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Abstract
The main focus of this study is to make a detailed analysis of Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms, with the following objectives: to establish how he condemns war and militarism as brutal, cruel, needless, and fed by the false illusions of glory. Using his personal, first hand experiences in World War I Hemingway demonstrates how love, in contrast to war, is a positive and affirmative force that has the ability to transcend hatred and violence. This work also compares and contrasts A Farewell to Arms with some of the other main literary writings in English about World War I. Its goal is to provide some insight, in socio-political and historical terms, about World War I, and to analyze its impact on Western society and culture in general.
A great deal of literature was written in the twentieth century by men of high intellect, lofty ideals and sound wisdom in order to show that war is a futile and destructive pursuit. In English and American literature, both in poetry and prose, even if we restrict ourselves to writings about the two World Wars we can list names of great writers such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Norman Mailer and many others who wrote about this theme. Even from the German side, Erich M. Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) ranks as a classic anti-war novel. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) is also in this list of classics, a tale of World War I, and a love story of considerable romantic charm. Indeed, this novel is a unique and special work, which enjoys popularity even today all over the world and it has also been filmed a number of times.
The earliest roots of World War I (1914-1918), the modern world's first major international conflagration, rest in a number of closely linked factors. First, economic pressure and population growth in Europe combined with rapid industrialization created a situation where intense competition existed for limited scarce resources. This led to an increased competition for overseas colonies, a competition, which had already begun in the 19th century, but now intensified. This in turn led to a very complex system of imperialistic alignments between...