A Very Short Story

The term “iceberg theory” was coined by Hemingway to describe a writing technique that he honed as a journalist to clearly describe an event while providing very little context or interpretation. In this way, he retained a minimalistic style, touching only the surface of things, while, like an iceberg, alluding to or suggesting that the deeper meaning of the story lay just beneath the surface. In this way, the reader is forced to rely on his own interferences and interpretive skills to arrive at the story’s deeper meaning, thus creating a more nuanced and thought-provoking experience. Hemingway employs the “iceberg” method at the very onset of the story: “One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof, and he could look out over the top of the town” (Paragraph 1). The reader is not told who “they” are, why the man is being carried onto the roof, or what significance the view has. These omissions leave the reader to infer, as the story unfolds, that the man is a soldier recovering in a hospital from an injury sustained during World War I, and that he is with a woman named Luz. The reader is not privy to the soldier’s thoughts about, for example, the beauty of the view, but the flight of swifts and searchlights as dark comes carry a significance of meaning far deeper than what Hemingway could directly describe. In a similar manner, when Luz is preparing the soldier for surgery, Hemingway writes, “When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema” (Paragraph 2). The joke is humorous on the surface, but it also reveals the intimacy between Luz and the soldier as well as the awkwardness of the situation. Throughout the narrative, Hemingway uses sparse, simple language to imply deeper meanings. By omitting details and allowing the reader to fill in the gaps, he creates a sense of ambiguity and complexity that allows the story to resonate on multiple levels.