A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway - Research Paper Example

? From Shell-Shock to PTSD: ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and the Psychology of War THESIS: The effects of war are numerous:they can divide nations and unite them; they can liberate some from monarchies and enslave others to communism; and they can make soldiers heroes or physiological victims. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms reflects the psychological impact war has not only on combatants but also on those closest to them. Hemingway’s novel anticipates the present war on terrorism as World War I and the war on terror have physiologically affected soldiers and their families with grief and loss and citizens with the fear of attack and uncertainty. I. Introduction - Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms powerfully illustrates the negative effects war can have on the human psyche. II. Trauma-induced revelation – The effects of the war; Frederic’s injury and the responses of those close to him; reflect the direct and peripheral psychological damage war causes. III. Testifying to horror – Hemingway’s generation’s experience in World War I gave rise to an unprecedented literary interpretation of war and the residual damage it causes. IV. Chivalry obliterated – A Farewell to Arms alludes to the fundamental moral and social changes that World War I ushered in. V. War and psyche – Modern-day war trauma is no longer restricted to military personnel; civilians live in fear of terrorist attack. A. Hemingway would have recognized the psychological anxiety brought on by the war on terror, though the nature of that war is radically different from conventional warfare. VI. Conclusion – The main characters in A Farewell to Arms are war casualties in a physical, psychological and moral sense. War is lethal to the body, mind and soul. Name Name 2 Class Instructor Date From Shell-Shock to PTSD: ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and the Psychology of War The psychological and moral effects of war have long been misunderstood though writers throughout the ages have been aware of them. Ernest Hemingway’s laconic and elliptical prose style gives the subject an understated power in A Farewell to Arms, as it did in many of his other works. The experience that shaped his early fiction was a war unlike any the world had seen, the first mass conflict driven by technology and industrialization. Accordingly, Hemingway’s great story is one of the first to portray the personal and peripheral human suffering that result from war on a modern scale. In Hemingway’s day, the psychological manifestations of combat-induced stress fell roughly into the same category as a shrapnel wound or trench foot, well-known physical products of the Great War that had significant and residual effects on both the injured and those close to them. The days of shell-shock are long past; there is a better understanding of what has come to be known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though perhaps not much more social acceptance of, or sympathy for, its long-term impact on combatants. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have opened a new chapter in the study of this phenomenon, specifically the recognition that the mental ravages of war affect not only the family members of military personnel but also citizens fearful that the conflict may engulf them as well. It seems Name 3 remarkable that Hemingway could have captured the essence of a syndrome that affects so many in today’s technologically advanced, ideologically charged world in a story about World War I. Nevertheless, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms powerfully illustrates the negative effects war can have on the human psyche. Trauma-induced revelation Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley both come to feel the cumulative weight of the war after Frederic is injured. Insomnia, confusion, anxiety and the intensification of his feelings for Catherine are symptoms of Frederic’s post-traumatic suffering. His personal convictions likewise undergo a radical change. “Anger was washed away in the river along with any oligation,” Frederic muses about what has happened to him (Hemingway, 210). The romanticism of war and the adventure of his experience have been stripped away by the horror of what he’s seen. Frederic has had enough war and its “outward forms. I had taken off the stars…it was no point of honor. I was not against them, I was through” (Ibid, 210). Frederic’s outlook encompasses anger, depression and ambivalence, all emotional characteristics of PTSD. It is a complex condition. One of its most devastating and persistent features is the presence of multiple symptoms, a prevalent condition among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Co-occurring disorders among military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq may be of particular concern because of the high estimates of co-morbidity found among individuals with PTSD” (Tanielian, 124). In her Rand Corporation report, Tanielian indicates that data confirms these disorders may have long-term debilitating effects on soldiers and their family members. