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Discuss Hemingway’s attitude to war as reflected in A Farewell to Arms
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Ernest Hemingway writing style shows one dominant effect in the short story “Soldier’s Home”, about the effects of war and how impactful war is on a young person's life. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home.
Krebs returns long after the other soldiers come home missing the celebration. “By the time Krebs returned to his hometown in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late” (844). Ernest Hemingway reveals right away in the story that Krebs war experience was far from romantic as it was persuaded in movies and advertised. “Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful” (844). Krebs is considered an antihero, type of protagonist, who gives in to disillusionment and hopelessness. Krebs changed so much from his experiences, however, when he returns the town is still the same. “Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up” (845). At first,
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Krebs did not want to talk about the war considering it had changed him “… did not want to talk about the war at all.
Later he felt the need to talk, but no one wanted to hear about it” (845). The townspeople do not want to hear the truth about the atrocities of battle, preferring, instead, lies about the heroics of war. Krebs finds himself telling these lies because dishonesty is the path of least resistance, even though it causes “nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration” (846). After a while, Krebs makes some effort in trying to talk when his mom asks about the war, but she would get bored, therefore, Krebs did not want to talk much. Krebs just wants to live a life where he can relax and avoid talking about the
war. Krebs spends his days aimlessly, sleeping late, reading, practicing the clarinet, and playing pool. Krebs makes no effort to talk to women because he does not want the complications or consequences of a relationship. Krebs knows that he is home, but feels like the home, he has returned to is no soldier’s home. Krebs’ mother initiating a discussion with Krebs about religion and a job leads Mrs. Krebs to ask the question, “don’t you love your mother, dear boy” (847). Krebs responds honestly, “I don’t love anybody” (847). The response from Krebs causes Mrs. Krebs to cry and revealing her unwillingness to hear the truth. Believing the only way to stop Mrs. Krebs cries, Krebs lies and tells her that he did not mean what he said and was merely angry at something. Mrs. Krebs reasserts her maternal role, reminding her son that she held him next to her heart when he was a tiny baby, reducing Krebs to the juvenile lie: “I know, Mummy… I’ll try and be a good boy for you” (847). After Krebs emotional lie, he decides to leave the town, go to Kansas City for a job, and live his life simply and smoothly.
In “Soldier’s Home,” the main character Krebs exhibits grief, loneliness. When he returns home with the second group of soldiers he is denied a hero's return. From here he spends time recounting false tales of his war times. Moving on, in the second page of the story he expresses want but what he reasons for not courting a female. A little while after he is given permission to use the car. About this time Krebs has an emotional exchange with both his little sister and his mother. Revealing that “he feels alienated from both the town and his parents , thinking that he had felt more ‘at home’ in Germany or France than he does now in his parent’s house”(Werlock). Next, the story ends with his mother praying for him and he still not being touched. Afterwards planning to move to Kansas city to find a job. Now, “The importance of understanding what Krebs had gone through in the two years before the story begins cannot be overstated. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been for the young man”(Oliver). Near the start of the story the author writes of the five major battles he “had been at”(Hemingway) in World War I- Bellaue Wood, Soissons, Champagne, St.Mihiel, and Argonne. The importance of these are shown sentences later that the
War can destroy a young man mentally and physically. One might say that nothing good comes out of war, but in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, there is one positive characteristic: comradeship. Paul and his friends give Himmelstoss a beating in which he deserves due to his training tactics. This starts the brotherhood of this tiny group. As explosions and gunfire sound off a young recruit in his first battle is gun-shy and seeks reassurance in Paul's chest and arms, and Paul gently tells him that he will get used to it. The relationship between Paul and Kat is only found during war, in which nothing can break them apart. The comradeship between soldiers at war is what keeps them alive, that being the only good quality to come out of war.
He arrives back at his town, unused to the total absence of shells. He wonders how the populations can live such civil lives when there are such horrors occurring at the front. Sitting in his room, he attempts to recapture his innocence of youth preceding the war. But he is now of a lost generation, he has been estranged from his previous life and war is now the only thing he can believe in. It has ruined him in an irreversible way and has displayed a side of life which causes a childhood to vanish alongside any ambitions subsequent to the war in a civil life. They entered the war as mere children, yet they rapidly become adults. The only ideas as an adult they know are those of war. They have not experienced adulthood before so they cannot imagine what it will be lie when they return. His incompatibility is shown immediately after he arrives at the station of his home town. ”On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the people hurrying to and fro. A red-cross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: "Just look, I am giving a soldier coffee!"—She calls me "Comrade," but I will have none of it.” He is now aware of what she is
In Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home”, Hemingway introduces us to a young American soldier, that had just arrived home from World War I. Harold Krebs, our main character, did not receive a warm welcome after his arrival, due to coming home a few years later than most soldiers. After arriving home, it becomes clear that World War I has deeply impacted the young man, Krebs is not the same man that headed off to the war. The war had stripped the young man of his coping mechanism, female companionship, and the ability to achieve the typical American life.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Soldier's Home." The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2002. 152-57.
