In our time — Background and Themes

Violence as Routine

The vignettes treat extreme violence as unremarkable. In chapter 2, a bullfight crowd hoots a wounded matador, then falls quiet only when a tired boy kills the fifth bull. The description of the goring—'the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn'—is clinical, with no moral commentary. Similarly, chapter 17's hanging of Sam Cardinella is rendered in a flat sequence of procedural details: the strapping of legs, the whispered 'Be a man, my son,' the loss of sphincter control. The guards are 'disgusted'; the drop is 'very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings.' Hemingway's refusal to heighten the language forces the reader to confront the mechanics of death without catharsis.

Displacement and Detachment

Several vignettes hinge on characters being out of place. The drunken battery in chapter 1 is 'fifty kilometers from the front,' yet the adjutant fixates on a kitchen fire. In chapter 3, a refugee column on the Karagatch road has 'no end and no beginning'—carts loaded with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines—while a woman gives birth. The narrator is a passive observer, noting details without affect. Chapter 18 offers a jarring shift: the king works in his garden, serves whiskey, and chats about revolutionary committees as if discussing the weather. 'Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America,' the narrator remarks. This tonal disjunction—the king's jolly garden talk after a hanging—creates a world where violence and civility coexist without acknowledgment.

Compression and the Unfinished Sentence

Hemingway's early style is already evident in the elliptical syntax. Sentences often begin with 'And' or 'Then,' creating a paratactic flow that mimics perception: 'Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster.' In chapter 16, Maera's death is described through expanding and contracting sensations, culminating in a cinematic simile—'as when they speed up a cinematograph film.' The prose refuses to explain; it simply registers. The book's structure, with chapters that feel like fragments, reinforces this aesthetic. The final page lists the other works in Pound's series, reminding us that In Our Time was conceived as part of a larger experiment in modern prose.

Readers should approach In Our Time not as a conventional story collection but as a sequence of prose poems or sketches. The brevity of each chapter—some only a few lines—invites rereading, as the connections between war, bullfighting, and domesticity emerge through juxtaposition rather than plot. Pay attention to what is left out: the motives, the backstory, the authorial judgment. Hemingway's early work is a laboratory for the stripped-down style he would later refine, and this edition preserves the raw, unpolished quality of that experiment.

Reading In our time made me think about how some stories stay with you like a quiet ache, not needing many words to linger. That starkness, the raw edges of war and sorrow, reminded me of a certain northern collection I stumbled on recently. A Viking's love: and other tales of the North — Context and Discussion holds that same kind of cold, tender honesty, and I keep turning its pages over in my head, unhurried, like a friend’s hand on my shoulder.