Hunger in A Movable Feast
By Alex Riegert
Hunger is prevalent in Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. It is seen in the title of the work and characters reference hunger and food multiple times throughout the text. In the introduction to the work, Patrick Hemingway gives some important details about the term “a movable feast” that should be noted. Patrick Hemingway states that, “the idea of a movable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for ‘we happy few’: a memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose.” For Ernest Hemingway, Paris in the 20’s was a movable feast. It contained memories and experiences that he would carry for the rest of his life. They were memories that he could feed off of even though they were only distant memories. As Patrick Hemingway alludes to in the introduction, electric shock therapy was performed on Ernest Hemingway late in his life and it caused it to lose his memories and struggle to write the way he used to. This loss of memory must have felt to him like his sustenance was evaporating before his very eyes with each treatment.
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I agree with your definition of hunger within “A Moveable Feast,” but not entirely convinced it correlates to experience as much as it does memory. Though the two are closely related, I think there is a stark difference to address in this particular context. Experience is the act of doing something while memory is the nostalgia and recollection of those experiences. Therefore, I would say that memory represents the hunger, while the experience is the food to be devoured.
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Both of your ideas on Hemingway's "hunger" are great. I now would like to further connect this hunger theme with Hemingway's depiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the accuracy of the memory of his experience. While Hemingway is sending for a thermometer for Scott, he describes how tired he is of the circumstances: "I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life" (141). As you suggest above, Hemingway is hungry for new, interesting experiences that may contribute to his writing in the future. He expected to have valuable, long discussions on writing with Scott, leaving him hungry for something different. Hemingway then tries to order a bottle of whiskey to sate his feelings of emptiness caused by his hunger for "true mystery". Perhaps Hemingway's feelings of emptiness and hunger distorted his first impressions of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the time. The book is a product of his hunger to retain his experiences for when he sits down to write, which led him to keep journals in Paris in the twenties in the first place.
