HEMINGWAY!

Ernest Hemingway is awesome. I'm just going to start off with that. My household's a bit nerdy, and my mother and I occasionally have a habit of speaking about our day the same way that he wrote... Rereading that, we're kind of pathetic. I don't care though, I read "The Sun Also Rises" summer before Junior year, and feel in love with him completely. No idea why.

So, in my nerdy way, I was completely jazzed that we'd be reading a story by him.

And then I read it, and I was very confused. It was good, but I couldn't figure out what the actual topic was. I had an assumption it was marriage, but that didn't make for a truly interesting story.

Being told the topic was abortion made me feel a bit dumb. It was so obvious once I figured it out, why hadn't I caught it? Probably because I don't get 1920's abortion references, and I wasn't paying too close of attention when I first read it. No individual detail of the story said "HI, I'M ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND TODAY I'M GOING TO WRITE ABOUT ABORTION". But put all together, that's really the only thing that could have made it more obvious.

What I'm getting at is, that topic made me love the story. Why, I do not know. The dynamic of the couple was fascinating. They seem to love each other, but with the pregnancy, no matter what they do, everything is going to change. It almost shows us that eventually the fun stops and real life is going to slap you in the face. How you choose to deal with it is your choice, but you won't be the same afterwards. It's sad, but it true, which is what I like.

So far we haven't read a happy story in this class, come to think of it. Does literary fiction just tend to be depressing?