Assignment Writing - Paper No.108
Welcome readers! This blog is written as a part of assignment writing of Semester-2, assigned and Inspired by Dr.Dilip barad sir - Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
● Name :- Hetal Pathak
● RollNo :- 09
● Semester :- 2 ( Batch 2022 - 2024)
● Enrollment No. :- 4069206420220022
● Paper No. :- 108
● Paper Name :- The American literature
● Topic :- The Influence of World war - l on the Works of Hemingway
● Submitted to :- Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
● E- mail address :- hetalpathak28@gmail.com
● Date of Submission :- 31st March 2023
' The Influence of World war - l on the Works of Hemingway ' :-
□ Table of Contents :-
▪︎ Introduction
▪︎ Background of World war - l and Hemingway
▪︎ Hemingway's writing during the First world war
▪︎ Hemingway 's Perspective on war and its Influence on his writing Style
▪︎ Hemingway 's Works after World war-l
○ 'The Sun Also Rises'
○ 'A Farewell to Arms'
▪︎ Conclusion
◇ Introduction :-
Ernest Hemingway, In full Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 - 1961) was an American novelist and Short story writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely Publicised life. His Succinct and lucid Prose style exerted a Powerful Influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.
" The Writer's Job is to tell the truth." - Ernest Hemingway once said. When he was having difficulty writing he reminded himself of this , as he explained in his memories, A Moveable Feast ;
" I would Stand and look out, over the roofs of Paris and think, " Do not Worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true Sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So, Finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say."
Hemingway's Personal and artistic quests for truth were directly related. His writing was his way of approaching his identity of discovering himself in the Projected metaphors of his experience. He believed that if he could see himself clear and whole his Vision might be useful to others who also lived in this world.
Hemingway's search for truth and accuracy of expression is reflected in his terse, Economical Prose style, which is widely acknowledged to be his greatest contribution to literature. Frederick J. Hoffman called Hemingway's ;
" The aesthetic of simplicity involves a basic Struggle for absolute accuracy in making words correspond to experience. "
One of Hemingway's greatest Virtues as a Writer was his self discipline. He was Perhaps the most influential Writer of his generation.
◇ Background of World war - l and Hemingway :-
Hemingway's World war - l writing developed, First as he honed his distinctive style and Progressed toward Completing his first novel. In the 1930s Hemingway shifted approach however and his world war - l related Writings came under the influence of his interest in social inequality ( To Have and Have Not). His shift toward showing instead of implying interiority in ' Across the River' and ' Into the Trees' and the general imposition of his ego into his private and public writing. He remained committed however to the idea of the inherently Complex nature of warfare.
Duringe First world war Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an Ambulance driver with the American Red cross. Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine gun Fire. For his bravery, he received the silver medal of valour from the Italian government - one of the first Americans so honoured. Commenting on this experience years later in ' Men at war' Hemingway wrote ;
" When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immorality, other People get killed ; not you…Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."
Hemingway's greatest war work deals with aftermath.- Stated Author Tobias Wolff at the Hemingway Centennial celebration.
" It deals with what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward. The problem that Hemingway set for himself in stories like 'Soldier's Home' is the difficulty of telling the truth about what one has been through. He knew about his own difficulty in doing that."
In the early 1920s, In relation to the experience of World war Hemingway and other Modernist writers lost faith in the central institutions of western Civilization. One of those institutions was literature itself. Nineteenth century novelists were prone to a Florid and elaborate style of writing. Ernest Hemingway using a distinctly American vernacular , created a new style of fiction, In which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences - a fiction in which nothing crucial or at least very little is Stated explicitly.
" The way we write about war or even think about war was affected fundamentally by Hemingway. "
Henry Louis Gates
Ernest Hemingway was at the crest of a wave of Modernists. The first world war is at the watershed event that changes world literature as well as how Hemingway responded to it.
◇ Hemingway's writing during the First world war :-
Hemingway's literary genius was moulded by Cultural and literary influences. The war is the main and major influence that shaped Hemingway's thought and art. The most influential influence that left a deep impact on his genius was the nightmarish experiences which he himself had undergone in the two World wars.
As a novelist, Hemingway is often assigned a place among the writers of the 'lost generation', along with Faulkener, Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. These writers, including Ernest Hemingway, tried to show the loss of the world war that had caused in the social, moral and Psychological spheres of human life. They also reveal the horror, the fear and the futility of human existence. Truly Hemingway has echoed the longings and Frustrations that are typical of these writers, but his work is distinctly different from theirs in its Philosophy of life.
Hemingway has been immortalised by the individuality of his style. Short and solidity sentences, delightful dialogues and a painstaking hunt for an apt word or Phrase to express the exact Truth, are the distinguishing features of his writing Style. Hemingway is a realist. As he himself has Stated in "Death in the Afternoon" , his main concern was ;
" To put down what really happened in an action ; what the actual things were that produced the emotion you experienced."
◇ Hemingway's Perspective on war and its Influence on his writing Style :-
THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I on Ernest Hemingway’s writing, and his own harrowing experiences on the front lines in Italy in 1918, has been linked to everything from his hardboiled narratives to his spare rhythms to his traumatised protagonists. Yet scholars have also disputed the extent or shape of this influence, with many cautioning that the relationship between Hemingway’s wartime experience and his subsequent literary output is oblique at best. Hemingway himself acknowledged that he was well launched in his career as a fiction writer before he ever took on the task of writing directly about war.
