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ISBN: 978-81-909047-9-7, p-ISSN: 2249-2569, e-ISSN: 2320-2955

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES, ENGINEERING & PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES (An International Registered Research Journal)

Volume-01

Issue-07

Year-04,

January,2014

IMPACT FACTOR: 1.963

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“THINK BEYOND TO CREATE MIRACLES” Promoted By: Association for Innovation (Under the Society Registration Act, 1860, a government registered organization with registration no. 2241)

Year-4/Vol-I/Issue-7

ISBN:978-81-909047-9-7, p-ISSN:2249-2569, e-ISSN:2320-2955

International Research Journal of Humanities, Engineering & Pharmaceutical Sciences Promoted By: Association for Innovation

SURVIVOR’S GUILT IN HEMINGWAY’S WRITINGS: AN INSIGHT INTO HIS MAKING

Parveen Kumar Sharma Assistant Professor, Amity institute of Corporate Communication, Amity University

Abstract: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is known as the American writer who wrote of himself in his writings and represented the bitter side of the socalled Lost Generation. His works, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea have special connotations to understand and discover. It is not just the relationships that Hemingway failed in; he never came into an agreement with the idea of war for the sake of war. He stands for the failed heroes of the States who felt shattered after the brutal encounter with the emptiness of warfare. Ernest contrasts arms in love and arms in war. From his adventure fascinated childhood to his suicide, he remained a mythical figure not only for American Literature, rather for the whole genre of fiction. His works started with short stories and concluded with worldly acclaimed fiction. He wrote as a reporter and brought calculated expressions to his works. He represented the post World War-I guilt ridden generation and the resulting emotional void. He was moved to writing by the Survivor’s Guilt that he suffered from along with millions of young participants of the war. .

One of the notable authors of the era, encompassing between the two infamous world wars, Hemingway’s early writing portrays the lives of two types of people. The former consists of men and women who have lost faith in moral values, and live with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. They came to be known as the Lost Generation. The other type is, men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as boxers and bullfighters, who wage courageous and usually futile battles against the circumstances of their lives. About Ernest Miller Hemingway it is said: “When you want to find the truth about Hemingway’s life, look first to his fiction.” Thus Survivor’s Guilt in Hemingway’s writings is to be probed through an inter-relation of his own life and the life of his characters. He has actually brought a catharsis of his own mental trauma. When the war was going on Hemingway was eager to join it. But, he was denied the selection in the force because of his defective vision. Later, he got an opportunity to be a part of the war, as he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in December 1917, and was accepted for service. Hemingway once wrote to his close friend, Fitzgerald, about the glory and effect of war, saying, "War groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get." Hemingway reached Paris, amid heavy bombardment from the Germans. This left him seriously wounded. According to Jeffery Meyers, this wound was a major turning point of his life. It was his first, direct and personal encounter with the wounds of the war on his body, though he had already experienced the psychological agony of war, on his very arrival. It is believed that he got over 200 wounds in his legs. The truth about war, he later observed, was lacking when he needed it most. The guilt of being survived, while his mates were not alive, haunted Hemingway like hell. The wounds he had received were more psychological than physical. The question: why the World War happened and why he has been a part of it, killed him from inside. In his letters to his family he told that he was shot twice through his scrotum, and had to rest his testicles. It gave him lifelong nightmares about his masculinity. Meyers informs further: Others soldiers in his ward had seriously damaged genitals and those who mutilated inspired the wound of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Jake's wound is not described in the novel; but the account of Frederic's wound in A Farewell to Arms...is close to what actually happened. One of the first patients to be admitted in the Milan Hospital, Hemingway fell in love with the nurse, Agnes, who was seven years older to him, later rejected by her leaving a devastating effect on him. Agnes was later portrayed as Catherine Barkley in his most famous novel, A Farewell to Arms. After his return from the war, Hemingway went through the haunting effects of his concussion. He suffered long nights of insomnia and it was not possible for him to sleep in the dark, having the lights off. He returned as a wounded man. He joined writing profession, though the psychological stirs could not be calmed down until he wrote his first novel-the damn tragedy of life-The Sun Also Rises, which appeared in 1926. Literature gave IJHEPS™/January-2014/Home Page: www.ijheps.org/ www.journalspot.org

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ISBN:978-81-909047-9-7, p-ISSN:2249-2569, e-ISSN:2320-2955

