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http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/hemingw.html
28/04/2012
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to women. This carefully constructed vignette has a nameless man and woman discussing their relationship against the backdrop of the mountain landscape. As in the very best of Hemingway's novels and stories, the authorial stance is ambiguous; readers must pay close attention to small details to understand the progress of the narrative. Students should be encouraged to focus on the dialogue between the man and girl in order to discern their relationship. The issue of abortion and how each speaker feels about it is central to the story. Yet abortion itself is not the main issue; it is the not-toosubtle pressure "the man" is placing on "the girl" to have the abortion that is the key issue. The disaster that was World War One was a defining experience for writers of Hemingway's generation, especially those, like Hemingway, who served in the military. Although Hemingway is often simplisitically associated with the glorification of masculine violence, the excerpt from A Farewell to Arms suggests instead a highly critical view of war, particularly in the conscious avoidance of heroic imagery and in Henry's meditations on the uselessness of the slaughter.
Original Audience
The central issue in this story is the abortion the girl is being pressured to have by her male companion. The author's stance on the issue of abortion is ambiguous, but the story clearly comes out against the male pressuring the female into an abortion that she doesn't seem to want. Pro-choice and pro-life students might want to concentrate class discussion not on abortion alone, but on the issue of subtle pressure at the heart of the story. A Farewell to Arms, written ten years after the end of World War One, reflects a growing sense in Europe and the United States of the horror and futility of that war coupled with an unease over its implications for the brutality and sterility of a modern world that was unable to prevent such a bloodbath, despite vaunted claims of technological and social progress (indeed, increased technological efficiency had seemed to make war even more horrific). Students might want to consider how attitudes about war, technology, and progress have or haven't changed in the aftermath of the conflicts that have followed World War One.
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story "May Day" for a similar evocation of post-war despair and alienation.
Bibliography
Jeffrey Meyers offers an excellent brief reading of this story in his biography (pp. 19697).
http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/hemingw.html
28/04/2012