Abstract
This paper examines the modernist expression of the individual angst through the lens of Existential philosophy by reading the character of the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s last published novel, Islands in the Stream (1970). The explication of this philosophical idea is borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre's works; Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Humanism. The existential philosophical ground that is used for a reading of the text are concepts of 'Being', the ‘en-soi’, and ‘pour -soi’, the possibility of the ‘pour- soi’, anguish and the notion of freedom and liberty exercised by the ‘for-itself’ in the face of the existential 'neant’ or as Hemingway termed it, the ‘nada’. The paper is divided into two parts: the first part provides a brief exposition of these concepts which are applied to read the text in the second section. This paper is invested in revisiting the significant contribution of Hemingway and Sartre as key figures whose ideas shaped modernity’s engagement with the ‘self’ and enriched the literary and theoretical landscape. The revisiting of a key modernist thinker and writer is thus a necessary academic endeavour that reorients our gaze to the past which can be useful in the contemporary times as we grapple with times of loss, anguish, freedom, and authenticity as the globe encounters a different form of fear and non-being owing to the pandemic and the Ukraine invasion induced suffering.
Keywords: Modernism, Existentialism, ‘other’, code-hero, ‘nada’.
Introduction
This paper analyses Nobel laureate (1954) Ernest Hemingway’s (1891-1961) novel Islands in the Stream (1970) as an exemplification of Existential philosophy by drawing upon certain key ideas enumerated in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Both Hemingway and Sartre are seminal figures for any critical revisiting that engages with Modernism and its interconnections with Existential philosophy. Briefly, Modernist literature is considered to be invested in excavating a specific relationship of the modern individual to the social and the political. Despite the understanding of modernism which celebrates the telos and possibility of human progress with its dependency on human knowledge we know that this modernity thesis was also complicated by the cataclysmic events that the west witnessed due to the two world wars. The promise of modernity’s grand march to progress was deeply distressed as the writers, artists, and thinkers grappled with unprecedented suffering in the early decades of the twentieth century. One can suggest that modern writers and thinkers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Stephen Mallarme, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Sartre, etc. were experimenting with and articulating subjective impressionism through a movement away from objectivity, clear-cut moral positions and fragmented narrative points of view (Barry 82). These writers wrote about a world in ruins where the individual was pitted against a terrible uncaring universe that seemed to be a fragment. “Hemingway, like many other modernist writers, saw the disruption of time and mythic experience as at once a pressing reality and a pertinent metaphor for the entire angst- and anomie-ridden post-World War I landscape… as attempts to define and respond to a terrifyingly denatured and devitalized landscape of alienation, lostness, and emptiness” (Strychacz 56-57). For these high modernist writers, this encounter with the ruined edifices and fragments did not translate into a celebration of the fragmented consciousness, unlike the later postmodern writers; it rather engendered moments of acute fear. It is this specific inflection of the lost individual grappling in a ruined world that Existentialist philosophy attempts to articulate. Even before the skepticism associated with the postmodern, the existential philosophers directed their skeptical gaze on the human condition and unmasked many of the certainties of the times. It is important to explain in some detail the core concepts of the Sartrean existential philosophy that shall be used later to read the text.
Existentialism and the Sartrean philosophy
Defining the core of the Sartrean philosophy, Crowell says that human existence is predicated on the two modes of ‘Being’ the ‘en-soi’ that is the ‘Being in itself’ and the ‘pour-soi’ the ‘Being for itself’; the ‘en-soi’ is the being of the phenomena, the given datum in the world. It is never either possible or impossible. It is “uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with being, being- in -itself is the detrop for eternity” (Being and Nothingess lxvi). The ‘pour-soi’ or the ‘being-for-itself’ is Heidegger’s ‘dasien’, a conscious existence that has a past and a future and generates itself and a world. The facticity of this ‘pour-soi’ involves action and an agentive perspective that is termed transcendence (Crowell). Its past is its facticity, in transcending these conditions, the ‘pour-soi’ separates itself from its past but the past remains behind to haunt the awareness of the ‘pour-soi’. The ‘pour-soi' is responsible for the past, but it is free to interpret it and give it a sequel, a future that will alter its meaning (Blackham 113). Since the future is a project and a continuously evolving possibility, the ‘pour-soi’ faces the future with a feeling of dread. The ‘pour-soi’ thus has to accept the awful responsibility of creating and reshaping its facticity to move towards its future.
