The best titles of Hemingway’s novels and stories have biblical and literary sources, poetic evocations of the themes, and allusions to tragedy, trauma and death. His fiction often returns to his teenage wound and narrow escape from death during World War I in Italy. By suggesting the physical locales and using bitter irony to foreshadow fatal events, he enhances the meaning of his work, reminds readers of literary associations and draws them into the tales.
The title of The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986) comes from Genesis 3:24, “So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword” to keep Adam and Eve out. The title warns that the characters’ idyllic life in France and Spain will not last.
A Moveable Feast (1964), with its idiosyncratic spelling, comes from a heading in The Book of Common Prayer (1549): “Movable feasts, Tables and Rules.” These holidays are not fixed dates like Christmas, but like Easter occur on a different day each year. Hemingway uses the phrase literally to suggest the endless youthful pleasures of food, drink, sport, friendship, sex and love in Paris during the 1920s. In Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) Colonel Cantwell says “Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.” In the posthumously published True at First Light (1999) Hemingway (himself often a movable beast) calls love a “moveable feast.” But the melancholy mood beneath the festivities warns that these pleasures cannot last.
In In Our Time (1925) the sketches of life and death, which capture essential moments between 1914 and 1923, ironically echo the hope expressed and invocation denied in The Book of Common Prayer, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.” After World War I the soldier Nick Adams experiences bitter trauma rather than tranquil peace.
The Sun Also Rises (1926) comes from Ecclesiastes 1:4-5, quoted in the epigraph: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” The preacher declares the world is nothing more than “vanity of vanities.” Men soon die, but the earth lasts forever. The pristine fishing scenes in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain contrast with the characters’ decadent life in Paris.
In To Have and Have Not (1937), the 1930s Depression theme suggests the struggle for existence; the unequal conflict between the rich and the poor; between those who own and don’t work and those who work but don’t own. Hemingway quotes Matthew 25:29 to express the economic conditions of the poor: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
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