Title
Hemingway’s Suicides: A Psychobiographical Approach to Literature
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Draws on Freud’s theory of psychobiography to examine the devastating effect of the suicide of Hemingway’s father on the author’s life and writing. Opens with an explanation and history of the approach before moving into a commentary on Hemingway’s equation of suicide with cowardice and the numerous references to it in his works, including Death in the Afternoon and To Have and Have Not. Berman focuses primarily on For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its masked suicide of Robert Jordan, reading the novel as Hemingway’s meditation on his father’s death. Concludes that the author’s inability to write at the end of his life contributed to his suicide.
Published in
Critical Approaches to Literature: Psychological
Date
2017
Pages
187-206
Citation
Berman, Jeffrey. “Hemingway’s Suicides: A Psychobiographical Approach to Literature.” In Critical Approaches to Literature: Psychological, edited by Robert C. Evans, 187-206. Ipswich, MA: Salem P, 2017.