This engagement of the individual existence with its facticity is dependent on action and choice (Crowell). In this movement, it also comes across the unavoidable fact of its freedom. Sartre says, “Man is condemned to be free” (Existentialism and Humanism 34). Man cannot escape his freedom, he is left alone, without excuse, “Liberty is the being of man” (Being and Nothingness 510). He does not exist outside his realization, existing only through his actions and his purpose. Mészáros explains it thus “the freedom of our action is made… in terms of an authentic choice- the choice of our being”, “insisting that we are absolutely free and absolutely responsible… meaning that the adversity of my environment imposes on me the absolute obligation of carrying the full burden of responsibility also for my situation which I therefore must be, rather than just being in it”(190, emphasis in the original).
Man can practice the art of self-deception by choosing to ignore this freedom of choice and action. In Existentialism, Sartre uses the term ‘bad-faith’ to denote this lie used to deceive one's self to escape the responsibility imposed by freedom. The responsibility of the ‘pour-soi’ is not limited to the personal but extends to the whole world, in choosing itself it chooses for the whole of mankind (30). This sense of complete and profound responsibility is the cause of feelings of anguish, abandonment, and despair(ibid). To escape from this profound responsibility is to lie to oneself, to act in bad faith. Sartre developed the idea of ‘good-faith’ as a counter to bad-faith. While good- faith is an attempt to face our freedom, bad-faith is an attempt to flee from it. Acting on good-faith the ‘pour-soi’ attempts to achieve its ideal being, the unity of its ‘pour-soi’ with the ‘en-soi’, in the distant future, which is impossible in principle. In bad-faith, the ‘pour-soi’ sees itself as a product of heredity, environment, custom, and culture and shirks its responsibility to exercise its freedom of will. The only choice available to the human being is to keep choosing and acting in the face of this desolate situation. The only hope for survival lies in its courage to face this meaningless and irrational world.
The Hemingway Protagonist and Sartrean Existential Credo
Stoltzfus has analyzed the resonances between Sartre’s philosophical enterprise and Hemingway’s explication of freedom, choice, action and authenticity, ‘nada’, which underpins this paper’s argument (205-228). Hemingway’s claim to an existential reading centre on his ability to create ‘authentic’ characters who face their responsibility, who are ready to create and shape their present and future without getting enmeshed in their past failures and who survive and exist in the presence of their existential ‘nada’, the meaningless nothingness. This nothingness is all-pervasive, huge, terrible, an absence of meaning, of order, the chaos of non-meaning, which the individual ‘dasein’ is forced to perceive, and the will is challenged to respond (Rovit 94). The Hemingway protagonist thus encounters what Sartre has called the pure contingency of human existence.
“Hemingway’s consistent belief in the freedom of the individual to make a responsible choice was paid for at the painful expense of having constantly to wage battle with the fearful unpredictability of the future” (Rovit 96). The Hemingway protagonist is burdened with the responsibility and freedom of not only to choose and act for himself but also for others. He cannot and more importantly does not shirk his responsibility. In addition to this awful responsibility and freedom, he has to contend with the ‘nada’, “a total whimsical destruction of his will and his responsibility” (ibid). The plots in Hemingway thus carry “his imagination of figures who hold together configuration of possibility and potentiality, partly realized, partly to be realized” (Mottram 122).
