Writing Analysis of “The Butterfly and the Tank” by Ernest Hemingway

“The Butterfly and the Tank” isn’t one of Ernest Hemingway’s better known short stories, but maybe it should be. John Steinbeck, in a letter to Hemingway, wrote that it was among the “very few finest stories” ever written.

The story is one of a handful Hemingway wrote from his experiences covering as a reporter the Spanish civil war in the 1930s. He even helped make a film called “The Spanish Earth” in support of the eventual losing side. The fictional short stories appear to have been culled from Hemingway’s own experiences and, rather than use them as journalism, he set them aside as worth turning into fiction.

This story is oddly reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel,” but in the inverse. That’s interesting because Hemingway listed “The Blue Hotel” as one of the stories to read in his list of stories for young writers. Crane’s story is considered a masterpiece, while Hemingway’s story is not considered to be of equal brilliance compared to his short stories written in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Crane’s character has an irrational fear of the frontier West. He believes he has to appear tougher than he is due to all the dime Westerns he’s read, causing him to be overly suspicious and aggressive with a false and odd bravado that ultimately gets him killed. In Hemingway’s story, a person in a celebratory mood due to an approaching wedding completely underestimates the seriousness and danger in a bar in war-torn Madrid, and that…