Ever-Widening Horizons: Hemingway's War Literature, 1923 to 1940

摘要

Ernest Hemingway has permeated the cultural consciousness so deeply that his fiction has become difficult to consider without preconceived bias. His name might evoke thoughts of a bullfighting aficionado, big-game hunter, war hero, war correspondent, or even misogynist; but one cannot judge his writing on such terms. It is frequently the erroneous merging of his literature and his carefully cultivated public machismo that leads to accusations that he celebrates violence or demonstrates a 'fetish of militarism' (Strychacz, 2003). Hemingway is undoubtedly interested in war, but he finds it fascinating for the same reason that Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy did. On one level, death is simple, but Hemingway's characters struggled with disparate responses to death throughout his career. Until now, critics have generally focused on particular novels, particular themes, or Hemingway's oeuvre as a whole. The critical corpus lacks a specific examination of Hemingway's perspectives on the psychological burden of war. The author proposes to investigate Hemingway's changing attitudes toward war, starting with the early stories and sketches, mostly from 'In Our Time'; moving on to 'A Farewell to Arms'; and concluding with 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' works written between 1923 and 1940. In this investigation of the psychological burdens of war, the author starts with two themes common to all of the war fiction: the pressure war puts on language and communication and the curious union of creation and destruction. He then applies a microscope to the horrors of battle. These horrors take three essential forms: harm to oneself, or fear of such harm; harm to one's comrades, and the corresponding duty to prevent it; and the psychological toll of killing one's enemy. These entwined categories, which shall sometimes be referred to as fear, duty, and guilt, exert pressure on each other.