According to Tackach, the “traditional Hemingway hero[demonstrates] simplicity in style, grace under pressure, stoic acceptance of defeat” (79-80). Dutta calls the Hemingway hero a “cult literary figure of the time” who is very significant in our understanding of the “backdrop of war in American Literature” (309). Philip Young while discussing the essential feature of the Hemingway protagonist classifies them into two kinds: the ‘hero’ and the ‘code-hero’. The ‘hero’ figure is young, honest, sensitive but very nervous. He dies a thousand times before his death and never recovers completely from the emotional scars he gets from the harsh encounters with the world. In contrast, the ‘code-hero’ exemplifies certain principles of honour, courage, dignity, and endurance that enable him to survive decently in a world of violence, disorder, chaos, and misery to which he is introduced and he has to inhabit. Examples of this Hemingway figure include Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929), Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Jack Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), etc. They are the quintessential masculine figures of the “lost generation”, a group of aimless drifters who roamed around Europe and other countries during the wars and gave voice to the disillusionment of that generation. Santiago, the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is an exemplary code-hero in the Hemingway oeuvre. It needs to be noted that the Hemingway protagonist is a hyper-masculine figure who has been identified closely with the biography of the creator (Justus; Couce). These lost men who are confronted with war and violence embody the lost innocence of the generation that lived through the war-ravaged world of that time.
Rovit modifies Young’s idea about the Hemingway protagonist and suggests that he can be classified as the ‘tyro’ and the ‘tutor figure’. The ‘tyro’ figure has a particularly fecund imagination of disaster and he is the defeated victim. He agrees with Young that the ‘tyro’ is wounded physically and emotionally and is unable to recover from his scars. The ‘tutor’ figure is also defeated but he, “refuses to resign himself to the chaos of unmeaning and to deny the actuality of his fearsome defeat… he is neither a victim nor a rebel…he only serves his life with dignity” (Rovit, 47). He is what Mottram calls, “a figure of possibility and potentiality” (122) who tries to live an ‘authentic life’ in the Sartrean sense by accepting both his freedom to act and his responsibility.
Commenting on the courage of his protagonist in accepting the challenge to play the game in this malignant and irrational world, Hemingway says, “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them. to break them so of course, it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are one of these types you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry” (A Farewell to Arms 249). Later in the same novel, he says, “You did not know what it was all about. You never had the time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you” (ibid. 327). The Hemingway protagonist is ultimately sacrificed but the difference lies in the fact that “he chooses that end as the only proposition conceivable in the existential world which he has decided to be the pattern and the process” (Mottram 123).
The only guide available to the Hemingway protagonist to operate in this whimsical and destructive world is to follow the Hemingway code. In its simplest terms the code consists of two lessons, “the ability to make realistic promises to oneself and the ability to forgive oneself one’s past one’s facticity or en-soi” (Rovit 92). To quote Rovit again, “The code is a tentative bridge he erects into the future to affect a passage over the shadow (the past); it is a network of promises to himself of future challenges and how he will respond to them. It is tentative, flexible, and subject to swift changes, but according to his capacity to redeem those promises to himself that can be kept, it gives the hero minimum surety and rest in a quixotic world that is his only guide to the future” (ibid 96). According to Rowland, the true[Hemingway] hero accepts responsibility for himself in a world where notions of ultimate truth and certainty have all but vanished, and with heartfelt vigour and persistence he must wring meaning out of a world devoid of any values outside of himself.