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine too feels the impact of war and the consequences of Name 4 what has happened to Frederic. The emotional fallout hits her with the devastating power of a physical wounding, changing her from the inside rather than altering her from without. Frederic’s friends and companions are also affected by his wounding and by having to be careful in how they interact with him. Overcome by emotion, Rinaldi strives to maintain control for Frederic’s sake because he “cannot afford to be sentimental, for he has not only to restrain his emotion, he has also to help Henry restrain himself from going sentimental about his suffering” (Dahiya, 88). Here, Hemingway’s trademark clipped prose is in evidence, expressing Rinaldi’s inner conflict as he struggles to control his sadness. The spare, clipped language that Rinaldi uses in speaking with Frederic is all the more poignant for the depth of feeling that it expresses (Ibid, 88). This is an example of the kind of emotional avoidance common in situations where loved ones feel the need to be circumspect in what they say to a traumatized soldier. Testifying to horror In his review of Hemingway’s war fiction, Jeffrey Meyers wrote of the “mental and moral sickness” that the World War I generation carried away from the experience of death, disease and dismemberment. That experience, Meyers said, had helped create a unique literary epoch that required its creators to overcome the depression and moral destitution the war had wrought. Hemingway, of course, was a leading voice of this new generation of writers, who had set down “the confession in language of blood and tears of the horror unendurable to vividly living nerves of the combination of civilized life with barbaric slaughter” (Meyers, 137). Hemingway and his literary contemporaries, who shared in the transformative events of the first Name 5 global war, were themselves shell-shocked. As writers and artists, it was their peculiar burden to work through their pain and interpret what they’d seen and felt. Hemingway’s Frederic Henry was among the first in a modern literary tradition of figures victimized by war in ways they couldn’t fully understand. And who of that generation could possibly comprehend the carnage of those four years? On the first day of the Somme offensive, the British sustained 60,000 casualties. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell employs anecdotal evidence extensively to paint a vivid picture that cuts through the generic meaningless of so many historical accounts. A British soldier recounting an incident from the Somme remembered, “Then we killed...I saw about ten Germans writhing like trout in a creel at the bottom of a shell-hole and our fellows firing at them from the hip” (Fussell, 239). These horrific “snapshots” of memory were what motivated Hemingway and others of his literary generation. When Passini tells his compatriots that “There is nothing as bad as war,” he is referring to the dehumanizing imagery of which Fussell writes (Hemingway, 52). These are the living nightmares that haunt Frederic as he convalesces, and which will remain part of him forever. Chivalry obliterated Among the dramatic elements Hemingway weaves into his story is the anticipation of a fundamental change in Victorian social mores. Rows of soldiers mowed down by entrenched machine gunners expunged the last vestiges of chivalry from the notion of war. This represented a radical break with traditional (even cherished) assumptions about la guerre, change that is Name 6 mirrored in the way Frederic and Catherine’s affair bypasses Victorian ideas of courtship. But this is more than a modern rejection of 19th-century practice. There is something much deeper at work. Catherine has become a casualty of war in the sense that her faith in “civilized” social norms and preconceptions has been utterly destroyed. She “makes clear that the collapse of Victorian norms for courtship and love is part of a more general crisis of ideals precipitated by the war” (Hatten, 1993). Presumably, this elemental moral change was occasioned by the death of her fiance, who perished in a manner all too familiar among World War I casualties. Catherine “contrasts her idealistic fantasy of wartime heroism as involving a ‘picturesque’ sabre wound with what she now sees as war’s reality: ‘They blew him all to bits,’” she tells Frederic bitterly and matter-of-factly (Ibid, 1993). If World War I officially raised the curtain on the 20th century’s recalibration of the world’s moral compass, we may see it reflected in A Farewell to Arms, in altered social behavior (namely Frederic and Catherine’s doomed love affair); and the moral vacuity the war engenders in Frederic, Passini and others. Hemingway had been through it all himself as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in the war’s Italian theatre. Like his protagonist Frederic Henry, he had been injured, recovered in an Italian hospital and fell in love with a beautiful young nurse. He had seen the world his forebears knew blown apart. And like Frederic, he was jaded by the experience, had passed through a crisis of faith in the things he knew and came through