What is it about?
Frederic Henry is an enigmatic protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms because he is an American citizen in an Italian military uniform. This paper examines Henry's conflicted role within a war that most observers would define has having two distinct sides defined by the boundary between two distinct European nation-states. This paper examines Hemingway's use of literary techniques to challenge that mode of battlefield dichotomy in order to carve out a third space for the novel's protagonist.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
By challenging the tendency to tell stories of war within a rigid, oppositional framework--us vs. them, good vs. evil--Ernest Hemingway uses his novel to anticipate a future in the twentieth century in which war would become more complicated, especially with the more systematic involvement of non-combattants, such as Red Cross medics, journalists, and, eventually, United Nations observers. In this sense, A Farewell to Arms provides a valuable analysis of war and other conflicts as they play out in a more transnational European setting.
Perspectives
What makes Ernest Hemingway such an influential twentieth-century US author? In this paper, I argue that it is because of his prescient understanding of himself as a new kind of postnational figure. A Farewell to Arms ultimately makes its mark by narrating war from this still-innovative postnational perspective.
Dr John D Schwetman
University of Minnesota Duluth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “I Was in Italy … and I Spoke Italian”, January 2018, University Press of Florida,
DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813054414.003.0011.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
