Macomber

A crowd of natives has clean carried Francis Macomber triumphantly into camp. Macomber, a good- spirit athletic type, has just winded it on a lion hunting adventure and now eery iodine live ons hes a coward. Macombers wife cant contain her resentment and humiliation about her preserves breakd give on the hunt. This is not a proud moment for the Macombers. Shmoop Editorial Team. The nearsighted elated spirit of Francis Macomber Shmoop. com. Shmoop University, Inc. , 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Hemingways unmindful Stories By Ernest Hemingway Summary and Analysis The bypass skilful Life of Francis Macomber Hemingways perfectly Stories Summary and Analysis The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Wiley Publishing, n. d. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Hemingway, Ernest. FAST-US-1 demonstration to American English Reference File. FAST-US-1 Intro to American English Reference File. Charles Scribners Sons, 7 May 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Wik ipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 04 Nov. 013. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Ga misadventureard, Theodore L. JSTOR. The English Journal. Vol. 60. N. p. National Council of Teachers of English, 1971. 31-35. The English Journal. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. I. Francis Macomber and his wife Marg bet (usu tout ensembley referred to as Margot), are on a king-size- back up safari in Africa, guided by professional hunter Robert Wilson. Earlier, Francis had panicked when a hurt lion charged him. Margot mocks Macomber for this act of cowardice, and it is implied that she sleeps with Wilson.The next day they hunt buffalo. When they dress the buffalo, it charges Macomber. Francis, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of courage, but his surmisals are too high. Wilson fires at the beast as well, but it keeps charging. Macomber kills the buffalo at the last second. At the same time, Margot had also fired a shot from the car, which instead hits Macomber in the skull and kills him. For at one time, they ar e both on the same side, barb at the same bull, but tragically she kills the man she was trying to save.In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Hemingway drills his famously sparse prose style and villains with the moral seduce of carnals to demonstrate the ironic truth that happiness is fleeting and had better not depend upon differents. II. The narrator furnishes detail, nothing more(prenominal), but packs in those details is all the psychological nuance of a session with a psychoanalyst. In The Short Happy Life, a numerous basic actions can go a great distance. The sentences are certainly not fancy, but they reveal a ton about the characters.For example The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the contemplate cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents (p. 1). Here, Hemingway speaks volumes in one sentence the feeling in the air is apparent, he sets the visual scene, and he conveys ideas of cla ss and environment. Readers slam w present they are, and what kind of people they are dealing with. Hemingway also lets the dialogue do a lot of the work. That way readers get to do it the characters through what they say instead of having Hemingway tell them what to think.At the storys opening, for example, Margot says, Ill have a screw auger too. I need something (p. 1). This unadorned expression gives the reader their initial picture of Margot She will drink because she needs something but something for what? Something, readers soon find out, to benumb the rage and disap capitulumment over Macombers failure and something as in my husband gave me nothing, so give me something. Lastly, this short sentence says Macombers wife, not Margot, so readers know that this mans wife needs something, and she needs it because of him.Thats a whole lot of meat for eight short words. He omits things because he trusts the readers to be active, and to understand what he is saying indirectly. Hemingway packs a lot of unsaid things into the actual words on the page. III Animals A technique that emerges as one of the most imposingly effective is Hemingways use of brutes, for behind the scenes of the five-act tragedy that constitutes The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber stalks a troupe of in forgiving supporting actors whose effect on the understanding of Hemingways story is crucial.Wether in the from of a charging lion or, more subtly, in Margot Macombers back-handed reference to those big cowy things that jump like hares (p. 9), Hemingway uses his animal menagerie as a standard against which to measure and evaluate his human actors. Francis Macombers safari windings out to be quite different from a romantic adventure out of Martin Johnsons storybook Macombers adversaries are a far cry from Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the elephant (p. 22) and the Natural History Museum that the columnist describes.Hemingway suggests here that Macomber has emerged from the fairytale world of high society into the real world of tooth and claw. It is in conjunction with the animals they themselves hunt that readers can best evaluate Robert Wilson, Francis Macomber, and his wife. Wilson emerges as the professional. He is self-confident and almost detached from the jungle world of his employers. From Margarets point of view he seems a killer, but his flat, blue, machine gunners eyes (p. 8) ironically seem to raise Wilson into a position of control over the brutal struggle for supremacy that he witnesses.Margot Macomber, on the some other hand, is deeply enmeshed in this struggle. Her husband labels her a bitch (p. 22) afterwards her return from Wilsons tent and refers to her bitchery (p. 10) elsewhere in the story, but more specific than this implicitly negative admonition of Macomber is Hemingways explicit use of animals as a verbal weapon in the mouth of Margot. To Francis self-punishment Margot adds criticism of her own. When Francis passes her s ome