Exploring Fragmented Worlds: Hemingway and Hopper

In Edward Hopper’s disquietingly familiar realist paintings, isolated individuals experience the urban drama of everyday life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Paintings such as Sunday, Automat, Drug Store, Chop Suey, Nighthawks, and Summer Evening are populated by enigmatic and anonymous figures inhabiting equally anonymous locations. Despite Hopper’s preference for the visual medium to express the fragmented times of modernity, his paintings provide analogies to Hemingway’s unsentimental short stories of the 1920s. Underlying both Hopper’s paintings and Hemingway’s stories, however, is a common story of human disjointedness that is their artistic response to a modern fragmented society and culture. Hemingway’s short stories “Cat in the Rain,”“The Killers,”and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” among many others, depict an equally alienating landscape of isolation and loneliness, reflecting the uncertainties of the historical times. Finally, my article will examine the disrupted narrative subtexts in a series of visual works by Hopper and short stories by Hemingway. I argue that their broken narratives create an unvoiced paradox: there is an openness to interpretation, despite the structural and formal disruptions present in these two artistic media.