Historical background
World War I 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. 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 he wanted to convey lay 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 combined with 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.
Discussion
Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms in 1929 as a fictional autobiography. It is a testament to his belief that an author can only convince his reader if he writes about something experienced in person. Here he relates his adventures in WWI.
The narrative style Hemingway chooses might surprise the reader since he recounts the events in a detached way, couched in short sentences as in a newspaper report, not as an involved narrator. This makes the story easy to read, yet it can appear naive and commonplace, including the romantic dialogues, which are so neutral that they seem superficial.
The male characters portrayed in the novel are soldiers, which allows Hemingway to show off their macho side. They indulge in drinking competitions; brothels are part of their common talk. If grappa is offered it is taken in two shots, not one. Throughout the story the narrator himself downs wine as if it were water A priest plays the role of stoic victim to the captain’s crude insinuations, highlighting even more the macho spirit so dear to Hemingway.
However, underneath this simple narrative style Hemingway's iceberg theory is working to involve the reader in deeper themes. One of the more salient of these is the question of morality in wartime. The episode of the Italian engineer who decides to desert and is shot in the back by the narrator as he flees is recounted in short, sharp detail. Despite the flat narration it induces the reader to wonder about the distinction between murder and army discipline. Rinaldi's syphilis is also presented as a simple fact and the reader may be surprised to read that, since penicillin was unknown then, this illness of a close friend is not treated in more tragic terms. When considered in relation to the thousands being killed in the war, perhaps it may seem less of a tragedy.
Even the death of his newborn child and his lover, Catherine, from a childbirth haemorrhage is presented in a distanced fashion, especially by the woman herself, who adopts a stoic attitude to her own death. The reader is left to imagine the narrator’s loss.
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