Modernist text speaks about the historical and social context of WWI. As a movement, modernism highlights the impact of the war and its impact on society. Two modernistic authors during WWI, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway choose to express their text with fragmented timelines, to juxtapose war and the relationships in society. Yet, modernist text exposes the usage of dialogue as a mode that fragments the reader’s mind through the singular or multi-focalisation of events that adds to the reliability of the narrator. Ford Madox Ford’s first person narrative The Good Soldier presents itself as being very formal, yet conversational between the narrator and the reader in comparison to Ernest Hemingway’s third-person omniscient, everyday speech in In Our Time. However, dialogue in these texts supplements the reliability of the narrator through the fragmented timelines of past and present events, the portrayal of character’s emotions through dialogue, and judgements made by the narrator.
The dialogue in The Good Soldier converses with the use of formal speech amongst the narrator and the reader to supplement the dependability of the narrator, John Dowell, as it fragments the mode of time. In the beginning of the narrative in “Part One” the narrator gives the reader insight to his mind and a brief summary of the text; the narrator chooses to describe the relationships between himself and his wife Florence and their friends Edward Ashburnham, and Leonora Ashburnham (Ford 5-37). There are little snippets of dialogue by the characters which contribute to the fragmentation of time. John Dowell continuously speaks of “nine seasons” (Ford 5) or “nine years” (Ford 9) when he describes the years in which he and Florence knows the Ashburnh...
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Ford, Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. USA: First Vintage International, 1989. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Indian Camp." In our Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 15-19. Print.
---. "My Old Man." In our Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 115-129. Print.
---. "The Three-Day Blow." In our Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 39- 49. Print.
Soboleva, Maja. "Epistemological Principles of Cultural Dialogue." International Journal of Communication 18.1-2 (2008): 79- 95. http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/ps/retrieve.do?retrieveForm at=PDF_FROM_CALLISTO&inPS=true&prodId=LitRC&userGroupName=yorku_ main&workId=PI-1AIY-2008-XAL00-IDSI-74.JPG%7CPI-1AIY-2008-XAL00-IDSI- 75.JPG%7CPI-1AIY-2008-XAL00-IDSI-76.JPG%7CPI-1A. Web. November 22, 2011.
Many times readers lose interest in stories that they feel are not authentic. In addition, readers feel that fictitious novels and stories are for children and lack depth. Tim O’ Brien maintains that keeping readers of fiction entertained is a most daunting task, “The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination- to vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer” (Tim O’ Brien 623). Tim O’ Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” examines the correlation between the real experiences of war and the art of storytelling. In O’Brien’s attempt to bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction, the narrator of the story uses language and acts of violence that may be offensive to some.
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
Wideman, John Edgar. “Our Time.” Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. 9th ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 657-694. Print.
Wideman, John Edgar. "Our Time". Ways of reading: An Anthology for Writers [ninth edition]. Ed. Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky. N.Y.|Boston: Bedford/St. Martin Press. 2011.655-694. Print.
McQuade, Donald, ed. The Harper American Literature. Harper & Row Publishers: New York, 1987, pp. 1308-1311. This paper is the property of NetEssays.Net Copyright © 1999-2002
In Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home”, Hemingway introduces us to a young American soldier, that had just arrived home from World War I. Harold Krebs, our main character, did not receive a warm welcome after his arrival, due to coming home a few years later than most soldiers. After arriving home, it becomes clear that World War I has deeply impacted the young man, Krebs is not the same man that headed off to the war. The war had stripped the young man of his coping mechanism, female companionship, and the ability to achieve the typical American life.
O’Brien, Tim. How to Tell a True War Story. Literature and Ourselves. Sixth Edition. Eds.
Owens, Lewis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman, OK: U Oklahoma P, 1994.
In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1208-1209. Hemingway, Ernest. A.
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
Hemingway, Ernest. "Soldier's Home." The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2002. 152-57.
