Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees:A Study in Narrative Technique

Abstract

The story between the duck-shoot of the first chapter and the duck-shoot at the end of the novel is not an interior monologue as critics call it, but a flash-back in the third-person oblique method, with the omniscient narrator's vice being occasionally heard. Hemingway's narrative technique is constructed stone by stone and the different pieces of its structure, like Venice or St. Mark's, articulate his writing and its calculus. Each narrative technique fits into the other as different building blocks dovetail into the architectural whole.