Islands in the Stream and Existential Philosophy
Thomas Hudson is the tutor protagonist of Hemingway’s last book published posthumously in 1970. Hemingway wrote the novel over a long period from 1946 to 1947, and from 1950-1951(Baker 379). According to Fleming, this novel demonstrates important narrative and character tropes that define the Hemingway protagonist and needs to be integrated into the Hemingway canon (128-148), despite the episodic nature and the posthumous publication history and “considerable editing first by Hemingway himself — Islands in the Stream retains enough narrative patterning to make it structurally and thematically coherent” (Justus 58). Hudson’s characterisation has also been analysed through the lens of feminist eco-criticism via a focus on naturalism, the sea and Hudson’s relationship to it through his life on the island and his death (Doneer); as well as a psycho-biographical approach that explains the anecdotes and episodes of this three-part novel (Baker). These approaches offer us an engaging insight into the novel but does not address itself to the exploration of Hudson's existential ‘angst’, his feeling of loss, despair, and loneliness. An alternative existential reading makes the novel more interesting and richer as well as provides us insights for the contemporary time as well which I shall refer to in the conclusion.
The existential concerns paramount in the emotional structure of the novel centre around the feelings of loss of belief, alienation, loneliness, an oppressive sense of nostalgia, suicide, and death that surrounds Hudson, “The emotional state of the protagonist is the consistent focus throughout the novel, and depletion is its most telling note. Texturally, the novel is studded with the diction of defeat: unhappiness, suffering, loss, sorrows and cries, grief, hopelessness, blankness, wickedness” (Justus 59). Hudson is one of the wounded Hemingway heroes to borrow Young’s term. His sense of loss and grief mentioned in Part one ‘Bimini’ is occasioned by his two divorces and the absence of his three sons. The narrative structure of ‘Bimini’ relies heavily on a contrast between scenes of action and calm repose.
Hudson’s awareness of the existential ‘other’ is an important aspect of his perception of and struggle against the contingent situation. The overwhelming and overpowering presence of the sea and the given datum about the Cuban poverty and squalor are two important examples of the existential ‘other’ that Hudson confronts. Both these others are complete by themselves and indifferent to his existence. The tall chimneys, the old cobblestones, the harbour, the black and greasy water, the wooden docks, the shantytown, the black wall beside the railway track merge with his perception of the sea. The sea like these ‘en-sois’ “… is just there and the wind moves her and they fight over her surface, but down below none of that matters” (Islands 221). Hudson is perpetually conscious of the existence and presence of numerous other ‘en-sois’ around him. Hudson comes to understand the nature of his relationship with the non-human, the existential ‘other’ in his response to the facticity of the “heron” (Islands 353), the “big and ugly hermit-crab” (354), the “mullet” (354) the “yellow sand on the beach” (355) and says “I love doing it” (355).
Hudson’s calmful meditations centre around his realisation that he failed to be a good husband and a good father. He is emotionally disturbed from having left his first wife, his lack of discipline, his selfishness, and ruthlessness (Islands 7-9). His sense of failure, dread, and collapse is given an immediate social and cultural context during the birthday celebration festivities for the Queen. The sense of collapse implicit in the chaotic and violent rowdiness of the boat-boys, the meaningless fight with the obnoxious tourist, and the senseless prank played on the constable, create an ‘aura of dread’ that provides a context for Hudson’s brooding sense of failure to lead a life of discipline and order (Justus 59). Hudson’s conversations with Mr. Bobby about the waterspout and End of the world painting further intensifies this aura of dread.
The presence of Hudson's writer friend, Roger Davis intensifies and heightens the painter’s sense of guilt, gloom, failure, and collapse. Roger's introspective guilt on account of his brother’s death, his sense of failure as a writer and good lover is juxtaposed with Hudson’s meditations on failure. The lengthy conversation between Hudson and David reiterates the feeling of dread they both feel as they perceive the presence of evil- the irreducible Existential Other outside their being, and the evil inside their beings. The Existential Other- violence, vulgarity, waterspouts, hurricanes, sea are not as potent as the internal evils, “… the personal demons and the dark nightmares” (Justus 59), that haunt both Roger and Hudson. These two friends symbolise what Justus calls the “… fragile remnants of human-being victimised as much by his deficiencies as by the external evil, the Other” (ibid 59). But there is an essential difference in their response to this omnipresent evil. While Hudson is prepared to fight against his demons and tries to fathom the irrationality of the Other, Davis is ready to flee from them to the west with Audrey. He remains the characteristic ‘tyro’ figure who never learns, not because he is incapable of learning but because he chooses to retreat into some haven.
