Ernest Hemingway's Code Hero Defined by His Setting in A Farewell to Arms

A detailed Summary of Ernest Hemingway's Code Hero Defined by His Setting in A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway's Code Hero Defined by His Setting

The life of Ernest Hemingway exemplifies courage, valor, and fortitude as he recovered from a World War I wound, stalked big game, and pursued other blood sports. In fact, where there was action, there was Hemingway. This influential writer, who uses his simple prose to portray strong, stoic characters, ultimately created his own genre of "good guy" characters-the "Hemingway code hero." These anti-heroes, as they are sometimes called, are a strange brew. He created this hero as a result of his vision of the world after World War I. Hemingway and other writers of that time were called the "Lost Generation" by Gertrude Stein who saw that they all had lost their idealism due to the senseless bloodshed of the war. With no positive outlook on life, Hemingway created characters like himself who confront the meaninglessness of life in various settings, such as nature, night, rain, and fields of battle. Thus, Hemingway uses setting to reveal Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River," and the old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" as "Hemingway code heroes."

Fighting on foreign soil for a country not his own is the setting where young Frede

Through his settings, Hemingway reveals these three code heroes. Frederic, in A Farewell to Arms, is a code hero who is stoic in the face of danger. Nick, in "Big Two-Hearted River," is a code hero who isolates himself from man and uses nature to heal both his physical and mental wounds, and the old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted place" is a code hero who, even though he realizes that life has no meaning, manages to cope with death and depression and show grace under pressure in this dark and lonely world. These code hero traits are embodied in Hemingway's own life. In a sense, a part of each of these three heroes' lives or stories is an autobiographical vignette of Hemingway's own life.

ric Henry plays an all too real and meaningless "game" called war, thus revealing himself to be a code hero in A Farewell to Arms. His heroism is portrayed in a truly ironic scene. While eating cold macaroni and cheese with his young ambulance crew, the opposition scores as they hit the very bunker where Frederic and his comrades are ironically talking of the meaninglessness of war over their cold repast. Just before the blast, one of Frederic's crew addressed Frederic, saying, "[The Bersaglieri] wouldn't attack.... Were you there, Tenente, when they wouldn't attack and they shot every tenth man? They lined them up afterward and took every tenth man. [The] Carabinieri shot them" (48-49

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Approximate Word count = 934
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels