Remate and autobiography in Islands in the stream

Extract

[...] Hemingway's network of Cuban spies at the so-called “Crook Factory” and Nazi hunts in the gulf not only distracted from the war effort, but also served as a serious distraction from his writing. As Burwell points out, Hemingway's Nazi-hunting exploits contributed to the ruin of his third marriage and mark the peak of his ten year hiatus from writing during the 1940's. We can see a parallel set of problems for Hudson: a loss of occupational identity and resulting emotional crisis. [...]

[...] Mostly though, it is Hudson with his three dead sons who has the fullest license for this misery, while Hemingway suffers from severe bouts of depression and has nothing comparably painful in his own life. In this way we can see that the author creates Hudson in the image of himself and with the same struggles, even if Hudson is a comparably more sympathetic character. It is in the events of the Nazi hunting in that we see this torture shared by Hemingway and Hudson highly magnified. [...]

[...] Remate and autobiography in Islands in the stream There are countless examples of the overlaps in characters, settings, and events that make the case for the connection between Hemingway and the characters he creates in his literature, and Islands in the Stream is no exception. Of particular interest for this essay is the author's technique, a consideration of which sheds light on the congruencies of himself and the main character of Islands, Hudson. According to Mary Hemingway, the author's wife of the time during which Islands was based, the was a concept that Hemingway named after the jai-alai word for “double-wall rebound” (Baker). [...]