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영어

This paper attempts to read Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) as an antiwar novel. Hemingway was seriously wounded while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in the Italian front during the First World War. In spite of his rather short war experience, Hemingway determined to write his experience into a novel about the First World War. After years of assiduous research, particularly about historical events in the Italian front, Hemingway wrote a novel that incorporated his own war experience. By the time he wrote A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's earlier romantic and glorified view of the war evolved into a bitterly critical one that conveys the meaninglessness of the First World War, particularly stressing the unprecedented scale of human casualties and destruction brought on by the war. Like his previous work In Our Time (1925), A Farewell to Arms highlights the theme of "separate peace." Frederic Henry deserts the war after witnessing the absurdity of the execution of Italian officers on the Tagliamento River. Deserting the war and finding no solace in religion or family, Frederic and Catherine Barkley seek their separate peace in their intense love against all odds. Catherine seems more brave and mature in love than Frederic who tends to be self-centered. The death of Catherine is at once tragic and controversial enough to invite female critics of Hemingway's gender representation. Nonetheless, my argument is that Hemingway, by focusing on the tragedy experienced by people embroiled in the war, succeeds in making his novel a representative American antiwar novel of the time.