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Dramatic Irony
Chapter 11: Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm
Explanation and Analysis—Ernest and Ezra:
Ezra Pound is a foil for Hemingway. Pound lives the kind of life Hemingway wishes he could establish for himself in Paris, but he struggles to make the kind of authentic social and professional connections that seem effortless for Pound. In Chapter 11, a simile helps Hemingway comment on this effortlessness:
If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them.
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Chapter 18: Hawks Do Not Share
Explanation and Analysis—Hemingway and Fitzgerald:
Hemingway devotes a great deal of space in the memoir to F. Scott Fitzgerald, positioning his friend as a foil for himself. In Chapter 18, Hemingway contrasts the two of them by commenting on Fitzgerald's ironic dissatisfaction with Paris:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is, and he thought always that there would be some place where he and Zelda could have a good life together again.
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