![]() ![]() While this perception is viewed as problematic by the narrator David, the author Hemingway provides us a way to deconstruct this prejudice, which is through looking into the eyes of the elephant. ![]() ![]() On top of that, I suggest that the adult masculinity demonstrated in David’s African story is associated with a biased prejudice based on speciesism, whereby we differentiate ourselves from other animals purely on the grounds that we are human. Regarding the latter aspect, in “Tracking the Elephant: David’s African Childhood in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden,” Suzanne del Gizzo stresses the importance of childhood and empathy in David’s African story, suggesting that David’s childhood innocence is linked to the symbolism of Africa, while his empathetic connection with the elephant and his perception of elephants as equal to humans based on elephants’ reasoning power serve as a profound contrast to his father’s anthropocentric masculinity, in which animals are regarded as objects and thus they can be killed unethically. While the honeymoon narrative, constructed around Catherine Bourne and David Bourne, focuses on the theme of gender/sexual role reversal and polyamory, the African narrative is based on David’s childhood experience while elephant hunting in Africa with his father. Published in 1986, Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden has always been a controversial work due to its multi-layered narratives. ![]()
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