Hudson is the state of being “spooked” (Islands 251; 353), throughout the novel, a term signifying other “… deleterious conditions like feeling bad, feeling nausea, feeling sick, moments of moral- physical repugnance and repulsion” (Mottram133). He had to keep the enemy (the external and the internal) at bay, he has to guard himself against feeling “spooky.” His enemy is the feeling of grief and loneliness. To ward it off, he invents his code of behaviour- a code centred around his work, painting, drinking, and nostalgic reminiscences of the past, in short, a life of enforced habit and discipline. He steadfastly avoids any emotional involvement and is content to think that he has been “… able to replace almost everything except the children with work and the steady normal working life he had built on the island. He believed he had made something that would last and hold him. Now when he was lonesome for Paris, he would remember Paris instead of going there. He did the same thing with all of Europe and much of Asia and Africa” (Islands 7). This strict imposition of discipline is “… neither stoic nor puritan but the existential condition for a non-reductive life” (Mottram 141). Sojka also suggests that discipline is necessary for the Hemingway protagonist. While we see Hudson lose all discipline after the death of his sons, he is also besieged by guilt as he initially stays away from the war. In deciding to participate in the war, he recovers his discipline to perform his duty and ultimately achieves “existential salvation” and the novel reinforces the Hemingway code (279).
Hudson’s reliance on alcohol and Seconal, a barbiturate, suggests a fragile psychological balance that is under constant threat. The significance he imparts to his specially concocted coconut cocktail or frozen daiquiri, the importance he attaches to his morning swim and newspaper, or to the first drink of the day, the little ritual he makes of burning driftwood in the fire-place or the way he responds to the pictures in his Cuban Finca, is ritualistic, his code that holds them together. His deliberate decision to live on the island in magnificent isolation is also part of his self-disciplining ritual. His remark that he has learned to live by himself pretty well and he works hard (Islands 25), merely points to the surface feeling of repose and calm his general ritualistic routine imposes on him.
This surface feeling of repose and calm is shattered towards the end of the first section when Hudson receives the news of the death of the two younger boys, David and Andrew, and later of Tom’s death in the war. The three boys become part of his past, his facticity. Their life and occasional companionship afforded moments of rare happiness in Hudson’s otherwise barren life. With their death, he can no longer experience the pleasures of the shared holidays at the Idaho ranch or the Bimini house. Rovit (1986) suggests that Hudson exhibits an excess of melancholy and grief at the death of his sons. In his opinion, it is difficult to find any ‘objective-co-relative’ to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase, for Hudson’s excessive grief in the light of his unfatherly conduct during David’s fight with the Marlin and the fact that there is a significant time-lapse between the news of death and Hudson’s display of grief. He explains this apparent inconsistency by blaming it on editorial lapses (Islands 170-71). But Hudson’s deep anguish and suffering at his son’s death are accompanied by the feeling of absurdity at his continued existence. He tells himself, “There is only one thing you don’t get over and that is death” (Islands 278). In their death, he comes face to face with the ‘nada’ that he managed to suppress so far.
In the face of his existential ‘nada’, his self-imposed discipline becomes all the more necessary and pronounced. He forces himself to behave in an orderly and dignified manner and tells Eddy, “We’ll play it out the way we can” (Islands 196). His reading, exercising, and drinking abroad the Ile de France become his antidote to grief. He tells himself,” You are always drinking against something or for something now” (ibid. 232). His conversations with his cat Boise and Honest Lil are his “palliative measures” (ibid. 266). His desperation to keep going is implicit in his remark that, "There is no way for you to get what you want and you will never have what you want again” (ibid. 266), he can only keep on playing his life’s game well.
