.
Reading War and Peace isn’t casual commuter fare. There are hundreds of characters and voluminous historical notes. Far from a groan, it deserves to be approached as a lavish feast with many varied courses. It has everything: multidimensional characters, descriptive battle scenes, social significance, and political maneuverings told from the perspective of hindsight. Anthony Briggs’s new translation is, perhaps, a purer version than we have seen heretofore, comparing favorably with the seventy-five-year-old Maud translation that had the benefit of Tolstoy’s input. There are some convoluted sentences better suited to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. However, Briggs has managed to keep the narrative interesting, free-flowing, and easy to read. War is easier to define than peace. War is associated with action, risk-taking, adventure; it is also seen as a manifestation of hell, as in General George S. Patton's famous assessment of World War II. If peace is connected with order, law, and justice, as Albert Einstein believed, then the establishment of peace requires thought and discipline. War creates more drama than peace and often makes for what one might call a more interesting story. For these reasons, war frequently proves to be a more suitable and engaging literary topic than peace. The story, after all, is important here, because human beings relate to one another through the stories they tell each other.