The best of [Hemingway's] critics recognized that though he dealt with a limited range of characters, placed them in quite similar circumstances, measured them against an unvarying code, and rendered them in a style that epitomized these other limitations, it was precisely this ruthless economy that gave his writing its power. And when Hemingway himself commented on his aims, it was clear that he knew what he was doing. He knowingly restricted himself in order to strip down, compress, and energize his writing. Prose, he once said, is not interior decoration but architecture, and the Baroque is over. His best work stands as a striking application to writing of Mies van der Rohe's architectural maxim: "Less is more."

On the other hand, Hemingway's detractors, many of whom are well-qualified, have doggedly insisted—and sometimes with a certain logic—that less is simply less: Hemingway is too limited, they say. His characters are mute, insensitive, uncomplicated men; his "action" circles narrowly about the ordeals, triumphs, and defeats of the bull ring, the battlefield, the trout stream, and similar male proving grounds; his style (some deny Hemingway's writing the benefit of this term) has stripped so much away that little is left but "a group of clevernesses"; and his "code" is at best a crudely simple outlook, in no sense comparable to the richer, more profound Stoicism which it is sometimes thought to resemble. (pp. 1-2)

The critics who disparage Hemingway's characters because they lack inwardness are probably outnumbered by those who disparage his fictional situations for the narrowness of their range…. This is not only a world of men without women, but of men without jobs, men without parents or children, men without homes or even communities. It is a world in which the soldiers desert or else operate as guerillas, for there are no lasting affiliations in this world of isolates. (pp. 2-3)

His characters go into battle, but never to the ballot box; they are constantly being tested but never in a social context. According to this view, raw physical courage is not only the supreme value in his fictive world but practically the only one.

As a direct consequence of limiting his characters to certain types and severely limiting the situations in which he places them, Hemingway works with a relatively narrow group of ethical problems. On this account, some deny that his writing has any moral sense whatever. (p. 3)

The objections to Hemingway's style, like those to his characters and situations, rest ultimately on the belief that it, too, is sterile. Too much has been stripped away, leaving the diction pale, the syntax weak, the verbs without energy, the adjectives colorless. (p. 4)

But the … characteristic response [of critics defending Hemingway] has been to maintain that this world—like Homer's—is less limited than it appears to be; that Hemingway has succeeded in making war—and the other forms of violence that interest him—a moral equivalent of life. The soldiers, boxers, and bullfighters are tested and found to behave under stress not as Republicans, intellectuals, Spaniards, or expatriates behave, but as men do. Seen in this light, Hemingway is a classicist. His achievement is not merely that he has rendered the here and now with the authority of a candid photograph; he has also given us a glimpse of eternal and universal truth. (p. 5)

In much the same way that the limited world of Hemingway's fiction can be shown to imply a much broader one, his spare, economical style can be revealed as a precise instrument of implication. "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." So Hemingway himself has written, effectively characterizing the immense power of the unsaid. (p. 6)

[The] power and distinctiveness of Hemingway's fiction derive from the combination of his various limitations. Considered singly, any one of them is crippling. How could one hope to write serious literature about characters and situations so bare, in a style that is quite inflexible and spare, only designed, it would seem, to celebrate the virtue of the stiff upper lip? The effect of the "less is more" principle can be experienced only when one looks at the whole façade or some large feature of a building, for only then can the absence of ornamentation be apprehended as a value in itself.

The power of this effect can be demonstrated if we look at a scene in which his various limitations all work together. An ideal scene is one which Hemingway evokes again and again. It appears in … [many] of his finest stories, and he uses it to end five of his six novels. It is the scene in which the hero has finally been cornered, but as he gallantly suffers his defeat he is not alone; he is in the presence of others who either do not even notice him, or if they do are unaware of his ordeal and of the gallantry with which he endures it. Here, in short compass, Hemingway brings to bear his most powerful and distinctive skills…. (pp. 11-12)

Hemingway's fishermen, soldiers, waiters, and other limited and seemingly unpromising characters are generally elevated by this strategy to persons deserving our attention. They are not dumb oxen chewing their cuds at the door of the slaughterhouse, but gallant men enduring their suffering with grace in a cold, empty universe. Occasionally they have one companion who recognizes and values their admirable stoicism, but this only emphasizes the rarity of such recognition in this world. And, anyway, it is made clear that the hero is beyond such help. (p. 12)

Hemingway understood suffering, like the Old Masters in Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts"—that it occurs "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along"—or watching carts hurrying down a slope. (p. 15)

With consummate art in these works and stories—art so unobtrusive as to elicit the charge of not being art at all—Hemingway confers on a seemingly routine experience affecting ordinary people a cosmic significance. And his style, far from being a series of surface mannerisms, reveals itself to be a way of looking at the world and expressing an attitude of tense resignation in the face of inevitable suffering and defeat. In the characters that do not share the secret, either because they are insensitive …, or have no way of knowing it …, Hemingway mirrors man's fate as he sees it and shows us that suffering and death, even when heroically endured, are a lonely and personal affair. (pp. 15-16)

Hemingway's art does lack a broad base. He has won his reputation as an artist of the first rank by operating within limits that would have stifled a lesser writer. But within and because of these limits, he has in his best work uttered a lyric cry that—although it may not resemble the full orchestra of Tolstoy or the organ tones of Melville—is nonetheless a moving and finely wrought response to our times. (p. 16)