Hudson is accused of being a “grief-hoarder” (Islands 255) by Willie, his U-boat companion. He acknowledges the fact that he could not share the news of his son’s death with anyone, “Telling never did me any good. Telling is worse for me than not telling” (ibid258). Hudson takes on the mantle of the grief-hoarder and chief-mourner, for his grief and the suffering and grief of Tom's mother. His protective behaviour towards her is as much for her sake as it is for his own. Though he accepts the impossibility of getting away from death he tries hard not to think about it, “How do you tell a mother that her boy has died …How do you tell yourself that your boy is dead? You used to know all the answers. Answer me that” (ibid299). The brief answer he finds is in the moment of passionate lovemaking with Tom's mother. In this moment of togetherness, they can create an existential ’now’ that makes their ’nada’ bearable. But both of them are aware of the temporal nature of this existential now. They want to get back together but they are aware that “it will not work” (ibid 301).
Hudson’s nostalgic reminiscences of his past make his ‘nada’ bearable. His idle happy days in Paris, the memories of the Parisian streets and cafes, the meetings with other painters and writers echo other such perfect moments that one finds in Sartre’s Nausea. After the death of his sons, his compulsive need to slip back into the memories of his past become more acute. He realises that he cannot run away from the suffering and despair of his present conditions, therefore he keeps going back to his past. Hemingway’s use of the flashback technique to facilitate Hudson’s journey down the memory lane is very effective. The reminiscences of his love affairs with the Princess on his Mediterranean voyage or his memory of his wild orgy with three Chinese prostitutes, his glorious days in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe are his attempts to idealise his past. By doing so he tries to impart some meaning to his facticity, a relevance that can help him survive in his present state of shock and despair. Hudson is aware that he is choosing, “surrogates not to regain anything but simply to keep from losing everything. The make-do stability only barely disguises desperation and the desperation is disguised not all by the explicit pattern, order, and rhythm that Hudson arbitrarily imposes on himself” (Justus62).
Hudson’s ultimate decision to join in the Nazi- hunt is his last surrogate in the face of the haunting spectre of the existential nada. He knows he cannot escape; he just must go on (Islands 317). The duty to just carry on and the action keeps his mind off things (ibid 334), but we can sense his feelings of being haunted and hunted (Mottram 145). His decision to join the war effort is not because he is ideologically committed, it is simply a surrogate that helps him to sustain his existence, he has to do it, but he is not proud of it, he only has to do it well (Islands 335). The long hours on the ship offer him enough time to slip back into his meditative mood. He realizes that “There was no use in thinking about them, He had traded remorse for another horse he was riding now…(to) do a good job of non-thinking” (ibid. 360). His work and duty become his defence against thinking. He feels his iron control over his thoughts and emotions slipping when he is not working himself to death, the “horrors” of the “game” keep coming back to haunt him (ibid. 361). What appears to be senseless exhaustion is his only antidote to thinking and suffering.
He chooses to disregard his safety in carrying out the suicidal attack on the German submarine so that he can do his 'duty' well. He is grievously wounded and he makes sure that his wounds would turn lethal by forcing his crew to diffuse a booby-trapped turtle boat before they take him to the hospital (Rovit172). As he lies wounded on the deck, he feels relieved from all his duties, responsibilities, and obligations. He thinks of the happy days of Paris, of his paintings, and of the times he had spent with young Tom and his mother, with a sense of peace and happiness. He wants to hold on to these memories, “Hang on good now to how you truly want to do it. You must hold hard to life… Bit life is a cheap thing beside a man’s work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight… without any hope of anything” (Islands 434), and a little later in the novel, “He felt far away now and there were no problems at all” (ibid. 436). His suicidal attempt succeeds, his wounds are lethal enough to end his life.
