Talk:Across the River and Into the Trees
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate, you can edit the article attached to this page. You can discuss the Project at its talk page. | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. | |
 |
This article is part of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the General Project Discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions. | ||
| Start | This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale. | ||
| Mid | This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale. | ||
|
Article Grading: |
|||
|
Tasks you can do:
|
|||
[edit] Plagiarism
This article was excerpted from a full review at this website: [1]. Is there anything regarding copying the work of another author and placing it on Wpdia as one's one work? The original author changed a few words but it is mostly the same stuff - check it out. Does this count as plagiarism? If so, I think it should either be removed or at least rewritten. JMBell 22:17, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- This is the full text from the website just in case you're too lazy too click the button:
Ernest Hemingway published Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) after a decade during which he had published no new fiction. His only book between For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Across the River and Into the Trees was Men at War (1942), an anthology of war stories. Deriving its title from the last words of US Civil War General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, Across the River and Into the Trees tells the story of the last days of Colonel Richard Cantwell, who has survived two world wars only to die of natural causes.
Hemingway had struggled during the 1940s to get back into the writing of fiction after his traumatic service as a war correspondent during Wolrd War II. Returning to Cuba, he began one project that would eventually result in the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden (1986), then shelved that manuscript to work on another that would be published posthumously as Islands in the Stream (1970). But during a 1949 trip to Italy, he began a short story which quickly evolved into Across the River and Into the Trees.
The story the novel relates is deceptively simple. Following the Second World War a fifty-year-old American colonel visits the site where he was nearly killed during the First World War, spends three days in Venice, duck hunting, eating, drinking, and making love to a nineteen-year-old Italian contessa. His nostalgic liberty over, Colonel Cantwell anticipates his death by quoting the last words of Stonewall Jackson to his aide, then crawls into the back seat of his staff car and dies of a heart attack. This plot (and the knowledge that the countess was based on a real young woman with whom Hemingway had become infatuated) has caused some critics to regard the book as a literary manifestation of the male menopause.
But Across the River and Into the Trees is more complex than it might appear on first reading. In a 1950 interview, Hemingway responded to the charge that not much happens in the novel by noting that he had included “the defense of the Piave [River], the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris” and the bloody battle for the Hurtgen Forest that he himself had witnessed as a correspondent. As he had done in his most complex short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, Hemingway imbedded related compressed stories within his basic structure. While the plot of a doomed love affair and the premature death of his protagonist occupy the foreground, the spectre of the colonel's wartime experiences emerges in the stories he tells his mistress Renata.
One of the underlying themes has to do with the recent war and Cantwell's lifetime of military service. Here the odd title's significance becomes apparent. Stonewall Jackson was a major Confederate hero during the US Civil War. As a brigadier general, he gained his nickname (and a promotion to major general) by standing “like a stone wall” against Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run. Perhaps the most famous of the southern generals after Robert E. Lee, and one of the best loved by his men, ironically Jackson was felled by “friendly fire”: approaching a line of his own sentries, he was shot by mistake. Colonel Cantwell quotes Jackson's last words, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees”, just before his own death.
Jackson's story sheds an ironic light on Hemingway's novel. First, the enlisted driver to whom Cantwell quotes General Jackson's last words is himself named Jackson, but his ignorance of military history and tacti