Hemingway's iceberg writing style exercised a great influence on twentieth century literature. Many of his oeuvres such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The old man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Garden of Eden are considered as the classics of literature. In fact, all his masterpieces speak of high standards of his art in which he created memorable stories of people, events, experiences and enduring actions. He passionately experienced and explored intense themes such as love, war, life, fear, trauma, violence, faith, courage and endurance in his works. Hemingway has a distinction of being a soldier-writer who both took part in world war-l and wrote about it.
◇ Hemingway's Works after World war - l :-
Ernest Hemingway lived in a time of full violence, pain, blood and hostility. He is well known both for his great Works and for his great adventures.He was the Participant of World war -l and world war - ll, and the Spanish Civil war. Along with that he was a victim with hundreds of wounds from these wars.
Throughout Hemingway's life the experiences from various wars and Adventures enabled him to witness the bloody battles, Violence, life and death of People and provided him with rich Sources of writing. Virtually his works and his experiences are inseparable and have been intertwined in many aspects.There is no exception that Hemingway Poured his war experiences into his literature works. However, his viewpoints on war were not stable but underwent an ever - changing Process.
So, That is how we will try to look and analyse two of his great Works :- ' The Sun Also Rises' and ' A Farewell to Arms' . How Hemingway's viewpoints on war are formed and reflected in his fictions.
■ ' The Sun Also Rises' :-
Ernest Hemingway Prolific writer also transformed his Personal war experiences into the Works of literature that resonated with Post war readers and Civilians alike. Two of Hemingway's World war - l novels gave little account of the characters in the war. In ' The Sun Also Rises' Story follows former Soldiers several years after the war. While another novel :- ' Farewell to Arms' took place during the war, used few descriptions of the trenches and the fighting favouring hospitals and Italian cities. The Italian front became little more than a backdrop for a majority of the story to instead put focus on those living with the war and not the war itself.
Hemingway's novel - 'The Sun Also Rises' directly addressed the futility of life Soldiers could, and did, face following the war. This post war Soldier is represented by the narrator Jake Barnes, a character who passed through the book like wind through a screen door due to his inability to reconnect life. The crux of this indifference is exhibited by his futile entanglement with the free spirited Lady Brett Ashley. That sense of futility caused by a war injury which rendered him impotent. The new York Times Review summed up this relationship as ;
" An erotic attraction which is destined from the Start to be Frustrated."
Jake could not escape the war due to his injury that left him Permanently disabled. Furthermore, Hemingway Symbolised the doomed bull in the arena as a tie - into Jake's lack of life. As Verna Kale Commented in his biography of Hemingway :
" This story greatly reflected Hemingway's own trip to Spain and his experience with bull fighting, and the revelation to the Author."
Hemingway echoed these instances of self - removal experienced by Veterans in his novel.
■ ' A Farewell to Arms' :-
Another Hemingway's work :- ' A Farewell to Arms' is based on Hemingway's own experience as a Participant in world war-l. This novel remarkably reflects his attitudes towards war. In this novel, Hemingway shows the world of war with all its Ugliness, Violence, insanity and irrationality.
Besides giving an accurate account of the war, Hemingway had given an insightful description of the Psychology of the Soldiers. Being tired with war and its irrational Pogrom, the Soldier's started to look for Peace. Hemingway got himself recruited as Ambulance driver in the Italian army.He joined the army not because of any dire need or Pressure but because of his own romantic notions about war.
In his book 'The Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway, Frank L.Rayon mentioned that
' The Views of Ambulance Drivers who developed the " Spectatorial attitudes " towards the war in the First world war.'
Hemingway was horrified by what he saw on the battlefield and returned. His experience with war changes his Outlook on life completely. He was very enthusiastic before being enlisted for war but he was highly depressed and pessimistic when he returned from the war.
In his novel - ' A Farewell to Arms' Hemingway has shown that war is the most irrational and yet most destructive of all human activities as it brings only death, despair and destruction. According to Scott Donaldson,
" A Farewell to Arms" supplied Hemingway's most extended fictional statement of disillusionment.
◇ Conclusion :-
To conclude, Ernest Hemingway’s works reflected and in some way communicated the experiences of Soldiers serving during World war - l. Hemingway's doubts and scars never fully vanished after the war. The desire to reclaim what they lost in the war haunted them and carried into their Writings.
[ Words :- 2062]
[ Images :- 06 ]
Works Cited :-
“Ernest M. Hemingway.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ernest-m-hemingway.
“Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath.” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/spring/hemingway.html.
The Impacts of Wars on Earnest Hemingway’s Works - Researchgate. www.researchgate.net/publication/276384998_The_Impacts_of_Wars_on_Earnest_Hemingway's_Works.
Akhter, Khadiza. “Impact of the Great War on the Characters of Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms and the Sun Also Rises.” The Comilla University Journal of Arts, 2 July 2021, www.academia.edu/49505787/Impact_of_the_Great_War_on_the_Characters_of_Hemingways_A_Farewell_to_Arms_and_The_Sun_Also_Rises.
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