Hemingway’s first short story, “Up in Michigan,” portrays the growth and destruction of a young girls’ romantic illusions about love through her infatuation with and seduction by an apparently gentleman who is really an insensitive brute. Hemingway explores this typically anti-romantic theme in what appears at first glance to be straightforward journalistic style. But the prose, like almost everything else in this story, is deceptive, for lurking beneath the flat surface of its denotative diction and simple syntax lie linguistics strategies and dynamically charged meanings through whose interplay the real disillusioning world of the story emerges. In thus concealing the inward psychological phenomena of disillusionment within linguistic substructures which only release their meaning when seen as poetic forces playing against each other beneath the narrative level, Hemingway forces “form” to express the theme that appearance is deceptive.