Love and war

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Ernest Hemingway was a man who was intrigued by the complexity that love and war brought to intimate relationships. Not only was Hemingway intrigued by love and war, he once also lived it. During WWI Hemingway served as a Red Cross ambulance driver; after being seriously wounded he spent six months at the Red Cross hospital in Milan where he fell in love for the first time. Falling in love with the nurse also resulted in Hemingway’s first heartbreak. Hemingway was a “damned good looking man”, which allowed him to have plenty of relationships with women. Having been married four times to four different women also gives light as to why the relationships he writes about always fail in his stories. Although Hemingway never served as a soldier in war, as much as he wanted to, he knew that the burdens of war always resulted in a failed love. Ultimately, Hemingway uses the war to attack the romantic delusions individuals had prior to WWI to signify the affects war cast on romance.
Nick Adams is a fictional character that Hemingway has made a sequence of short stories about. In the short story Now I Lay Me, Hemingway introduces us to Nick who is a soldier in WWI. We quickly learn that Nick is an insomniac and he is afraid of going to sleep at night because if he ever shut his eyes in the dark and let his self go “[His] soul would go out of [His] body”(276). The reason that Nick is afraid of going to sleep at night during the war is because he had been blown up at night and once felt his soul go out of him and then come back. Every night Nick attempts to disregard his fear of the war by staying awake and reminiscing about the trout stream he has once fished along as a boy, or sometimes he’d simply stay awake and say his prayers and pray...

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... and war, we saw how they correlated to one another yet also differed from one another in their own unique ways. Nick Adams, a WWI soldier, was left mentally and emotionally incapable of coming to terms with love and marriage due to his traumatic experience. Jake and Brett, like Nick, were both affected by the war in their own distinctive ways, but both were incapable of allowing the relationship between each other to become successful. As for Henry and Catherine, who seemed to have fallen in love at the perfect time, also had a love that was affected by the war, and in the end one is left alone. All the characters are victims of the lost generation of WWI. Hemingway makes it apparent that in each story, love has the ability to change people profoundly but the war sets limitations on those who are hopefuls of their outdated prewar value system of honor and romance.

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