Two Hemingway War Novels
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This paper will compare and contrast two novels by Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Both of these novels are based on the personal experiences of Hemingway which took place during and immediately after the First World War. During the First World War, Hemingway volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver for the Italian army. He was wounded during that time, and his experiences became the basis for the novel A Farewell to Arms. During the early 1920s, Hemingway went to Paris, where he befriended other American artists who were living as expatriates there. That experience became the foundation for his novel The Sun Also Rises. Thus, the setting for A Farewell to Arms is Europe during the First World War, and the setting for The Sun Also Rises is Europe during the years immediately following the war. These settings have a strong impact on the values and attitudes which are presented by the characters in the two novels. In A Farewell to Arms, for example, the destruction and tragedy of the war have an effect on the way the various characters behave and interact with one another. In The Sun Also Rises, it is not the war itself but rather the aftermath of the war which has an influence on the way the characters act and think. Both novels are concerned in one way or another with feelings of loss. In A Farewell to Arms, this loss is directly attributable to the effects of the war. In The Sun Also Rises, however, the feeling of loss is expres
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the arbitrary nature of death and loss during wartime. Thus, despite the differences in loss experienced by Jake and Frederick, both situations are the result of fate as symbolized by the events of the war. Even Jake's social impotence is related to the war, because it was the aftermath of the war which caused the initial loss of values.
In the end of their respective novels, the characters Frederick Henry and Jake Barnes are still developing. Neither character has attained a resolution of their problems. In particular, neither one has learned yet how to deal with the experience of lost love. Of the two characters, Frederick undergoes the greatest amount of development during the course of A Farewell to Arms. He starts out as a strongly masculine figure, who has not yet learned how to love. After he meets Catherine, he learns to love. That factor, combined with his experiences in the war, lead to his development as a character. By the end of the novel, he has deserted the army, and has begun to view Catherine as the center of his life. Although he loses Catherine in the end, it is apparent that he will continue to develop in the future. His loss has prepared him for the next stage in his development as a human being.
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Approximate Word count = 3058
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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