HEMINGWAY’S WRITING TECHNIQUE IN THE KI SUDADI’S SHORT STORY MALAIKAT CILIK WINNER OF THE 2026 RANCAGE LITERARY PRIZE

Abstrak

The language learning philosophy for Indonesian students is stated in the Trigatra Bahasa, namely: prioritize Indonesian, preserve regional languages, and master foreign languages. The researcher, as a Javanese whose mother tongue is Javanese and has an English educational background, needed to research the short story in the Javanese short story collection entitled Malaikat Cilik by Ki Sudadi which awarded the Rancage literary prize in 2026. The purpose of this research is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the Javanese short story entitled Malaikat Cilik which is also the title of this short story collection viewed from the perspective of English literature. The method employed is descriptive-qualitative research proposed by Robert E. Stake. Furthermore, the Ernest Hemingway’s writing technique of understatement is the main consideration in analizing the short story. The main findings of this research: 1) The short story Malaikat Cilik can be examined using the understatement writing technique proposed by Ernest Hemingway. In this short story, it is found that one of the main characters, a teenaged girl, is a person who has a stoic nature; her father is unknown, her mother has just died, and she earns a simple living at the market. However, she dares to ask for extra money for her needs from someone she just met, and 2) The short story Malaikat Cilik has more strengths than weaknesses when examined using the understatement technique. One of the shortcomings is the ease with which the other main character, an adult man, gives fifty thousand rupiah to a teenaged girl he has just met, which seems odd without revealing his own inner state. Furthermore, the teenaged girl's reaction to praying for the main character to become an official seems odd without revealing the teenaged girl's consideration of the adult man’s uniform or clothes. The main character of this short story, the teenaged girl, exhibits the stoic character that is characteristic of Ernest Hemingway’s understatement. Meanwhile, the other main character, the narrator or the adult man, exhibits behavior that suggests a flaw in the story, as William Faulkner noted when criticizing the understatement technique. If this short story were translated into three languages—Indonesian, Javanese, and English—it could be of a promising effort to realize the Trigatra Bahasa, i.e. prioritizing Indonesian, preserving Javanese, and mastering English.