After their first two days of fighting, they return to their bunker, where they find neither safety nor comfort. A grizzled veteran, Kat, suggests these ‘fresh-faced boys’ should return to the classroom. The war steals their spiritual belief in the sanctity of human life with every man that they kill. This is best illustrated by Paul’s journey from anguish to rationalization of the killing of Gerard Duval; the printer turned enemy who leaps into the shell-hole already occupied by Paul. Paul struggles with the concept of killing a “brother”, not the enemy. He weeps despondently as war destroys his emotional being.
When Krebs was in the army, he had a defined identity as a soldier and when he returns home Krebs’s reluctance to take the defined identity of the everyday joe shmoe that is awaiting him. Krebs difficulty to involve himself with the girls in his hometown reflects his refusal to conform to society’s expectation of him. Krebs associates his hometown girls as death to his individualism. All the girls in Krebs hometown look alike with their “round Dutch collars above their sweaters... their silk stockings and flat shoes,” (Hemingway; 49) and “their bobbed hair and the way they walked” (49). The strict uniformity of the girls that Krebs observes can be interpreted to resemble the uniformity of soldiers. Hemingway utilizes diction to illustrate Krebs’s opinion on the army’s forced conformity; “but they lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it” (49). In context of war, “alliances” is a word used between countries and in World War I it meant The Allies. Krebs using word “alliances...
The World War One novelist Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene” (Hemingway, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, 1929). Hemingway knew the horrors of war. He was a veteran of World War One. This was a war where 65 million troops were mobilized, and 37 million were killed, wounded, or went missing. War was seen as glorious until these views were brought in. Hemingway became famous for his writing as a member of the ‘Lost Generation’ of American writers. He, along with writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot made up the great American writers of the time. However, they did have their European
The narrator would only take such actions if he had reason to believe it was not as fearful an action to take as so many believe. The repetition of this line keeps this idea fresh in the audience’s mind. Similarly, in All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque uses words like forgotten and misunderstood to describe the way that outsiders think of the soldiers participating in the war. The way Baumer states: “And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside.... ...
While soldiers are often perceived as glorious heroes in romantic literature, this is not always true as the trauma of fighting in war has many detrimental side effects. In Erich Maria Remarque 's All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a young German soldier is told as he adapts to the harsh life of a World War I soldier. Fighting along the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer and his comrades begin to experience some of the hardest things that war has to offer. Paul’s old self gradually begins to deteriorate as he is awakened to the harsh reality of World War 1, depriving him from his childhood, numbing all normal human emotions and distancing future, reducing the quality of his life.
Ernest Hemingway used an abundant amount of imagery in his War World I novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the five books that the novel is composed of, the mind is a witness to the senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. All of the these senses in a way connects to the themes that run through the novel. We get to view Hemingway’s writing style in a greater depth and almost feel, or mentally view World War I and the affects it generates through Lieutenant Henry’s eyes.
The word "war" is always horrible to man especially with who has been exposed to. It is destruction, death, and horrible suffers that has been with all man's life. In the short story "In Another Country", Ernest Hemingway shows us the physical and emotional tolls of the war as well as its long-term consequences on man's life. He also portrays the damaging effects that the war has on the lives of the Italians and even of the Americans.
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
The short story “In Another Country” by Earnest Hemingway is a story about the negative effects of war. The story follows an unnamed American officer and his dealings with three other officers, all of whom are wounded in World War I and are recuperating in Milan, Italy. In war, much can be gained such as freedom and peace, however war also causes a plethora of negative consequences. Cultural alienation, loss of physical and emotional identity, and the irony of war technology and uncertainty of life are all serious consequences of war that are clearly shown by Hemingway.
middle of paper ... ... so provided the reader with realistic descriptions of the warfront. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms realistically explores the inglorious and brutal truths of war, and idealistically analyzes the power of true love. Works Cited “A Farewell to Arms Essay – A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.”