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Comparing and contrasting the realities of war in another country by ernest hemingway
The grim reality of war in A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Importance of heroism
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From an early age, Ernest Hemingway found himself obsessed with the subject of heroism. He looked up to his grandfather, who he saw as a hero, and sought to fulfill the war legacy left behind by joining the army. Hemingway was a participant in many wars, but one in particular shaped the rest of his life and his outlook on the world. It was during the end of World War I and Hemingway was serving the Italian army as an ambulance driver. During the battle at Fossalta di Piave, Hemingway circulated the trenches with chocolates, providing them to soldiers. Out of nowhere, an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded a few feet away from Hemingway, killing one man and wounding many others (Meyers, p.30). Hemingway was one of these wounded men. It was once said by Ted Brumback that Hemingway had acted heroically, for once he regained consciousness, he picked up a wounded man and carried him to the first aid dugout despite his own serious leg wounds (Meyers, p.30). Considered the turning point in his life, Hemingway had faced death but been called a “hero” as a result of it. Even though Hemingway’s obsession with heroism was still prevalent throughout his life, and this event on July 8, 1918, made its way into many of his novels, the heroes Hemingway wrote about never forsook glory or fortune. They were more concerned with the righting of wrongs and the longing of experience (Baker (2), p.129). In Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Frederic Henry is more obviously a form of Hemingway, but also a prime example of the heroes Hemingway liked to write about. Even though Henry faced danger, pain, and death throughout this wartime novel, none of it was glorified. Despite his obsession with heroism in war, while writing the novel...
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...veryone, innocent or not. Hemingway once mentioned the moral emptiness of the universe (Baker (1), p.129). Man is greedy and naturally he wants what he can’t have. That’s why one is drawn to go to war; to fight even harder for what he can’t have. Hemingway does a wonderful job of presenting death and the horrors of war in his novel, A Farewell to Arms. The overall theme in the novel is more obviously antiwar because of the troublesome events that take place, such as the abandonment of one’s commitments and the death of loved ones. Even war hero Robert E. Lee once said, “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” For it is the death in war that keeps one humble. It is the death in war that keeps one from acting upon his greediness. It is the death in war that destroys a man’s soul and reminds him that not everything is his to take.
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.
One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of s...
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother, Grace Hall, was a trained opera singer and later on, a music teacher. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a doctor and an avid naturalist ("Ernest Hemingway: An Inventory”). Just after graduating high school, at the age of eighteen, Hemingway enlisted in the army to fight in World War I ("The Big Read"). After being severely wounded in the war, he moved to Paris in 1921, and devoted himself to writing fiction (Baker). It is said that, “No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway” (Putnam). Hemingway’s book A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, and was based off of the events that happened to him in the war and what happened in his love life. Fredrick Henry, the protagonist, is an American ambulance driver fighting for the allies during World War I. He is introduced to a nurse named Catherine, who he later on falls in love with. Henry was hit by a trench mortar shell and was very badly injured. He is then sent to Milan, where Catherine later on comes to help nurse him to health. The two fall in love and Henry no longer is involved with the war, so they try and have a child, but both Catherine and the child die during labor, and Henry is left alone. Psychoanalytical approach views the psychological motivations of characters, which refer to the dynamics of personality development and behavior based on the unconscious motivations of a person ("Psychoanalytic Theory”). Hemingway’s writing was greatly impacted by his real life tragedies, which consist of witnessing the gruesomeness of war and his discovery and loss of love, this helps exhibi...
Who do you think of when you hear the word “hero?” Do you think of a superhero, such as Superman or Batman? Or maybe you think of a strong, responsible individual like your mom or dad? Whoever you think of must contain qualities and characteristics that you associate with heroes. A few of these characteristics may include being strong, powerful, courageous, and helpful. Up until Hemingway’s time, these were some of the modern day traits affiliated with heroes. Ernest Hemingway introduced a new idea of the hero in his writing. These heroes had a new set of qualities. Hemingway heroes were described as men who lived lives of pleasure, had control of their emotions, were graceful under pressure, skillful, and much more. A Farewell to Arms by
Stewart, Matthew C. "Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War." Papers on Language & Literature 36.2 (2000): 198-221.
