In Our Time: Searching for Order Amid Chaos

By Nancy W. Sindelar, Ph.D.

Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time in 1925, a year when people still were reeling from the impact of World War I. Hemingway and others had believed World War I was going to be the war to end all wars but quickly learned it was a futile blood bath. There were no heroes—just passive victims hit by shells in trenches, poisoned with gas, or scorched by flame-throwers. The horrors of the war left the world filled with people who felt betrayed by their leaders, their culture, and their institutions. The war brought a basic disillusionment and the realization that the old concepts and values embedded in Christianity and other ethical systems of the western world had not served to save mankind from the catastrophes inherent in the war.

An experimental structure

This disillusionment is present throughout Hemingway’s In Our Time, a series of short stories interspersed with interchapter commentary (vignettes that had been published by themselves the previous year, 1924). The short stories are organized in largely chronological order and tell a single larger story about life circa 1925. Most are about Nick Adams, whose experiences closely reflect those of a young Hemingway. The short stories tell the tale of daily life but are juxtaposed against the interchapters which focus on the world of war, politics and the chaos of the outside world. The structure of the book was experimental. Hemingway said it was “Like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coastline, and then looking at it with 15x binoculars—Or rather, maybe looking at it and then going in and living in it and then coming out and looking at it again.” [1]

Early influences

Hemingway’s personal experiences influenced the content. Born in 1899 and raised in Victorian era Oak Park, Illinois, Christian religious principles, a traditional education in public schools and a strong work ethic were imparted to Ernest as a child. His father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, was a disciplined medical doctor and a devout member of the Congregationalist church. Ernest’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, liked to think of herself as an English gentlewoman. Her parents emigrated from England and eventually built the Queen Anne house with a turret and six bedrooms in Oak Park, where Ernest was born and spent the first six years of his life. During summers, the family left their comfortable life in Oak Park and went to their rustic cottage in northern Michigan, where Ernest’s father taught his son to hunt and fish.

Hemingway joins the war

Both of Hemingway’s grandfathers lived in Oak Park and were veterans of the Civil War. His paternal grandfather, Anson Hemingway, inspired Ernest’s belief that war was the venue for men to display courage and honor. As Ernest grew up, he observed Grandfather Anson proudly wearing his Civil War uniform, displaying his medals, and marching with his comrades in the yearly Oak Park Memorial Day parades. When the United States entered World War I in April,1917, Ernest couldn’t wait to get involved. Though he couldn’t enlist due to poor eyesight, he eventually went to Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver, fully embracing the values and teachings of his grandfathers.

A different morality

The first eighteen years of Ernest’s life were idyllic. He had the love and attention of his parents and grandparents, yet he hungered to understand the challenges and actions needed to live in an ever-changing world. As time passed, he developed an autonomous morality, in which his personal standards were different from those of his parents. After graduation from high school, Ernest moved to Kansas City and got a job as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, but when the Red Cross came through town, he jumped at the chance to go to Italy and experience the war. He told his sister, “I can’t let a show like this go on without getting in on it.”[2]

Hemingway’s wartime injuries

Hemingway went to Italy looking for adventure and got more than he had bargained for. He soon learned war was a sordid bloodbath where one was required to carry parts of dead bodies, and risking sustained injuries that would last a lifetime. Ernest was hoping to display the honor and courage his grandfathers had talked about but was a passive victim, blown up in a trench while taking cigarettes and chocolate to Italian soldiers. When he arrived at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, he had a machine gun slug in his right foot, another behind his right kneecap, hundreds of steel fragments lodged in his legs, and was swathed in bandages. He had learned that modern warfare was different from what Grandfather Anson had experienced. His worldview had changed, and he now understood that surviving in this world required new actions—actions that trumped some of the religious teachings of his parents and some of the manners and morals he had learned in Oak Park.

A rejection of pre-war values

After the war, Ernest returned to Oak Park then moved to Chicago, where he met Hadley Richardson. She supported Ernest’s dream of becoming a writer, and after their marriage, the couple moved to Paris and embraced all Paris had to offer. Paris in the 1920s was a mecca for artists and writers. Given the bloodshed of World War I, prewar values were rejected and there was much experimentation with new lifestyles, collaborations, and relationships. Expat artists and writers experienced greater acceptance in the European environment than in the prohibition-era United States, and new forms of art and literature thrived.

In Our Time is the work of a young Hemingway at the outset of his career; it is a pivotal piece in Ernest’s commitment to a new method of writing and a new set of values. Ernest tried to write clearly and honestly about life in the modern world. Writing to his father from Paris, he said, “You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.”[3]

His letter to his father about the ugly as well as the beautiful was, no doubt, to prepare his parents for the transition to a new set of values. In Our Time documents questions that now concerned the author. What is bravery? What is fear? What constitutes a good relationship between a man and a woman? Answers to these questions were based on his experiences and described with honesty and images that were sometimes blunt, sexual, or bloody.

