Mr Elliot Hemingway Ending

For instance, when Mr. Elliot tells his wife how he learned to kiss he said he “learned that way of kissing from hearing a fellow tell a story once” (Hemingway 86). Just taking a second and logically thinking about what that means, one most likely cannot learn how to kiss through a story, but actual practice. So the assumption can be made that Mr. Elliot learned to kiss through practice with another “fellow,” so other man. Therefore, hinting at possible previous homosexual encounters. Even the ending of the story has an ironic meaning as Hemingway writes about Mr. and Mrs. Elliot and the “girl friend” they were living with, “In the evening they all sat at dinner together and “they were all quite happy” (Hemingway 88). The ending seems uplifting, but this is an example of the paradoxical meaning underneath what is said. There is nothing “happy” that is going on, what is actually going on is the fact that “Mr. Elliot becomes
Elliot grappling with his sexuality, so therefore trying, but failing to keep a masculine personality as a disguise. A little background of Hemingway is that word choice was always a key component in making sure what he is trying to say comes through. Hemingway “believed that in order to create realistic dialogue he had to use the words that real people used” (Trogdon 8). This mentality however got him into trouble many times, especially when it came to using sexual and what was considered unconventional language. For instance, a publisher “asked that he remove the phrase "tried to have a baby" and its variations from the 1925 publication of "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" in In Our Time” (Trogdon 8). In a response to criticism like that Hemingway stated, “I could not avoid using them and still give anything like a complete feeling of what I was trying to convey to the reader” (Trogdon 9). Meaning avoiding these specific words would not allow him to exemplify exactly what he