Historical background
World War broke out after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited an already tense territorial feud between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. France, Britain, and Russia joined together as the Allied powers against the Central Power alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Eventually, the US joined the war on the side of the Allies after the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger ship carrying 128 American citizens. The conflict lasted four years, cost $350 billion, and claimed the lives of twenty-two million.
The role of Italy in World War I was as a decoy. Traditionally, Italy was an ally of Germany and Austria. However, the allies promised Italy the land it had requested from Austria - the region of South Tyrol, several islands in the Adriatic, and assistance with the expansion of its colonies in Africa - if it would switch sides. The only role of Italy’s ill-equipped army was to attempt to divert the force of the Austrians from helping the Germans in France, a role which caused the death of 500,000 Italians in 1916 alone. It is in that year that the novel's protagonist, Frederic Henry, is wounded. Italy was able to turn back the Austrians and claim a share in the spoils of victory with the Allied cause.
Literary context
In his early works Hemingway depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as soldiers, boxers and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances.
The author began his writing career as a journalist, quickly adopting a minimalistic style due to the nature of reporting on immediate events that required little interpretation. This led to his writing style, captured in the iceberg theory. This is a theory of omission which suggests that the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface. Instead, like an iceberg, the bulk of what you want to convey lies underneath the surface, hinted at but never explicitly stated. Readers are thus encouraged to infer details and fill in gaps with their imagination, feelings, and interpretations.
Hemingway’s economical writing style often seems almost childlike. He provides detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely, avoiding describing his characters’ emotions and thoughts directly. He offers the reader the raw material of an experience and eliminates the authorial viewpoint in order to make the reading of a text match the actual experience as closely as possible. He also believed that he could treat a subject honestly only if the writer had participated in or observed the subject closely.
The success of his plain style in expressing deeply felt emotions contributed to the decline of the elaborate Victorian-era prose that characterised a great deal of American writing in the early 20th century. Another contemporary example of this approach is Scott Fitzgerald, a master at hiding symbolism in the simplest of writing. In The Great Gatsby, the protagonist's obsession with Daisy and his extravagant lifestyle symbolise deeper themes of the American Dream, disillusionment, and social class struggles, topics common to the outlook of the 'Lost Generation' in the U.S. postwar era.
(A mindmap summary of the novel and a written review will appear here after publication in April in the Eco de Sitges.)
