Ernest Hemingway's works are broadly preoccupied with themes of violence, darkness, and death. By rendering a realistic portrayal of the modern man's predicament during the World War period, Hemingway has presented his continual concern for values in a corrupt and indifferent world. His protagonists are mainly depicted as alienated individuals fighting a battle against the odds of life with remarkable endurance and courage. In sharp contrast to his young heroes such as Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, and Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, some elderly heroes in his short stories and major novels exemplify the undaunted wise men who gracefully achieve dignity of existence in defiance of the biological, social, and environmental barriers of the world. The study explores the perceptions and attitudes of the old heroes of Hemingway's short fiction towards life and death in the light of Freud's theories of instincts. The old characters examined in the paper include Santiago inThe Old Man and the Sea, Frederick Henry inA Farewell to Arms, and Robert Jordan inFor Whom the Bell Tolls. To present a whole picture of Hemingway's treatment of the aging heroes in pursuit of their noble dignity of existence, the paper probes into Hemingway's own attitudes toward dilemma in terms of his past experiences, and the elderly heroes' individual confrontations of death, the attitudes they hold, and the actions they take in response to the unfeeling nature and world.

At all levels of experience, Hemingway brings into focus the finite individual pitted against heavy nerve-racking odds. To brand him as a lover of sensation, therefore, would be fallacious in the light of specific observations that he makes about his own position and that of his characters in his fictional works. When Cowley and Lillian Ross misinterpreted his love for sensation, he felt that they had failed to know the truth about him. Even his literary ideal, wherein he wished to present a sequence of motion and fact, classifies him as a votary of truth. His love for sensation, therefore, extends its scope beyond the immediate pleasure and belongs to a larger area of exploration, his continuous search for the ultimate truth. Sensations form only one of the steps to the temple of Moneta, and consequently, in their search for reality, his people become aware of a higher plane where the destiny of man becomes their vital concern. Along with their zest for the intensity of experience, they contemplate human aspirations and their doom, their validity and competence in the cosmic order. Hemingway, therefore, is rather a committed artist, although the grounds of commitment are entirely moral and aesthetic.

Hemingway does not wallow in mere sensations; he goes beyond their gratification and examines the fundamental reality of human experience. He finds it entailing infinite suffering and wishes to project this vision in his works of art. His tragic sense, therefore, becomes `the weightiest factor in his craft' (Moloney, 1951, p. 185). A tragedy implies abundant faith in life, its values of love, and the potentialities of man to perform wondrous deeds. A nihilist fails to portray such a vision, as life for him is ugly and sordid in all its manifestations. A largeness of spirit and a comprehensiveness of destiny with a fundamental belief that life is worth living are the basic requisites of tragedy, its greatest fruit being self-knowledge through suffering. A tragedy does not produce gloom or depression but a sense of exultation, and "is an affirmation of faith in life, a declaration that even if God is not in His Heaven, then at least Man is in his world" (Krutch, 1929, p. 125). Man is shorn of his unique stature in a universe where God plays the central role and the significance of human endeavor is thereby belittled. For a triumph over misfortune, man has to depend on his personal moral resources than on the invocation of supernatural blessings. The "sturdy soul of the tragic author seizes upon suffering and uses it only as a means by which joy may be wrung out of existence" (Krutch, 1929, p. 126).

American Literature Journal, Biological, Social, and Environmental bBarriers, Human Aspirations, Supernatural Blessings, Superficial Survey, Conventional Certitudes, Tragic Vision, Commercial Relationship, Psychic Traumatic Experience, Metaphysical Certainties.