Hemingway\'s Critique of War Ernest

Hemingway's Critique Of War

Ernest Hemingway was a prolific writer but it is not likely that he could have imagined that fifty years after his death there would be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of critiques, reviews, and scholarly assessments of his books. There is no doubt that Hemingway knew his best works would remain popular and in the public eye, but could he have projected that his writing would create the stir that it continues to stir today?

Indeed, the tone and theme of the vast variety of assessments and critiques of Hemingway's novels and short stories -- especially those works where war is the theme -- vary wildly and interestingly, and are the subject of this paper. What most scholars and English majors that study novels might not know about Hemingway is that he did dabble in the world of politics in his life, not just in his books. Ron Capshaw writes that while Hemingway did help raise money for communist revolutionary Luis Quintanilla, he also gave speeches in the 1930s that "…warned against Hitler" at the same time the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA) was "dismissing the Nazis" (Capshaw, 2002, p. 1).

An example of the extraordinarily diverse themes from war-related works is to be found in Richard Fantina's critique in which he asserts that few scholars are willing to address the fact that Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises "lacks a full complement of male genitalia" (Fantina, 2003, p. 2). Fantina finds it "more remarkable today" than when Sun was published that an author so closely identified with "traditional masculinity" as Hemingway could create a character that actually lacks "…a complete penis" albeit other heroes in his books "rarely make use of that organ in lovemaking," Fantina explains on page 1. Barnes was injured in WWI,

Many critics believe the best novel Hemingway ever wrote -- and he certainly published some brilliant work in his career -- is A Farewell to Arms. Written in 1929, it "solidified Hemingway's reputation as one of the greatest writers of his generation" (Timeless Hemingway/FAQs). Critic Marc Hewson's has an interesting view of Farewell, asserting that it is not a typical masculine war story but rather a love story that "grows out of" the death and destruction on the Italian war front (Hewson, 2003, p. 2). The setting in WWI allowed Hemingway to "expose the difficulties that rigid gender roles imposed on both sexes," Hewson explains. Whether Hemingway really meant to or not, by "juxtaposing the worlds of war and love" in Farewell allowed the author to imagine a world beyond early 20th century "social values" (Hewson, p. 2).

Hemingway's play, The Fifth Column, a "disturbing play" with a very "confusing moral center," according to Noel Valis. The Fifth Column was a "grotesque romance of the Republican terror" in Spain in which "the protagonist… was a swaggering American who specialized in political liquidation ... [perhaps] the ugliest American in all world literature" (Valis, 2008, p. 1). Was the play purely political propaganda, or was it a "morality play"? Valis insists that the play "is too morally confused to be either."

Meanwhile writer Gene Washington discusses The Fifth Column from the point-of-view of a letter Hemingway wrote to The New York Times, a letter in which the author used the phrase "dead angle." That was Hemingway's description of the exact rooms in the Hotel Florida (in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War) that were "safe" from shelling (mortar fire from nearby hills). In the letter, those were rooms 112 and 113 (in the play, 108-109); "It seemed eminently more sensible to live in a part of a hotel which you knew would not be struck by shell fire" the author wrote in the letter (Washington, 2009, p. 1). The point Washington makes vis-a-vis Column is that room 109 wasn't just a "safe" place, it was a place with "good things" like sex, perfume, alcohol, hot water, and yes, food.

The brilliance of Hemingway's narrative -- not just in war themes but also throughout his work -- cannot be over-emphasized. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway uses the character Frederic as narrator, and Frederic's narration is mainly descriptive, but in its simplicity, it packs a punch. Critic Katie Owens-Murphy explains that when Frederick -- an ambulance driver, not a soldier -- is asked about the war by a bartender, he first replies, "Don't talk about the war," but in the narration, Owens-Murphy explains that he "…muses about it in stream of consciousness":