Written by Saier Zeng, Eryn Levine,  Matt O’Connor,  Andrew Drumm, and Cara Stechmann

In order to gather an understanding of Hemingway’s use of words throughout his writing career, we used Word Trends examining his complied texts. The result was a series of small correlations and differences that although lead to different conclusions ultimately allow us to see how Hemingway looks at different aspects of life.

Hemingway seems to revolve around the issues of his time, the early 20th century. What was dealt with most in this time were things more associated with existentialism that developed from war and struggle. As reflected in the trends of such words as “Fight”, “Hell”, and “Hope”, Hemingway’s writing seems to want to follow the human response to adversity, and their coping following experiences.

We also found that when the word “people” was used, words such as “time” and “old” appeared as well, perhaps indicating age when it comes to society. From these connections, it could also be concluded that Hemingway considers society as a whole to be behind the times and lacking in youth. Consider that whenever characters were talking to each other, Hemingway did not spend time on these concepts, but when looking at people as whole, he took on a more sweeping generalization. Additionally, from our experiences with the short stories, it seems that the narration of these stories is mostly a close third person. Because Hemingway chooses to focus on the individual so intensely, it is understandable that he may think poorly of spending too much time looking at people in general.

Beyond word trends, we also analyzed word frequencies in relation to each other.The most frequent words in general tended to be simple ones; this is unsurprising, since we know Hemingway writes in a ‘sparse prose’ style. This knowledge, however, makes certain words that do appear all-the-more interesting. This trend may also reflect Hemingway’s writing style of a more “real” prose, and reflect how the average person may speak.

For example, the word “Hell” appears in the text 207 times. Its counterpart, “heaven”, only appears 3 times. Perhaps this disparity is caused by the fact that his stories revolve around war, as previously mentioned. Interestingly enough, within this vein of thought, the word “hope” appears 94 times; the word “hopeless” only appears 6 times.

“Said” appears to be the most frequent word used across all 5 short stories. Yet, its frequencies in “The Old Man and The Sea” and “True at First Light” are almost twice as high as those in the other three stories. It seems that Hemingway spent a lot more time describing the environments, the scenes or actions of the characters in these two stories compared to the other three. Though a very generic word, “said” still reflects greatly how frequently Hemingway chose to stick to his style of having tremendous amount of dialogues in his text.

Working with Voyant, we also discovered a chilling tendency for Hemingway’s writing to promote and reinforce traditional gender roles. Men, it seems, are associated with raucousness and beastliness. They are seen as hedonists, and are generally rooted in their base and carnal urges. Indeed, when one graphs uses of the word “drunk” vs. uses of the word, “men” in Hemingway’s works, there is an almost perfect correlation between the two themes:

Women, contrarily, seem to be associated with housework and the “cult of domesticity.” When one graphs uses of the word, “women” vs. uses of the word, “home,” there is an obvious relationship:

Although these connections might be coincidental, it seems as if there is a general trend in Hemingway’s writing toward propagating and upholding archaic views of men and women. Whether Hemingway consciously meant to solidify these roles or whether these trends are the product of the author’s era is unclear, but they are nevertheless present and have a significant impact on on Hemingway’s writing.

As noticed in class, Hemingway refers to god and has his characters speak the “god-damn” language quite often. Mapping the frequencies of “god” and  “god-damn” throughout the five stories showed that the frequencies of these two words are positively related to each other. “god” in general is mentioned more often; but whenever the frequency of “god” is high, the frequency of “god-damn” rises as well. Hemingway seems to like the idea of having religious references together with religious cursing at the same time. Is this a reflection on religion in Hemingway’s society? Or is it more of a self reflection of Hemingway’s own religious feelings?

When considering all of these different interpretations, it is clear to see that Hemingway had a control of language that allowed him to use few, simple words in order to comment on society and the way people live. The works we examined spread over time from the 1920s to the 1990s, and it is clear to see that the themes that come up in these novels are universal in content. Using Voyant gave us the opportunity to dig deep past Hemingway’s wall of action and dialogue and try to understand the heart of the matters he wanted to express when writing. With more time, more work could certainly be done to make more overarching interpretations.

Notable Stats (as discussed above):

– “Colonel”: 759 times)

– “Survive”: 2 versus “Fight”: 105

– “Kill”: 152

– “Hell”:207 versus “Heaven”: 3

– “Hope” 94 times and “hopeless” 6 times

– “Old” / “Time”: 639

– “Time” and “people” follow similar distribution patterns

– “Said” appears twice as frequently in “The Old Man and The Sea” and  “True at First Light” as in the other three stories