"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
Ernest Hemingway has the tendency to use his heroes in some unheroic ways. At first the hero may seem obvious, but later on it is discovered that the true hero is not who it seems to be. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway uses the true hero to guide the main character into becoming a hero, but fails miserably.
Ernest Hemingway used his experiences from World War I to enhance the plot of A Farewell to Arms. Parallels can be drawn throughout the entire novel between Henry's and Hemingway's experiences. Both were Americans serving in the Italian army; both were wounded and went to Milan; both fell in love with a nurse. These many similarities, however, also contain slight differences. There is no real question that Hemingway based events in the novel off of his real experiences, but A Farewell to Arms is by no means an autobiography. The book does not focus on the experience of war. Instead, it is more focused on the after-effects. Minor changes to the events themselves make the novel unique, while the factual basis strengthens the plot with authentic feeling.
Prevalent among many of Ernest Hemingway's novels is the concept popularly known as the "Hemingway hero", or “code hero”, an ideal character readily accepted by American readers as a "man's man". In The Sun Also Rises, four different men are compared and contrasted as they engage in some form of relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, a near-nymphomaniac Englishwoman who indulges in her passion for sex and control. Brett plans to marry her fiancée for superficial reasons, completely ruins one man emotionally and spiritually, separates from another to preserve the idea of their short-lived affair and to avoid self-destruction, and denies and disgraces the only man whom she loves most dearly. All her relationships occur in a period of months, as Brett either accepts or rejects certain values or traits of each man. Brett, as a dynamic and self-controlled woman, and her four love interests help demonstrate Hemingway's standard definition of a man and/or masculinity. Each man Brett has a relationship with in the novel possesses distinct qualities that enable Hemingway to explore what it is to truly be a man. The Hemingway man thus presented is a man of action, of self-discipline and self-reliance, and of strength and courage to confront all weaknesses, fears, failures, and even death.
Ernest Hemingway, an ambulance driver turned novelist, had a recognizable motif when it came to writing, many of his protagonists shared a common set of traits often referred to as the Hemingway hero code. The trait is as follows; a general loss of faith and conventional morality; cut off from the traditional value of home and family; the ability and the desire to do his job well; the belief that no matter how much trouble life gives a person he must never let his suffering show, except for fears; a belief that the world is generally cruel place, and he must demonstrate that men and women can find moments of meaning and happiness despite the cruelty of the world. A clear example of a Hemingway hero is Frederic Henry from the novel A Farewell
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.
...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.
Written just after the first global war, Hemingway delivers a subtle anti-war novel. World War I ended in 1918; A Farewell to Arms was published eleven years later. Although eleven years seems as if it would be enough time to forget, no time span can allow Hemingway to forget the effects of World War I. After World War I, Hemingway is struck with countless nightmares. Hemingway uses these nightmares and flashbacks to write A Farewell to Arms (Analysis 1). When reflecting on the novel, a blogger writes, “A Farewell to Arms is a war novel, not in the sense that it glorifies the war, but as all know, it describes the cruelty, madness of the war which deprives human life and happiness” (Analysis 1). During the novel, Hemingway displays his anti-war message by showing how the characters indulge in distractions to escape the reality of war. Love and sex, alcohol, and religion are all ways characters distracted themselves.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is considered one of the great novels of World War I. It introduces the theme of love, while war occupies all of Europe. It is a complex novel with many characteristic aspects of modernism. After looking into Hemingway's biography, the reader can tell that he included details from his personal life in his novel. He based the main character Frederic Henry upon his own experience as an ambulance driver during World War I.
There are indications in each of the novel’s five books that Ernest Hemingway meant A Farewell to Arms to be a testament against war. World War One was a cruel war with no winners; ”War is not won by victory” (47). Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the book’s hero and narrator, experiences the disillusionment, the hopelessness and the disaster of the war. But Henry also experiences a passionate love; a discrepancy that ironically further describes the meaninglessness and the frustration felt by the soldiers and the citizens.