The Double Iceberg in Ernest Hemingway’s Men without Women: An Implied Crisis of Masculinity

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway’s short stories have been largely analyzed as individual examples of his writing principle of the iceberg. However, Men without Women has received little attention as a short story composite, in which the form and content of the whole and of its individual stories reflect on each other. As relatively new approaches to the short story composite as a genre emerge, it becomes necessary to reread critically these kinds of works. In Men without Women, Hemingway’s grouping of the stories into a single work adds a different dimension to themselves: the composite – in which the stories become utterly interrelated to each other. In this larger iceberg, the postwar crisis of masculinities gains more visibility than in the individual stories, reinforcing the subversion of gender identities subtly present in them.