doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.3.526
An Analysis of Whether Henry in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a Hero or Not
Yixing Wang 1,*
,
- 1 School of Marxism, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
- 2 School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
- Manuscript received December 30, 2023
- revised February 18, 2024
- accepted March 22, 2024
- published May 24, 2024
Abstract
Hemingway, one of the greatest American novelists in the 20th Century, is known for the depiction of tough guys. But in his <em>A Farewell to Arms</em> (1929), he portrays the main character, Frederic Henry as a deserter. Henry dreams of being a hero, but he doesn’t become one. In this essay, we will analyze the question that whether Henry is a hero or not from three perspectives. First, as a commander, he is not a traditional American hero, as he has failed in his mission and lost the lives of his soldier due to his arbitrary command. Second, he refuses to think and does not use his conscience to make moral decisions, so he cannot be called a philosophical hero. Last, his inability to confront the trauma of war, his avoidance of the past and reality, and his apparent calmness to preserve his dignity as a man, make him not a Hemingwayan code hero.
Keywords
- A Farewell to Arms</em>
- traditional American hero
- philosophical hero
- code hero
How to Cite
Yixing Wang and Jiayao Guo, "An Analysis of Whether Henry in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a Hero or Not," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 279-282, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2024.10.3.526
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).