a sense of "hostility and resignation", and sheds a rare light on Hemingway's childhood. In the story, 12-year-old Nick hides from his angry and violent father; the mother, a Christian Scientist, is distanced, withdrawn in her bedroom, reading Science and Health. "Big Two-Hearted River", the concluding and climactic piece, details Nick's return from war. In it Nick knows he has left his needs behind; Debra Moddelmog highlights how all of the Nick storylines, and most of the others in the collection, are about a "flight from pain". She believes that Gertrude Stein's definition of the Lost Generation applies to In Our Time as much, if not more so, as to The Sun Also Rises; that "Nick seems to believe that the things most worth having and caring about – life, love, ideals, companions, peace, freedom – will be lost sooner or later, and he is not sure how to cope with this assurance, except through irony, bitterness, and, sometimes, wishful thinking." In the last story he learns to come to terms with the loss of his friends, and acknowledges "all the loss he has experienced in the last few years and, equally important, the loss he has come to expect." Style Biographer Mellow believes that In Our Time is Hemingway's most experimental book, particularly with its unusual narrative form. The vignettes have no traditional sense of narrative; they begin in the middle. Shifting points-of-view and narrative perspectives disguise autobiographical details. Pound taught Hemingway to write sparingly. Pound wrote to him that "anything put on top of the subject is BAD ... The subject is always interesting enough without blankets." Hemingway would write in A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964), "If I started to write elaborately, like someone presenting or introducing something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written." In Our Time was written during the author's experimentation phase, his first attempts towards a minimalist style. The prose in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River" is sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and by employing simple sentences and diction – techniques he learned writing for newspapers – the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality, explains Benson. The tightly compressed sentence structure emulates and reflects Pound's imagist style, bringing to prose narrative the stripped-down style Pound famously