On the Quai at Smyrna was a short story written by Ernest Hemingway in his short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and is told from the viewpoint of a Grecian man who is on the scene at a strange event. The strange thing is how people are screaming at midnight, and a number of other weird occurrences.
The story is ambiguous, but it’s safe to say that it is in response to the Great Fire of Smyrna that took place in 1922. It was a catastrophic fire that took place during the Greco-Turkish war, killing tens of thousands of people. Hemingway probably wrote the piece on a supposition of what the fire might’ve appeared like to someone like our narrator, who didn’t even know what was going on.
Although the narrator is unaware of the fire, he notes a bunch of things happening that he wouldn’t have expected. When they came in to attack the Turks, they were merely fired at lightly instead of greatly attacked. There were tons of dead babies and other horrible stuff in the water, although he tries to dismiss it at the end.
This is a pretty short story, but an interesting one. Hemingway was well known to write about historical events, and I imagine it would’ve been a lot more interesting if we were actually living at the time of this war. Given the fact that we are not it isn’t really too relevant for us today, but it’s a nice perspective piece.
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