I'm currently a high school IB student who took literature lessons, and I’m writing the reviews of several of Hemingway's short stories. Who can tell me what is the relation between Hemingway's fragmentary memories in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"? How to understand stream-of-conscious writing? What does it mean to have snow recurring in your memory? I have to say answering and analyzing questions like these is a torture!

No offense to Hemingway and all those who love his writing, but his books are just too hard to understand, mostly owing to "the iceberg principle". It was almost "mission impossible" when it comes to literature exam when you have to figure out what this man is trying to say with only one eighth of the whole story. I hope Hemingway doesn't say only one eighth of a sentence in real life or else he is going to get beaten up hard (or maybe not because he is quite strong).

Making things worse, being one of the most well-known naturalist writers, Hemingway rarely uses adjectives. Instead, he tries to depict the whole picture using only simple verbs and dialogues, being so called concise and intuitive. To be honest, if the name "Hemingway" isn't printed on the front page of the book, I could possibly mistake it as some kind of story written by a writer who hasn't gone to high school and thus ran out of words when writing.

For instance, in "Hills Like White Elephants", a seemingly casual answer, "you wouldn't have", to her boyfriend's statement that he has never seen a white elephant implied the girl's frustration with his boyfriend. Due to the similarity in looks between a white elephant and a pregnant lady, the girl tries to imply that her boyfriend isn't capable of understanding her feeling of becoming a mother. Oh man, girls are hard to understand.

Similarly, in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", a simple phrase such as "he would go home" can be interpreted as the representation of nothingness. This is because "would" means that this behavior hasn't happened yet. The fact that he knows he would go home indicates this behavioral pattern has been repeated for years, creating a sense of nothingness.

With all these words, I'm not saying that I hate Hemingway and his writing. Actually, diving into these paragraphs to really understand the thoughts of Hemingway is fun, especially when most of the analysis of the story is reasonable. But still, personally, I hope every student can be liberated from Hemingway’s words as they will plunge you into deep self-doubt, asking yourself if Hemingway's story is really that simple, forcing you to figure out the deeper meanings under the words. This process is totally painful, and you will find that under the "glacier", there is a Mariana Trench!