cooked eland he shot, she scoffs at his offering with the comment Theyre the big cowy things that jump like hares, arent they? (p. 9). Rubbing salt into his wounded ego, she tongue-in-cheek asks, Theyre not dangerous, are they? (p. 9). All Francis has been able to shoot by this point in the safari are relatively harmless animals, and he has proved himself a coward in the face of the only dangerous game he has encountered. Although Hemingway colligate Margot with no specific animal, she does materialize as the ejector seat of all the most dangerous qualities of female carnivores. To Robert Wilson she is a typical American woman, one of the hardest in the world the hardest, the cruelest, the most ravenous, nd the most enthralling (p. 8). Externally she is so enameled in that American female cruelty (p. 9) that she seems flush more insensitive than Robert Wilson. While she is seen as cruel and predatory, her husband is compared with a pika and is at the end conjugate with t he lion whose head is blown off by Wilson. Hemingways subtle identification of Macomber with the lion he is hunting serves a far more important purpose than symbolically to foreshadow his death at the hands of his wife.Indeed, it is through Macombers links with both the lion and the buffalo that readers become aware of his transition from excited adolescence to manhood. Initially, the lions bravery and determination are used rigorously as a contrast to Macombers rabbit-like trembling. In his struggle for survival the lion with half his head shot away kept locomote on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him (p. 21). He stared defiantly with yellow-bellied eyes, narrowed with hate (p. 19) similarly, Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most (p. 3). Momentarily facing the challenge make up by the lion, Macomber feels sick at his stomach (p. 16) and cannot control his shaking. The fear was quieten there l ike a cold, slimy hollowin all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick (p. 11). The difference between Macomber and the lionis suggested by the nature of their respective wounds. Macombers psyvchological wound can be traced lastly to his overall weakness and, more recently, to the effects of his huntress wife. But the lions wound is more a red badge of courage incurred in combat.Instead of fear, a . 30-06 220 grain solid bullet causes the sudden hot scalding unwellness (p. 15) in the lions stomach. In contrast, the nausea of fear experience by Macomber is one of nothingness. The lion is broken down and fights his fate to the end, whereas Macomber has collasped internally, at peace(p) to pieces nervously (p. 8). Macomber bolts like a rabbit, where in the lion all of him, pain, sickness, execration and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a quiver (p. 19) directly at his attackers.In death he becomes al most human. Macomber becomes, by his own admission, a rabbit. But Macomber changes. His metamorphosis from rabbit and laddy-buck occurs after the second fording of the stream that separates the camp from the hunting ground. Just as we view the initial conflict through the lions stream-of-consciousness as he watched Macomber dismount from the car, so we now see Macomber observe three huge, minatory animals looking almost cylindrical in their vast heaviness, like big black tank cars (p,27). The situation has been inverted.Where the lion saw the car and its passengers in animal terms, bulking like some super-rhino (p. 15), Macomber sees the animal in car terms. Hemingways eversion of style implies the conversion of Macomber to a lion-like figure and foreshadows his courageous birth into his all-too-short apt life. The hunter becomes the hunted the man with newly achieved lion-like qualities falls prey to the predatory wife who has seen the change in her husband (p. 33) and herse lf has become white and ill with fear at what it portends.In Macombers death he is subtly linked with his own last victim, the buffalo Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not cardinal yards from where the buffalo lay on his side.. (p. 36). Linked with the buffalo both in the manner of death and by physical proximity, Macomber has, at last, achieved the transition from rabbit to lion, to bull, and to manhood. Hemingways subtle use of animals as an evaluative device has helped to turn what would have been a story of pitiableness into one that approaches tragedy.Hemingway is very careful with these details so that the reader can fully explore the extent to which Macomber has sunk. (margot dominant)In appendix to Macombers embarrassed cowardice, he watches as Margot kisses Wilson on the mouth, calling him the stunning red-faced Mr. Wilson. After Margot returns from sleeping with Wilson, readers learn about the reasoning for her conjugation to Frances. She is too beautiful for Fran cis to divorce her, and Francis has too much money for her to ever start him. When Macomber reminds Margot the there wasnt going to be any of that.You promised there wouldnt be, readers realize that this deceit has been going on for a long time. In years past Macomber has never been enough for his wife, but creation here, on the safari, was supposed to change all that. Yet Margos lese majesty is so open and executed in such defiance that Macomber gets to know how very much his cowardice has changed everything. Margot will continue to press her gain until the end, when she notices that Macomber is gaining courage and a strong sense of his own manhood.The shooting of the first-year buffalo marks the beginning of the tremendous change in Macomber. In all of his life, he has never felt so remarkable. On the other hand, Margot sits very white faced. She realizes that Macomber is changing, and she fears this change. She fears this change because she is losing psychological control o ver Macomber. She knows that if Macomber in the long run gains a sense of manhood, he will have the strength to leave her. She tries to taunt him, but he is oblivious to her existence. She now knows that his future does not include her.