Banal Story

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"Banal Story" is a short parody written by Ernest Hemingway which appeared in the spring/summer 1926 issue of The Little Review.^[1] and the following year (with slight modifications) in the collection Men Without Women.^[2]

Plot Summary

It depicts a character reading The Forum. The beginning of the story contains a series of hypothetical questions from the fictional copy of The Forum the character is depicted as reading. The story ends with Hemingway describing the death of a famous bullfighter named Manuel Garcia Maera (1896-1924), in Triana, Seville and its aftermath.

Analysis

Phillip Yannella and Wayne Kvam wrote articles on "Banal Story", in the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual and subsequently a chapter on the story appeared in Paul Smith's A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, then George Monteiro's wrote an article: "The Writer on Vocation: Hemingway's "Banal Story'". The four sources form the story's current critical foundations. They establish the parallels between the stories in The Forum magazine and the death of "Maera", and offer detailed interpretations of the story as a parable and self-reflexive study of writing.^[3]

Susan Beegel worries that "Banal Story" will continue to be "neglected because it depends on readers' understanding numerous allusions to The Forum".^[3]

Critics question why the two contrasting parts exist in the story and how they relate or diverge from one to the other. Quimby Melton argues 'that the sections have a mutual purpose and dependence that establish the story's essential statement about the relationship of romance and realism.' As several scholars argue, the struggle between these two issues is an important theme of Hemingway's work. Therefore, for all its stylistic novelty, the theme of "Banal Story" resolutely places it with the concerns of Hemingway's larger body of work.^[3]

References

^ Banal Story Summary Retrieved 30/9/2022.
^ 'New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway' by William Kvam. Retrieved 30/9/2022.
^ ^a ^b ^c Revisiting Hemingway’s “Banal Story”: Survey, Significance & Semiotics Retrieved 30/9/2022.

External links

Online text
The full text of Banal Story at Wikisource

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)

Short stories

"Up In Michigan" (1921)
"Indian Camp" (1924)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"Banal Story" (1926)
"Today is Friday" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1927)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"Now I Lay Me" (1927)
"A Simple Enquiry" (1927)
"Ten Indians" (1927)
"An Alpine Idyll" (1927)
"A Pursuit Race" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Natural History of the Dead" (1932)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
"Old Man at the Bridge" (1938)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Plays

Today is Friday (1926)
The Fifth Column (1938)

Screenplays

The Spanish Earth (1937 film)

Letters and
journalism

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet
"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1959 TV play 1965 TV series 1984 song
The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 film 1999 animated film
Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) Under My Skin (1950) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977) Soldier's Home (1977) My Old Man (1979) After the Storm (2001) The Garden of Eden (2008) Across the River and into the Trees (2022)