“Absolute Best Hell”: “The Strange Country,” Meta-Narrative, and Authorial Self-Review

Since its first appearance in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Strange Country” has generated conflicting (and often conflicted) interpretations regarding its genre status. Is it a stand-alone short story, a fragment of an abandoned portion of the first posthumous Hemingway novel to appear after his 1961 suicide, Islands in the Stream (1970), or a scrap of an entirely different manuscript? This article argues the story is best understood within the meta-narrative Hemingway constructed after World War II as he began a series of works broadly known as his “Land, Sea, and Air” trilogy. Specifically, “The Strange Country” reveals in microcosm not only some of Hemingway’s abiding concerns in his late works, but also, in its narrative of an author’s journey with his muse, it details some of his sentiments regarding these works. Most notably, Hemingway explores two metafictional threads: the motif of the road trip as a metaphor for the artistic journey, and second, Hemingway’s scrutinizing of his own romantic and professional choices, here channeled through Roger’s internal monologues and interior reminiscences.