it a changed man. For Hemingway and other artists of the generation Gertrude Stein called “lost,” the world would never be the same. They had “lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization,” (Putnam, 2006). Harvard Professor Henry Gates commented that Hemingway was at the Name 7 forefront of this modernist movement in that he “captured in stunning stories and novels the uncomfortable realities of his age and forced into public consciousness a realization of the brutalities of war and their lingering psychological effects” (Ibid, 2006). (This particular subject must have resonated powerfully with Hemingway: a story that was never published in his lifetime, Black Ass at the Crossroads, is a World War II story about a G.I. who ambushes and kills German soldiers and experiences severe feelings of guilt for what he’s done.) War and psyche Hemingway’s legacy must be said to include a heightened general awareness of the “lingering psychological effects” to which Professor Gates made reference. In the 21st century, that heightened awareness has helped to focus attention on the chronic remorse, anger and depression American soldiers often face after returning home from service in the Middle East. It is significant and remarkable that it has also helped bring to light the fear and anxiety of potential terrorist attack on the citizen population, which is also vulnerable to stress-related trauma. In Collateral Damage: The Psychological Consequences of America’s War on Terrorism, Paul Kimmel and Chris Stout argue that the war on terror should be regarded as a long-term endeavor for citizens as well as the military. They assert that this war effort has “stress-inducing effects” for all Americans, and they “advocate for a number of improvements in our country’s mental health delivery system aimed at reducing the potential impact of future incidents of terrorism” (Kimmel and Stout, 4). It’s a far cry from the shell-shock mindset of 100 years ago, and it’s interesting to contemplate how profoundly Hemingway’s famous treatment of war’s lasting impact in A Farewell to Arms and his other novels and short stories has entered the public’s consciousness. Name 8 In 1953, an insightful article comparing the difference between Hemingway’s later work and his early books appeared in a prominent literary magazine. Critic John W. Aldridge pointed to a vast change in prose and tone, attributable no doubt in part to the normal process of aging and its consequent and inevitable change in perspective. Aldridge’s comments are intriguing in that he appears to be speaking about the subject matter and language in A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway’s other war novels. “In the best of the early Hemingway one always felt that the prose had been forced out under great pressure through a tight screen of opposing psychic tensions…” (Aldridge). Psychic tension is an apt description not only of Hemingway’s early style but of the pressure soldiers of the Great War found themselves under in the trenches and in their hometowns when they returned. It is this tension, and the taut fashion in which Hemingway chronicled it in A Farewell to Arms, that speaks so forcefully to the impact of war on the human psyche. Conclusion Since the catastrophic events of September 11, 1999, war and its peripheral effects have come to have new meaning, both for soldiers and civilians. But the potential for death and widespread destruction still traumatize those affected in ways Hemingway would no doubt have recognized nearly 100 years ago. A Farewell to Arms portrays war’s negative effects on the human psyche in its portrayal of the story’s key characters as casualties who have been damaged in diverse ways. Hemingway’s great genius was in his recognition that war is equally lethal to the body, the mind and the soul. Name 9 Works Cited Aldridge, J.W. ‘About Ernest Hemingway.’ The Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. Spring 1953. pp. 311-320. Dahiya, B.S. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: A Critical Study. Delhi, India: Academic Foundation. 1992. Donaldson, S. New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press. 1990. Fussell, P. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 1975. Hatten, C. ‘The Crisis of Masculinity, Reified Desire, and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality. 4, 1. July 1993. pp. 76-98. Hemingway, E. A Farewell to Arms. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1929. Kimmel, P. and Stout, C. Collateral Damage: The Psychological Consequences of America’s War on Terrorism. Wesport, CT: Praeger Publishers. 2006. Meyers, J. Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. New York, NY: Taylor & Routledge. 1982. Putnam, T. ‘Hemingway on War and its Aftermath.’ Prologue Magazine. 38, 1. Spring 2006. PLAGIARISM STATEMENT Plagiarism, defined as uncited borrowing and quoting, is an academic offense carrying significant penalties. I state that, apart from properly cited quotations, this paper is my own work and includes no plagiarism. It has not been submitted previously to any other class or reviewed/graded by another instructor. 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