Goodbye, Arms came out in 1929, Hemingway's second novel. It was a novel with the theme of war and love, and it was also Hemingway's first war novel. After the First World War, many anti-war novels emerged in the United States, and "Farewell, Weapons" is one of the most famous, and it is also one of the outstanding masterpieces in the American "Lost Generation" literary genre.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" > tragic work on the theme of war and love, and love under war cannot go from hell to true heaven</h1>
The English name of "Farewell, Weapon" is "A Farewell to Arms", in which the word "arms" is a pun, which has both "weapon", which means war, and "embrace", which means love. Through the English interpretation, it is not difficult to see the theme of this work: war and love. From the perspective of realism, there is no doubt that war will lead to the tragedy of love, and the tragedy of love highlights the cruelty of war.
The greatness of this work is that it closely intertwines war and love. Set against the backdrop of the Italian battlefield of world war I, the novel takes the love story of the protagonist Frederick Henry and the English nurse Catherine Barkley as the main line, focusing on how Henry "bid farewell" to "war" and "love" successively, or conversely, how "war" destroyed "love", war not only took the life of Catherine and her baby, but also took the love and happiness of Henry, but also took the lives and happiness of thousands of people. Through the portrayal of personal destiny, the destructive nature of war and the destruction of human nature are reflected.
Stills from the "Farewell, Weapon" movie
The protagonist of the novel himself is not a hot-blooded young man with rich ideals, and can even be said to be a more "self" egoist. In this novel, we will not see heroic characters who fight for justice, but on the contrary, the novel shows the baptism of life of small people in war. Just like Zhang Ailing's novel, we can't see the kind of big people with great historical characteristics and big ideas, and her pen is a group of small people living in the depths of the city. In contrast, the writing of small people can arouse people's resonance with the times.
After experiencing the cruelty of real war, the protagonist Henry gives his own views on war:
"Words like sacred, glorious, sacrificial, futile, etc., I was ashamed as soon as I heard them. We have heard these words, sometimes standing in the rain, standing in places barely audible, and faintly hearing only a few words that are shouted out loud; we have also read these words, read from the new bulletins posted by others on the old bulletins, and now that we have observed them for so long, I have not seen anything sacred, and there is nothing glorious about those glorious things, and as for sacrifice, it is like a slaughterhouse in Chicago, except that the meat is no longer processed, but buried. There are many words that you can't listen to, and in the end there are only place names and a little dignity. Some numbers are the same, and there are certain dates, and only these and place names can you say, and there is some meaning. Abstract terms such as glory, honor, bravery, and sacredness, when put together with village names, road numbers, river names, troop numbers, and dates, are simply disgusting. (Chapter 27)
From this passage, we can deeply feel the protagonist's pessimistic disappointment in the war and a strong negative emotion. In addition to this, you can read a smell of being deceived. According to Hemingway's principles of iceberg theory, the above view of war is only one-eighth of the iceberg, and seven-eighths is still underwater. Let's take a look at seven-eighths of the way deep underwater.
Some people say that "Farewell, Weapon" is a sequel to Hemingway's previous work "The Sun Also Rises", published in 1926, "The Sun Also Rises", which depicts the living conditions and ideological emotions of a group of British and American young people who fled to Paris after the First World War. The protagonist Barnes was wounded in World War I and lost his sexual ability. The trauma left over from the war caused serious distress to his post-war life, where there were no goals and ideals, and he always felt swallowed up by a sense of destruction.
And "Farewell, Weapon" directly describes the cruelty and lethality of war in the real war, through the protagonist Henry's personal visit to the battlefield, as well as personal experience in the war, profoundly reveals the destruction and destruction of human nature by war. The abstract terms that the protagonist Henry once thought of as sacred, glorious, sacrificial, honorable, bravery, etc., were the most seductive words they had heard before entering the war, and when he witnessed the bloodiness of the battlefield, his values changed, so that he felt deceived, so that he felt ashamed to hear these words, and even felt that these words were not as real as certain dates and place names.
The protagonist Henry's weariness with war determines that his negative behavior must be escape. His trajectory in the novel begins with wounds, then jaundice before being discharged from the hospital, and when he returns to the front lines, he encounters a defeat in the war and catches up with the Great Retreat. When he was retreating, he encountered a road blockage, he chose to leave the large army to cut the country lanes, and then suffered punishment for breaking away from the troops, and at the moment when he was about to be executed, the desire to survive forced him to choose to flee again, and he jumped into the river to escape.
Love is also a way for him to escape the war, he fell in love with the nurse Catherine when he was wounded, and reunited with Catherine after escaping death. The precious love of the war gave him temporary spiritual liberation, but also made him feel the joy from heaven. But in the shadow of war, relative happiness is always short-lived. The protagonist Henry and his girlfriend Catherine did have a good time in Switzerland, but as Catherine died in childbirth, the protagonist Henry was eventually pulled back to the cruel real world.
Through the trajectory of the protagonist in the novel, it is not difficult to see that the protagonist Henry is an opponent of imperialist war, but at the same time a passive pacifist. In his view, any thinking of faith and reason has no practical value and is illusory. Only personal enjoyment and happiness are things that can be seen and touched. He did not think about what war was all about, the only thing he did was to escape, to escape from the battlefield, to escape from society, to hide in his own world, which ultimately doomed his life to the end of tragedy.
