earticle

영어

This study is concerned with the recognition of distorted principle in John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Both writers, though contemporaries, seem ever so different from each other. Though both writers’ personalities are more complex, each created a rather clear-cut public image. Their works are perhaps the political novel, though neither author would continue his interest in radical politics beyond the Great Depression. Both authors were deeply affected by the immediate politico-economic environment of the Depression, witnessing events that would help inspire the writing of their respective novels and that would bring them to the point of their greatest personal involvement with American radicalism. Partly as a result of their deepening political involvement, both Hemingway and Steinbeck wrote novels that demonstrate great sympathy with the poor and a deep contempt for the rich and the establishment. Both novels, too, indicate a dubiousness about the period’s posed social alternatives. But at the same time both produced works that have led to endless, unresolved controversy about their intended meanings, specifically whether the novels incline toward a collectivist or, after all, an individualist view. To be brief, this study is about the ambiguity between the pro- and anti-collectivist interpretations which are all the more pronounced when we remember that there are in the novel other collectivist indications.