In Another Country

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"In Another Country"

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

Country

United States

Language

English

Genre(s)

short story

Publication

Published in

Men Without Women

Publication type

short story collection

Publication date

1927

Chronology

The Undefeated

Hills Like White Elephants

"In Another Country" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway.^[1] It was published in Hemingway's 1927 short story collection, Men Without Women. The story deals with WWI soldiers receiving treatment in Italy during the war.

Summary

The short story is about an ambulance corps member in Milan during World War I.^[2] Although unnamed, he is assumed to be Nick Adams, a character Hemingway made to represent himself. He has an injured knee and visits a hospital daily for rehabilitation. Machines are used to speed the healing with the doctors making much of the miraculous new technology.^[3] They show pictures to the wounded of injuries like theirs healed by the machines, but the war-hardened soldiers are portrayed as skeptical, perhaps justifiably so.

As the narrator walks through the streets with fellow soldiers, the townspeople hate them openly because they are officers. Their oasis is Café Cova, where the waitresses are very patriotic.^[4]

When the fellow soldiers admire the protagonist's medal, they learn that he is American, and therefore view him as an outsider. The protagonist accepts this since he feels that they have done far more to earn their medals than he has.

The story then shifts to the friendship between the narrator and an Italian major, who was once a champion fencer but now has a withered hand that has not been cured by the machines. The major becomes grief-stricken when he learns that his wife has suddenly and unexpectedly died of pneumonia.^[5]

The American writer Andre Dubus, who cites this story as an influence on his own writing, sees "In Another Country" as a story about healing and the desire to survive despite suffering. Dubus writes, "The major keeps going to the machines. And he doesn't believe in them. But he gets out of his bed in the morning. He brushes his teeth. He shaves. He combs his hair. He puts on his uniform. He leaves the place where he lives. He walks to the hospital, and sits at the machines. Every one of those actions is a movement away from suicide. Away from despair."^[6]

References

^ "In Another Country". medhum.med.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-10.
^ Halter, Peter (1990-12-01). "Indeterminacy in Hemingway's 'In Another Country'". English Studies. 71 (6): 523–534. doi:10.1080/00138389008598722. ISSN 0013-838X.
^ Monteiro, George (1988-09-01). "The major's therapy: Ernest Hemingway's "In Another Country"". The Journal of Medical Humanities and Bioethics. 9 (2): 143–152. doi:10.1007/BF01139239. ISSN 1573-3645.
^ "In Another Country by Ernest Hemingway | Major English | Class 12 - Mero Notice". Retrieved 2021-04-06.
^ "In Another Country - Hemingway's Original Text". olypen.com. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
^ Dubus, Andre (Spring 1997). "A Hemingway Story". The Kenyon Review: 141–147. JSTOR 4337534.

External links

Full text of "In Another Country" at HathiTrust Digital Library
The full text of In Another Country 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)