The novel ends in an atmosphere of nothingness and disillusionment, strongly suggesting the basic idea of the work, namely that war is disaster, war is death, and that love under war can never go from hell to true heaven.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" > representative of the "lost generation" in the United States</h1>
The term "Lost Generation", a term derived from the early 1920s, is a well-known assertion that was proposed by the Paris-based American writer Gerstei. She said to Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation. Hemingway used this sentence as the inscription for his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," which speaks to the mentality of the postwar generation of young people: war has collapsed traditional spiritual beliefs, and the current life of a drunken fan masks the extreme emptiness of their spiritual world and the sadness of waking up from a dream.
The "lost generation" became the title of writers with co-creative tendencies after World War I and became a literary genre in the United States, represented mainly by writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The so-called "confusion" refers to the wandering and disappointment of these writers about the world and the future. This sentiment is reflected in their work, first in linguistic minimalism and colloquialism; secondly, because they suffered from the deception of war propaganda in the First World War, they abandoned all sublime words. They no longer believe in false moral preaching, but instead express their passive resistance with a cynical attitude towards life.
A lost generation
It should be pointed out that for some writers, this title is only synonymous with a certain stage of their lives, in fact, the "lost generation" writers have a large number of writers, but most of them are drowned in history, and the reason is precisely because most people are too in line with the "commonality" of the "lost generation" and are eventually eliminated. On the contrary, writers such as Hemingway, Dos Pazos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, etc., who did not stick to the shackles of the "lost generation", gradually formed their own unique writing styles after 1930, thus occupying a solid and lasting position in the history of American literature.
For Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises" and "Farewell, Weapon" are his masterpieces of a "lost generation". What these two works have in common is that they inevitably promote a kind of passive and reclusive thinking, exuding a strong pessimism, which is also the insurmountable contradiction of the "lost generation" literature.
If Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises" avoids the question of the relationship between man's fate and society, then in "Farewell, Weapon" consciously or unconsciously raises this issue in the first place, in which he focuses on the problem of the historical conditions for the formation of a "confused generation", which is aimed at the evil imperialist war. Arguably, this work marks a big step forward in Hemingway's personal creation.
1918 Hemingway recuperates in a hospital in Milan
After the publication of this work, it has been unanimously welcomed by critics and readers for several reasons. First, the novel is considered Hemingway's semi-autobiographical work, with some of the plots in the novel strikingly similar to his personal experiences, and people always maintain an incredible enthusiasm for snooping on other people's privacy. For example, the love story of the protagonist Henry and the nurse Catherine, the same love story also happened to Hemingway. During World War I, he was wounded and admitted to a hospital in Milan, Italy, where he fell in love with a nurse from the United States. Therefore, it can also be said that the love story in the novel is based on Hemingway's personal emotional experience. For example, Hemingway's second wife Pauline had difficulty giving birth when she gave birth, which in turn provided the material for Catherine's ending in the novel.
Second, the novel was published at a time of economic crisis in the United States, with unemployment soaring and everyone cornered by life. People's living conditions and emotions coincide with the creative ideas of the "confused generation", and the negative recluse of the protagonist Henry in the novel, as well as the lie of all lofty ideals, the spearhead is invariably pointed at the US government at that time. People see themselves in the novel as they really are, as Hemingway wrote meaningfully in the novel:
I added a stick of wood to the fire, and it was crawling with ants. As soon as the firewood burned, ants poured out in droves, first crawling toward the central fire, then turning around and running toward the tail of the firewood. When the tail could not be squeezed, they fell into the fire. A few escaped, their bodies burned scorched and flat, and they didn't know where to climb. But most of them ran into the fire, then crawled to the tail, squeezed into the unheated end, and finally all fell into the fire. (Chapter 41)
Hemingway in Writing
Again, it is necessary to mention hemingway's writing style, he is hailed as one of the most famous language masters in the United States of the 20th century. Hemingway's language was refined and the sentence structure was simple. In his works, there is not only the environmental depiction of the blending of scenes, but also the moving portrayal of the emotions of the characters through actions and images, especially his unique telegraph-style dialogue and concise inner monologue. The British writer Hel O Bates once made a figurative analogy that Hemingway was like a man with a plank axe, cutting the messy hairs on the literary body and restoring the refreshing face of the basic branches of literature.
Fourth, the narrative art of the "iceberg principle" is equally brilliant in this work. His "iceberg" principle is to use concise words to create a distinct image, to hide his feelings and thoughts and emotions in the image to the greatest extent, rich in emotions but not revealed, deep in thought but hidden but not obscure, so as to skillfully combine the perceptuality and thinkiness of literature, so that readers can explore the deeper ideological meaning of the work through the feeling of the image. For example, the description of the last paragraph in the novel:
But I just kicked them out, closed the door, turned off the lights, and it didn't work. It was like saying goodbye to a stone statue. After a while, I walked out, left the hospital, and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (Chapter 41)
This paragraph is written that the heroine died of difficult childbirth, and the hero said goodbye to him at the end. In this text, we do not see sensational words, such as how sad the hero is in his heart, nor does he have any deliberate rendering of the scene, or even without any emotional color. However, through the text, the reader feels a strong and deep emotional undercurrent, which makes people cry. For the protagonist Henry, his lover is dead, everything will be destroyed, he bid farewell to war, and he also said goodbye to love. The thematic ideas of the work are potentially expressed, and the potential of feelings reaches a climax with the sudden end of the story. As a victim and victim of the war, Henry was devastated and his life was reduced to a disillusionment.
In summary, through the analysis of the theme of "Farewell, Weapon", the brief characteristics of the American "Lost Generation" literary works, and the analysis of the reasons for the popularity of this work, we have a basic understanding of this work, reduce some confusion in the reading process, add some epiphany, so as to establish our own unique understanding of the work, and have some inspiration for our own lives, which I think is the ultimate meaning of reading.