Hemingway And Salinger: An Analysis

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

The word "war" is always horrible to man especially with who has been exposed to. It is destruction, death, and horrible suffers that has been with all man's life. In the short story "In Another Country", Ernest Hemingway shows us the physical and emotional tolls of the war as well as its long-term consequences on man's life. He also portrays the damaging effects that the war has on the lives of the Italians and even of the Americans.

The literacy work of John Steinbeck shows how soldier won’t talk about their experience in war. Soldiers often have a difficult time cultivating with society after coming back. Steinbeck uses imagery to show what they face in the battlefield. He describes “their body and mind are so disturbed” and their “eardrums are tortured by blast and the eye ache from the constant hammering.”(18) To explain, the imagery shows soldiers face violent and chaotic attacks on the field leading them to be desensitize. The narrator also says, “At first your ears hurt, but then they become dull and all your

The psychological effects, the mentality of fighting and killing another human, and the sheer decimation of human values is what makes war atrocious. War is not only fought on the battlefield though. This book also describes the feelings of a soldier fighting his own demons that war has brought on. The battle that the soldier has with himself, is almost if not more damaging than the physical battle of war. He will never forget his experience with battle, no matter how hard he tries the memories of artillery, blood, and death cannot be erased. “I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.” (Sledge). This struggle still happens to soldiers today. Sledge’s words of the struggles still captures the effects of warfare that lingers today. The other effects that war has on the men is the instability that surrounds them at every hour of the day. They are either engaged in battle having bullets and artillery fired at them, or waiting for battle just so they can be deposited back in the pressure cooker of survival. “Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.”

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

This experience, above all other wartime horrors, changed the writer-to-be’s perspective on warfare and the human condition that causes it.

While any war is a terrible thing, it is the outcome of a war that truly leaves the victims in a state of despair and devastation, as author Dalton Trumbo attempts to explore in his novel, “Johnny Got His Gun.” The book’s title captures the reader, not only from the author’s perspective about war but also of compassion and to one’s own mortality. Trumbo’s story about his main character, Joe, mimics his own life’s story. Very much like Joe, Dalton Trumbo came from a working-class family, lost his father, and worked at a bakery. Their parallel lives diverge when Joe went off to war and Trumbo went off to the University of Southern California to study writing, criticism, and psychology (Dunbar, 2015). A fascinating fact, given the only tool

Before World War I, many Americans have had a positive image of the war. Men would go to war, return with honor and come back to their regular lives among the others. In Johnny got his gun, a book by Dalton Trumbo published in 1939, was inspired by an article he had read back then about a soldier who had lost all of his limbs. From the perspective of the protagonist, Joe Bonham, a First World War soldier who had suffered a severe injury and lost most of his senses, Trumbo uses literary techniques such as symbolism, rhetorical questions, and imagery to challenge the reasons for war.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” author Tim O’Brien writes about a soldiers patrol invasion into the rural and dangerous jungle areas of Vietnam and partakes in the enemy. This chapter is utilized to teach the reader about the different aspects of reader manipulation and fiction devices to engage the reader in an emotional depth to believe the stories to be true. In this chapter, with the use of his fictional character also named after himself as the narrator, O’Brien narrates that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, no encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.” This is central to understanding The Things They Carried because wrote in the form of a memoir O’Brien uses fictional devices to challenge the reader to believe each fictional story.

The authors, E.M. Remarque, Eric Lomax, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Ernest Hemingway, who became famous, wrote excellent novels, because they were in love, have an underlying issue or have experienced issues that they want to share with the world. I choose to investigate the following novels: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Railway Man, Slaughterhouse-5, Catch-22 and The Sun Also Rises, because they all thematically connect to the “horrors of war”. They have all suffered due to the war experience and the effect it had on them following their experience in war and how political leaders at their time influenced it. This has made their novels so exciting in terms of how everything connected and how they reflected the ‘horrors of war’, which they experienced firsthand. The following questions will formulate a comprehensive understanding of the authors and their literary.

The experience of war can be very damaging both physically and mentally for any person. The graphic images, deaths, and moral disintegration can cause anyone to fall into blatant misery. In the short story, “Soldier’s Home,” Ernest Hemingway writes about a young soldier coming home from WWI and the difficulties that he has trying to fit back into the old world that he once knew. Hemingway does not provide readers the first hand accounts of Krebs’s war experiences. Instead, he shows how the memories of war significantly shape Krebs’s life at home. For example, ways that the war massively effected Krebs’s well being throughout the present day includes: Krebs’s mental state, his view on relationships with women, and him feeling as though

Scores of young men and women have enlisted into different branches of the Armed Services, many have also seen firsthand the atrocities that war produces, instances where the difference between life and death are never certain has the ability to instill memories and images that will forever haunt them thereby creating the walking wounded. Ernest Hemingway uses conflict in his 1925 short story “Soldier’s Home,” through his own experiences from World War I to convey the tragedies of war the everlasting effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Harold Krebs returns home many years after the war is over and exhibits conflict with conforming and reintegrating back into his small hometown society. Dr. Jatinder Sareen annotates that one of the many defining features of PTSD is the withdrawal from social interaction. The years that Harold did not return home is an indication of the acknowledgement of what awaited him, upon his return home he makes conscious decisions to distance himself from society.

Though the opinions of each author differed in regards to war and a human’s management of post-war depression, they were also similar in how they related their characters’ struggles. Bierce and Hemingway started a war against what warfare was thought to be and how it really affected the post-war generation, and in Hemingway’s case, the Lost Generation. Though Bierce was merely part of the forerunning idea behind the Lost Generation rhetoric in Hemingway’s work, it prepared the idea of war in literature from a realistic standpoint. These realistically based ideas would later embed themselves in the modernist perspective using the similarities and comparisons of those affected by post-war depression. Though the Lost Generation in literature embodies the mental struggles of individuals after the first World War, it bases its ideas on those same mental depression struggles that are apparent in the literature of the Realist period and after the Civil War.

J.D. Salinger is one of the most renowned writers of his time. J. D. Salinger is most known for his controversial in the Catcher in the Rye. Salinger is also known for many of his writings such as Franney and Zooey, Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. The summer of 1930 he was voted “The Most Popular Writer”. “Salinger is a beautifully deft, professional who gives us a chance to catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened glimpses of ourselves and our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror images” (Lomazoff 1). In the novel, Catcher in the Rye, there is a relationship between the main character, Holden Caulfield, and Salinger. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in

Ernest Hemingway enlisted in the army at age 18, but he was unable to pass the US Army exam. Together with his friend, Ted Brumback, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in the International Red Cross Organization. As a driver, he was affiliated with the Italian Medical Corps in the Alpine Front. During his assignment, a shrapnel exploded in his leg, and he was evacuated to a hospital in Milano where he spent two months and was unable to walk. Later, Hemingway returned to the front as a first lieutenant and won an award for bravery, but he left the service and returned home to America. The poet then joined an expatriate’s literary community to voice his experiences at the war front. Hemingway used a unique style to narrate his experiences. Notably, his personal and artistic quest was to seek to write the truth. The poet used his writing to show his identity and the impact the war had on his character.