BIOGRAPHICAL AND SPATIOTEMPORAL PROTOTYPES: “HOMAGE TO SWITZERLAND” AS AN INTERSECTION OF HEMINGWAY’S LIFE AND EINSTEINIAN RELATIVITY
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The paper approaches Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Homage to Switzerland” from two perspectives: biographical and relativistic, as the author inscribed some of his own experiences into this work of fiction, and he was also acquainted with Albert Einstein’s fundamental ideas of time and space being relative depending on the experimenter’s position. The first part discusses the biographical basis of the story and some possible intersecting points between the empirical author and his characters, as one is a degrading misogynist, the other is going through a divorce, and the third man’s father shot himself. The second part focuses on the tripartite construction of the text, whose settings are three interchangeable Swiss towns with conspicuously similar participants in failed conversations. Drawing on Michael Reynolds’s analysis of this story as an experiment in relativity, the paper scrutinises the paradoxical time references which proliferate towards the ending and concludes that there is no dominant time frame. It also includes an experiment based on special relativity, with the train as the main cause of events in the text. Finally, the paper proposes a new starting point in the reading of this story: the third section is the only one that opens in Stanzel’s authorial, not figural narrative situation.
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