Macomber o la gracia bajo presión

Abstract

El análisis del personaje de Francis Macomber en la novela corta de Ernest Hemingway The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber nos permite comprender la famosa frase del autor: Grace under pressure. Macomber, el adinerado americano, aficionado a la caza de fieras pero carente de valor y temple para enfrentarse con el peligro, se ve despreciado por el guía que le instruye y su mujer que le engaña. Tras un inesperado y desesperado alarde de valentía, se convierte en un héroe, tras matar a la fiera. Su «vida feliz» durará poco. Al igual que la mayoría de los héroes de Hemingway, Macomber, moralmente herido y socialmente atrapado, ha luchado en da batalla perdida de la vida.

The character of Francis Macomber in the short novel The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber has attracted our attention as a man in a process of learning a code of values. Hemingway's famous phrase «Grace under presure » is largely illustrated in this novel by the conversion of Francis Macomber -the rich American, fond of big game hunting but enable to confront danger without panicking- from a coward and a cuckold, to a man. The recurrent themes of love, adultery, drinking, life in Africa, game hunting and death appear together with the themes of fear and courage, reworking, to a certain extent, the story that Stephen Crane told in The Red badge of Courage. Hemingway's hero, always wounded, socially trapped and fighting in the violent scenery of life, exemplifies this ((Grace under pressure)), the lietmotif in the «chef de file» of the Lost Generation.