Hemingway a tool to rebuild his shattered world of hope and faith. “Writing is a form of therapy;” says Graham Greene, “sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” His post war writings have mental illness in them, as Hemingway could not save himself from the rampant PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The burden of being a survivor of the worst war ever, made him sick of himself. His mental illness, that was also an inheritance through genes too, turned into a psychological disorder, termed as Bipolar Disorder. To have a better understanding between Hemingway’s life and his writings, his guilt and disorders, his attempt to remove the burden of being survivor, one has to elaborate and understand Hemingway’s writings. Hemingway began with Nick Adams as hero; the first to be wounded among the Hemingway heroes who declares that he has made a separate peace away from the violent world. The expatriates in The Sun Also Rises are in search of peace and in A Farewell to Arms, Henry and Catherine establish this separate peace for themselves. In A Farewell to Arms, chapter 34 has pessimism: “If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong enough at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” The professional psychologist can use his knowledge of psychological problems and situations to interpret a work of literature, even without any reference to its author’s biography. If Jake Barnes or Frederic Henry or Nick Adams or Jordan or Harry Morgan behaves according to a specific pattern, which, Freud discovered to be characteristic of certain kinds of individuals, this does not mean that Hemingway had in mind the Freudian theories, but it does confirm Hemingway’s remarkable insight into human nature. The holocausts had previously been damaging the psyche of people, but the World War I was the first danger of its kind that posed a threat to the whole humanity itself. “When people realize how bad it is, they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize…. There is no finish to a war.” The First World War was a long series of inconclusive battles. Hemingway was one of those, who received first hand experiences of the war. The war was destructive, as Encarta states: The death of over 10 million men in combat left a gaping chasm in the social and economic life of the postwar world. Many of those who survived the war returned home with physical disabilities that prevented them from rejoining the work force. Others suffered the lasting effects of what in those days was called ‘shell shock’ and what is today labeled Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychological affliction that prevents a successful adaptation to civilian life. Depression is what came as a consolidated term for a number of diseases, such as, the feeling of guilt that haunted the survivors, and led them in the dark realms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Artists began to produce works that mocked the self-confident assertions of humanism, and portrayed the sordid realities of modern life. It was the surfacing of guilt that they encountered and remained in a constant clash with it. To elucidate the feeling of guilt, the Encyclopedia of Psychology suggests, “Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs, when a person realizes or believes- whether justified or not- that he or she has violated a moral standard, and is responsible for that violation.”The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are the two works that have their roots in this overt action and his personal guilt. States the Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia: When we see another person suffering, we can feel their suffering as if it is our own. This constitutes our powerful system of empathy, which leads to our thinking that we should do something to relieve the suffering of others. If we cannot help another, or fail in our efforts, we experience feelings of guilt. The helplessness of being a victim of the tragedy and thus feeling responsible for the trauma of others, the survivor’s guilt becomes haunting; it is explained in the following words: “Survivor guilt/survivor syndrome is the mental condition that results from the appraisal that a person has done wrong by surviving traumatic events such as combat, natural disasters, or even surviving a lay-off in a work place. The effect of the survivor’s guilt depends on the person’s own psychological make-up.” Survivor’s guilt is common among the world war survivors. People suffered from collective guilt after the war. Critics are also IJHEPS™/January-2014/Home Page: www.ijheps.org/ www.journalspot.org

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ISBN:978-81-909047-9-7, p-ISSN:2249-2569, e-ISSN:2320-2955

of the view that in Hemingway, there lays both the poles- extreme optimism, and the worst state of pessimism. When he was leaving Hadley for Pauline Pfeiffer in 1926, he wrote to Pauline of how he had thought to remove the sin out of her life and avoid Hadley the necessity of divorce by killing himself. Frederick Busch affirms: A month before, he had written to someone else that "the real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over." … He was a nexus for death. After he had killed himself, his sister Ursula committed suicide in 1966 and his brother, Leicester, in 1982. Hemingway seems to be a different man having the same blood. Bipolar Disorder is what made Hemingway, a guilty survivor and a suicidal case of mental stress. Busch says in his article ‘Message From a Divided Man’ …that both as man and writer he was fearfully divided. There is a Hemingway, mostly young, who is sensitive, brave, generous and extremely intelligent. There is a Hemingway, mostly older, who is coarse, bullying and hostile to the exercise of mind. Apparently, A Farewell to Arms is a love story in the backdrop of war and is a semi-autobiographical one. The novel ends with the death of the heroine, that’s what Hemingway did very often with the ladies his men love. He lets his representative hero live alone, and makes him feel the pain of being a survivor. Hemingway’s task was not to suffer in heart, rather he set out to make that pain common, and thus bring out the suppressed anguish and fear: When he writes very well about love, loss, tenderness or fear, Hemingway works with the assumption that he must cause the reader to share the unstated emotion. That is responsible writing, a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair. The Hemingway hero, by whatever name he appears, carries both physical and psychic scars. Hemingway’s basic preoccupation was how one should live with these scars. Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises, is made impotent by the cruel war. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry’s physical wound has emotional repercussions and Hemingway’s hopeless attitude is evident in him: I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants…. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire…. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whisky…. This is all life is. Death makes mockery of all values. If it is admissible that the age suffered from paranoia, from PTSD, from the Survivor’s Guilt; how a man of intellects like Hemingway can escape these? Obviously, he could not, and he has not. Hemingway suffered from the guilt; he used his writing faculty to express it, and thus universalized his emotions. ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ in Hemingway’s writing is thus perceptible and acknowledged: “True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.” References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ernest Hemingway Biography, http:// www. lostgeneration.com/wwtwo.htm, June 19, 2013 Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker, (London: Granada, 1981), 231. Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography. (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 33. Graham Greene, “Ways of Escape” Microsoft Encarta Premium CD-ROM, Microsoft Corporation 2006 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, (New York: Scribner, 1995) p.249 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, (New York: Scribner, 1995) p.50 Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006 CD-ROM. Encyclopedia of Psychology. “Guilt” (http://enotes.com/gale-psychology encyclopedia/guilt).2nd ed. Ed.Bonnie r. Strickland. Gale Group, Inc., 2001. eNotes.com 2006. 17 November, 2008 Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia: www.wikipedia.org July 02, 2008 Wikipedia definition Monday, July 07, 2008 Frederick Busch, ‘Reading Hemingway Without Guilt’, http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/30/specials/busch-hemingway.html September 14, 2008 Irving Howe, ‘Messages From a Divided Man’ March 29, 1981 NY Times September 14,accessed2008http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/30/specials/busch-hemingway.html Reading Hemingway Without Guilt by Frederick Busch Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, (New York: Scribner, 1995) p. 328. R.D. Laing, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127.

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