Title
Hemingway’s Thrice-Told Tale: A Farewell to Arms and Noncombatant Fantasy
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Compares narrative strategies employed by Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway to attract a noncombatant readership composed of veterans who felt shame and resentment over their lack of frontline service. Traces Hemingway’s evolving commitment to validating the noncombatants’ experience in “A Very Short Story,” The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms. Gandal concludes that in his third rewriting of the doomed soldier-nurse love story, Hemingway achieved his greatest affirmation of the noncombatant through his creation of Frederic Henry, a noncombatant hero who proves his measure as a soldier and an officer. Also discusses Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921) and Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925).
Published in
War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature
Date
2018
Pages
78-99
Citation
Gandal, Keith. “Hemingway’s Thrice-Told Tale: A Farewell to Arms and Noncombatant Fantasy.” In War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature, 78-99. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.