Switzerland as an In-Between State

Teresa Delgado holds two MA diplomas from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, in the fields of Modern History and American Literature. This book, her American Literature thesis, was submitted to her University's English Department in September of 2015. Delgado currently works as a PhD level researcher and radio journalist in Switzerland.

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway spent a significant amount of time in Switzerland. Hemingway repeatedly visited Switzerland to enjoy the snow and ski. Fitzgerald lived in Switzerland from 1930 to 1931 while his wife Zelda was treated in a psychiatric facility. Yet, little has been written about the lasting impression that Switzerland left on both authors as a country. This thesis ties Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's interest in Switzerland to a literary tradition founded by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and explores how the two American Modernists use Switzerland to critique its "sister republic"-the United States. Both authors use Switzerland as a literary image to illustrate the fragmentation of the world and a state of in-betweenness. However, the two authors convey this notion in entirely different ways: Whereas Fitzgerald connects Switzerland to multiple in-between zones all connected to fluidity and a profound inability to offer its American visitors real healing, Hemingway focuses on spatial and temporal in-between zones tied to imagery surrounding snow and trains, finding inspiration in the works of Albert Einstein.