Earnest Hemmingway once said "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." (Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference) War is a gruesome and tragic thing and affects people differently. Both Vonnegut and Hemmingway discus this idea in their novels A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse Five. Both of the novels deal not only with war stories but other genres, be it a science fiction story in Vonnegut’s case or a love story in Hemingway’s. Despite all the similarities there are also very big differences in the depiction of war and the way the two characters cope with their shocking and different experiences. It is the way someone deals with these tragedies that is the true story. This essay will evaluate how the main characters in both novels deal with their experiences in different ways.
...tracks pretzeling of snipers taking out troops that stumble into their sights.”(Stephan) The author makes direct comparisons to For Whom the Bell Tolls and explains how “...that image has...shaped modern day impressions” on war. Wilkinson blames Hemingway and other authors for putting this point of view into readers’ minds about war. It states that people only thing this way because of the books and that real war is not as exciting as it seems. This article is very biased but still makes a good argument about what an actual reader feels about war and war novels. The author specifically targets Hemingway’s work. In my research paper I can support people’s views on war from a different viewpoint and not that we want to get in wars. And the claim that we even know anything about war except for the images that have been put into ours mind by writers like Hemingway.
From an early age, Ernest Hemingway found himself obsessed with the subject of heroism. He looked up to his grandfather, who he saw as a hero, and sought to fulfill the war legacy left behind by joining the army. Hemingway was a participant in many wars, but one in particular shaped the rest of his life and his outlook on the world. It was during the end of World War I and Hemingway was serving the Italian army as an ambulance driver. During the battle at Fossalta di Piave, Hemingway circulated the trenches with chocolates, providing them to soldiers. Out of nowhere, an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded a few feet away from Hemingway, killing one man and wounding many others (Meyers, p.30). Hemingway was one of these wounded men. It was once said by Ted Brumback that Hemingway had acted heroically, for once he regained consciousness, he picked up a wounded man and carried him to the first aid dugout despite his own serious leg wounds (Meyers, p.30). Considered the turning point in his life, Hemingway had faced death but been called a “hero” as a result of it. Even though Hemingway’s obsession with heroism was still prevalent throughout his life, and this event on July 8, 1918, made its way into many of his novels, the heroes Hemingway wrote about never forsook glory or fortune. They were more concerned with the righting of wrongs and the longing of experience (Baker (2), p.129). In Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Frederic Henry is more obviously a form of Hemingway, but also a prime example of the heroes Hemingway liked to write about. Even though Henry faced danger, pain, and death throughout this wartime novel, none of it was glorified. Despite his obsession with heroism in war, while writing the novel...
Theme is a literary element used in literature and has inspired many poets, playwrights, and authors. The themes of love and war are featured in literature, and inspire authors to write wartime romances that highlight these two themes. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms deals with the collective themes in the human experience such as love and the reality of war. A Farewell to Arms is narrated from the perspective of Fredric Henry, an ambulance driver in the Italian army, and pertains to his experiences in the war. The novel also highlights the passionate relationship between Henry and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse in Italy. Henry’s insight into the war and his intense love for Catherine emphasize that love and war are the predominant themes in the novel and these themes contribute to bringing out the implicit and explicit meaning of the novel. Being a part of the Italian army, Henry is closely involved with the war and has developed an aversion to the war. Henry’s association with the war has also made him realise that war is inglorious and the sacrifices made in war are meaningless. Specifically, Henry wants the war to end because he is disillusioned by the war and knows that war is not as glorious as it is made up to be. The state of affairs and the grim reality of the war lead Henry towards an ardent desire for a peaceful life, and as a result Henry repudiates his fellow soldiers at the warfront. Henry’s desertion of the war is also related to his passionate love for Catherine. Henry’s love for Catherine is progressive and ironic. This love develops gradually in “stages”: Henry’s attempt at pretending love for Catherine towards the beginning of the novel, his gradually developing love for her, and finally, Henry’s impas...