Hudson dies but he consciously chooses that end as the only conceivable choice in the existential world that he inhabits. He chooses to be the pattern and the process of his life and death. In his decision to choose his death, he exhausts the possibility as a ‘pour-soi’. According to Sartre “… a death is never that which gives life its meanings, it is on the contrary that which on principle removes all meaning from life,” (Being 539), and “Suicide is an act of life which requires a meaning only when the future can give to it, but as it is the last act of life it is denied this future, therefore it is an absurdity which causes life to be submerged in the absurd” (ibid. 540).
Ultimately the world is a “big crap game” against which Hudson has pitted himself and all he feels at the end is overpowering tiredness. He is conscious of his struggle, but he is content that he has done his job well, “I am really tired finally. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I would have done without it since young Tom died… you could have done something useful. Maybe… Duty is simpler. This is useful… Do not think against it. It helps to get over with things. That's all we are working for” (Islands 429). In the words of Mottram, the “…novel finally concentrates on the grim helplessness of human-beings in situations they choose to be in to manufacture an ethic” (146).
Hudson is one of the ‘tutor’ figures in the Hemingway canon who is killed by the world, but who lives by his ‘code’ and dies by it. He is neither a rebel nor a victim but an existential being who devises his strategy to confront the hopeless situation. He is acutely conscious of it; he just tries to do what he feels is the best in the situation. He is the symbol of an existential being who is aware of his possibilities and who creates his little moments of stability in the face of the existential ‘nada’ he encounters. His “palliative measures” provide him with some sort of justification to exist. His struggle demonstrates the shattering experience of the ‘pour-soi’ facing the pure contingency of its being.
For Carlos Baker, Hudson demonstrates pride without vanity in his programme of self-rehabilitation (408). Rovit thinks that the abundance of memory and melancholy in this novel highlights lines of anguish and reveals images of troubled memories flitting like vexations shadows across Hemingway’s vision (173). But the enduring impression left by this last work of Ernest Hemingway is the extent to which man controls, shapes, and arranges his past to give them some measure of rationality and justification. He is destroyed by his efforts but he manages to remain undefeated. Hudson is the symbol of “a spiritual alien adjusting as well as he can to the condition of human separation” (Justus 63)” … [further that] “Man doomed to failure, he must run a race whose outcome is already decided… he must live with violence and pain in a sustained anguish that comes from a realization of his only temporary survival; fear is a constant and while courage is possible, heroism is not” (Justus54). This quote is a succinct summation of the quandary of existence encountered by Hudson where he tries to live by his credo, the code and yet his life is sacrificed in his following that code.
Conclusion
The paper has read Hemingway’s use of existential philosophical ideas in his last novel Islands in the Stream by deploying key concepts as explicated by Jean-Paul Sartre. Despite having slid from critical engagement, this novel is a good example of both modernist and existential concern with the theme of individual consciousness grappling with alienation and anguish as it confronts a world that seems meaningless and absurd. Set in the aftermath of a world ravaged by the two world wars, the novel is a testimony of its historical time; it is also a document of individual strife and struggle that is dealing with an acute sense of loneliness brought on due to the inimical circumstances. The novel’s explication of the individual’s attempt to choose and act testifies to Hemingway’s belief in the value of courage to act that was so central to his worldview. A revisiting of the core existential concerns that illuminate the novel is an important critical endeavour in the present time. It becomes an essential text for us as we are confronting another kind of alienation and loneliness as we are forced to exist in our time engulfed in another global crisis which has made us hermits and recluses in our own homes where our actions and choices are also necessary for our collective futures. More significantly we need to revisit and recover the Hemingway coda of authenticity and choice in being responsible agents with agency as we encounter another historical blunder being enacted in the Ukraine invasion at present. The Sartrean and Hemingwayian existential concern provides us the language and vocabulary to think of our ideologies and actions that determine individual agency and choice. Much like Thomas Hudson we too must choose and act responsibly and own that choice, be authentic and not lapse into bad-faith, we need to discover our good-faith and be transparent.
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