As representative of the “Lost Generation” writers after WWI, Ernest Hemingway is renowned for his concise writing style. This “Iceberg Style” writing is well manifested in his creation of short stories. For years, critical attention has been paid to “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” from all kinds of perspectives but rarely from the perspective of discourse function in semantics, especially from the discourse function of “tense”. Tense in semantics can suggest the speaker’s angle of speaking thus reveal different intentions, which is to seek the seven-eighths of an iceberg hiding below the sea surface so as to fully comprehend and appreciated the author’s real intention of creation.