Hemingway & World War I

The literary representation WWI that Hemingway presents to us of the cultural history of the US during WWI, despite the general criticism that Hemingway’s work is anti-intellectual, is a representation from the viewpoint of the intellectual. Whether or not Hemingway’s heroes want to think or not, they are, especially in the case of Nick Adams and Frederic Henry, thinking beings. In other words, they cannot help thinking, and in particular thinking about the great nothingness that awaits them after death and consequently renders life devoid of meaning from without the individual. The existential motif signified in the last line is prevalent throughout the Nick Adams stories and A Farewell To Arms. During this period in Hemingway’s career, the great harbinger of nothingness, or what is refered to in the short story A Clean Well Lighted Place as the great nada, is World War I. This paper will discuss the central motif of nothingness and its relationship to the central character in the short stories “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River.” We will then turn to a discussion of A Farewell to Arms to see how the existential motif of nothingness effects the lives of the soldiers in the great war and in particular the American soldier Frederic Henry.

Both the Nick Adams Stories and A Farewell to Arms have as their backdrop the war. This is not to say that the setting of all the stories or every episode in

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that is the European nations, we had to confront the other pole of the Hegelian dialectic, nothingness. And what we discovered was that history did not progress into a harmonious synthesis that would leave us snug and sleeping well. No, quite the opposite. We were introduced to the great fear of nothingness and annihilation looming in the horizon of our lives. The genius of Hemingway, we might suggest, lies in his ability to give us a beautiful impressionistic account of this historical world moment. When Nick is much older and returned from the war his belief that death is something that will never happen to him has been shattered. “Big Two-Hearted River” is an impressionistic account of a fishing and camping trip that Nick takes after his return home after the war. In other words, the images presented are colored by the mood(s) of Nick Adams. Nick’s is a mind searching for peace in the uncertainty of a post-war landscape. The war has exposed to Nick the reality of death as part of the process of life that he, as a child, denied at the close of “Indian Camp.” In the initial paragraph we gain a sense of ruin and collapse in the description of Seney (177). As reflected in the images of the town of Seney, the war has exp
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Approximate Word count = 3189
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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