Andrew Hardy Assignment 1

When one hears "they sit in the bright cafe, discussing Hemingway and how this war will change them." the words conjure up a far darker image that that of Ludvigson's "Inventing My Parents". One might think of Hemingway's 1929 anti-war novel A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway offered a much more pessimistic view of the American Dream. Like one of the other authors alluded too in the poem-Fitzgerald-Hemingway ends his novel on a sad note. A soldier, a desertee, walks back to his hotel in the rain alone, after his wife and child die. This rain is a far more solemn rain than the "summer rain" Ludvingson's imaginary parents walk home in at the end of the poem. Perhaps because of her darker allusions at the beginning of the story, this final scene seems all the more triumphant, glorious, if not a little naive.