The format of In Our Time is an experimental combination of interchapters and short stories. The interchapters provide flashes of death, violence, and chaos in the outside world while the short stories focus on Hemingway’s personal experiences and document his efforts to bring order to his personal life by writing about it. They reveal his up-close-and-personal encounters with death, violence, and chaos.

Disillusionment with war

The book begins with the sentence, “Everybody was drunk” and reveals Ernest’s disillusionment with war. [4] There are no heroes, just drunk soldiers marching in a chaotic retreat. Though Ernest only read about it, the first interchapter is his reflection on the World War I Battle of Caporetto. The Austrians had broken through the Italian lines, and the Italians were retreating. Houses were evacuated, and women and children were loaded in trucks. Ernest first mentions the horror, confusion, and irrationality of modern warfare in In Our Time, but eventually will more fully describe the retreat in A Farewell to Arms.

His experience with Mussolini

Ernest’s negative depictions of the Italian army and his lifelong dislike of fascism were influenced by his personal contempt toward Benito Mussolini. He had interviewed him in 1923, shortly after he seized power, and in an article for the Toronto Star called him "the biggest bluff in Europe.”[5] Ernest had observed Mussolini trying to impress the media by pretending to be deeply absorbed in reading, while, in reality, he was holding a French–English dictionary upside down.

Near-death experiences

The interchapter prior to the Chapter 7 short story, “Soldier’s Home,” focuses on a soldier who had been blown up in a trench. The description mirrors Ernest’s own near-death experience in Italy as well as his growing ambivalence regarding prewar attitudes toward religion and sexuality. Fearing he will die, the soldier prays “Dear Jesus get me out…please keep me from getting killed…I’ll tell everyone in the world you are the only one that matters.”[6] However, the interchapter ends without transformation: “…he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anyone.”[7]

Alienation

The interchapter is followed by “A Soldier’s Home,” a short story that focuses a soldier returning home after World War I. The story begins with the background of the soldier’s life before the war. He attended a Methodist college and was a member of a fraternity. The photo of his fraternity brothers, all of whom were wearing exactly the same thing, represents the conformist mentality of prewar, Midwestern America. When the soldier returns from the war, he, along with Ernest, is troubled by the re-entry into his old life. He is changed by the war and feels alienated from everyone in his hometown, including his parents. He spends much of his time reading about the war but wishes there were more maps because he wants to pinpoint his experiences. Metaphorically, the soldier, like Ernest, is trying to understand and bring order to his war experiences. When the mother chides the soldier for not working by saying God cannot have any idle hands in his Kingdom, he replies that he is not in His Kingdom. Though he feels embarrassed for saying this, he no longer can pray with her.  

Relevant to today

The interchapters and the short stories in In Our Time explore themes of death, separation, and alienation attached to World War I or periphery events. However, In Our Time is as relevant today as it was in 1925. Hemingway experienced the horrors of World War I firsthand and filtered his experiences by writing both the interchapters and the short stories. Today, all we need to do is flip on our TVs to see the destruction in Gaza, the bombed-out towns in Ukraine, or experience the political divide at home. Like Ernest, we are confronted with the bloodshed of modern warfare and question the values and integrity of our political leaders. Like Ernest we view the chaos of the world around us and then retreat to our private lives, hoping to find order and understanding. We long for peace, economic security, and political stability but are routinely barraged with scenes of bombed-out towns, starving children, and stories of political corruption. As we look through our 15x binoculars at our personal lives, we sense, like Hemingway, the intoxicated chaos of the outside world.

The themes of In Our Time are one hundred years old, but they resonate across time and unite readers through the shared human experience of dealing with violence, separation, and change. They are timeless because they reveal the universal aspects of the human condition and remind us that good literature has the power to bridge differences and connect us through the fundamental emotions we all share.

[1] Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Edmund Wilson, October18,1924 in Selected Letters 1917-1961, New York: Scriber’s Sons, 1981, Carlos Baker, ed.,128.

[2] Ernest Hemingway to Marcelline Hemingway, quoted in Sanford, At the Hemingways, Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1999, 156-7.

[3] Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Clarence Hemingway, March 20,1925 in Selected Letters1917-1961, New York: Scriber’s Sons, 1981, Carlos Baker, ed.,153.

[4] Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925

[5] Ernest Hemingway, “Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer,”

Dateline Toronto, E.B. White, ed. New York: Scribner’s Sons,1967, 253-59.

[6] Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925

[7] Ibid.