Hemingway and the creation of twentieth-century dialogue - American author Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Robert Paul Lamb

For instance, the words fall, Vevey, and lovely are each used four times, and the word fine twice. The American lady tells the narrator's wife that she and her daughter left Vevey two years ago "this fall." Moments later, responding to the information that the couple had been in Vevey on their honeymoon, she says "[t]hat must have been lovely" but follows by saying that she did not know that her daughter would "fall in love with" the Swiss, changing the original meaning of fall. The wife agrees that "[i]t was a very lovely place," slightly changing the referent of lovely from honeymooning in Vevey to Vevey itself. A second implied meaning accrues to Vevey here: that it was a place where one could "fall in love." The American lady then agrees with the wife who has just agreed with her, but she puts her statement in the present tense - "Isn't it lovely?" - changing the referent from Vevey past to Vevey present, and calls the Trois Couronnes "a fine old hotel." The wife then gathers up the repeated words and phrases and sums up her sense of the conversation: "We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely." In her sentence, the meaning of fine changes from "prestigious" (revealing the American lady's values) to "nice" or "lovely" (indicating the wife's values); fall once more refers to a season (although it still echoes with the previous sense of "to fall in love"); and lovely describes Vevey in the past tense (conflating lovely, fine, falling in love, the room, the countryside, and Vevey - but locating it all in the past). When the American lady then asks if the couple was "there in the fall" and the wife replies "Yes," the conversation that began with the wife asking when the American lady left Vevey is brought full circle. Its focus has, by subtle increments, shifted from the American lady and her daughter in the present ("this fall") to the American couple in Vevey in the past (all emphases mine).

The narrator listens carefully, the bags at his feet, looking out the window. Perhaps he too is being lured back into the past by the circular, mesmerizing conversation. But then he sees the wrecked train. When the American lady asks if they were in Vevey in the fall, his wife says yes, but now they are passing three wrecked cars. The narrator, in his second and final speech, calls their attention to the present - "Look" - and announces, "There's been a wreck." Just as in an earlier speech, his statement seems commonplace but actually reveals his hostility and resentment: toward the American lady, the dissolution of his marriage, and the painful reliving of the happy past.

When the narrator points out the wreck, in 5 syllables totaling a mere 20 letters, his statement serves 6 functions (a remarkable example of dialogue compression). First, he indicates the literal wreck that has occurred. Second, the wreck is the physical realization of the fears about a train crash that the American lady has expressed throughout the story. Third, the couple's marriage, which the narrator's wife has been reliving, is a wreck. Fourth, the three people, like the three cars they are passing, are also wrecks (the wreck symbolizes the three characters as well as the couple's marriage). Fifth, the narrator, by his statement, wrecks the women's conversation. Lastly, since that conversation has been a reenactment, of sorts, of their previously happily married state, he has perhaps repeated in the present (especially since the story is based on the real-life first marriage that Hemingway wrecked) what he had done in the past. Certainly, his speech seems to "crystallize relationships." What he has said is pretty much the equivalent of "Shut up!"