On the quay in Smyrna
On the Quai in Smyrna (original title: On the Quai at Smyrna ) is a short story by the American writer Ernest Hemingway . It is included in the short story collection In Our Time , published in 1925 .
It tells fragmentary and confusing individual memories of a soldier during the Greco-Turkish War when Greek soldiers and refugees were evacuated from the Aegean port city of Smyrna (today's Turkish name: Izmir ) in September 1922.
action
The first-person narrator starts straight away and says the strange thing was that every night they started screaming at midnight and they stopped when the spotlights were shone on them. Other memories follow, such as a brief argument between the narrator, a gunner and a Turkish officer who says that the gunner had offended him badly. However, according to the narrator, this is not possible because the accused gunner speaks only a little Turkish. The narrator assures the Turkish officer that the gunner would be severely punished, in fact only claiming this to avoid further confrontation. He believes the gunner and asks him to go back to the ship for the rest of the day so that he is no longer seen. Then the narrator tells of women who held dead babies in their arms and did not want to give them away, which is why they had to be forcibly torn away from them after a week. Shortly afterwards follows the description of births in which, according to the narrator, surprisingly few children died. At the very end, the nameless protagonist talks about the Greeks to be evacuated who came to the harbor with their pack animals, but because they could not take the animals with them, their front legs were broken and pushed into the water, whereupon they drowned. The narrator describes this (ironically, probably) as being really pretty .
shape
There are no names in the entire short story and apart from the brief dialogue between the narrator and the gunner, all events are brief descriptions that are only sketched out. This narrative thus represents the fragmentary memories of a soldier who obviously relates his experiences from the First World War. Author Hemingway transfers the confusion of the soldiers to the reader through the writing style, since the reader finds those events just as suspicious as the soldiers at the time they happened. This is compounded by the fact that there is no short prologue or epilogue . The narrator stops as abruptly as it started and at first glance it is difficult to make out a quintessence.
Classification in Hemingway's work
On the Quai at Smyrna was the first of many literary works Hemingway wrote about the First World War. His main work on this subject is the novel In Another Land , published in 1929 , which was directly inspired by his time as a medic on the Italian front. However, later short stories by Hemingway on this subject are less confused.