Men Without Women
What the world, or life, does to a man - how it inevitably "crucifies" the individual - is one of the two main themes in Earnest Hemingway's Men without Women. The other main theme, which grows naturally out of the first, reveals how individual characters react to the suffering, the loss, or the threat of danger that they are made to face. Questions to consider:
- Is the character brave and determined in the face of danger?
- Can he accept what life has stripped away from him without losing his dignity?
- Or is the character psychologically broken, or perhaps reduced to cowardly or unmanly behavior, by what life has In how many of these stories do you find characters that are being tested in one way or another?
- How do they respond to the situation that tests them?
- What are we, the readers, supposed to think of them by the end of the story?
This is the Men Without Women Research Paper Assignment:
Write a well organized essay of at least 5-6 page paper on the following topic. Support what you have to say with concrete references to these Hemingway stories themselves. Remember to address every question that appears in the topic.
The first short story in Men Without Women is called "The Undefeated." In what sense is Manuel Garcia, who is gored by the bull and ridiculed by the crowd, undefeated?
- Describe the elements in his character that make it possible to call him undefeated.
- Discuss in these same terms one or two other stories in this volume that tell about a man who, though beaten, can be though of as undefeated.
- In contrast to these stories about "undefeated" figures, Hemingway offers stories about "defeated" figures like Nike Adams in "In Another Country" and "Now I lay Me."
- What sorts of defeat does Nick suffer in these stories?
- Who do the titles lead us to an understanding of his psychological condition?
- In still another story, "The Killers," Hemingway presents both a "defeated" and an "undefeated" character. Who are they? Explain in detail how these labels apply to them.