Ernest Hemingway And Tim O Brien's Research

Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien Research Essay

Both Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien are novels showing romance and the cruel reality of war that are based on the author’s experiences and views of their generation, while they served in the military. However both authors have drastically distinctive writing styles, the way they write, with both basing their novels around wars. Ernest Hemingway’s writing style in particular is made up of a minimal effort to describe the settings and emotions directly, but instead he hides these in the dialogue of his characters commonly known as the Iceberg Theory. Meanwhile, Tim O’Brien’s style is mostly the use of storytelling, causing it to be ambiguous by combining historic events with fiction. His writing causes mistrust between his narrators and readers because it is distinctly one sided. In Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the book is centered around World War I which was from 1914 to 1918,

A young American student, Fredrick Henry is studying architecture in Italy, offers his services to the Italian army. In Gorizia, he is wounded in the knee and is sent to recuperate in a hospital in Milan. He falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, lives with her, and she becomes pregnant. He returns to the front in Gorizia and is caught in the Italian retreat. In order to save his life, he deserts his post and goes away to a hospital in Milan to take Catherine and go some place where they can start life anew. They go to Switzerland but cannot live happily, for a fresh tragedy awaits them. Their eagerly awaited son is stillborn and Catherine who can never have a normal delivery, dies after a Caesarian operation. The mood of the novel overall is very pessimistic. Tragedy lurks behind every action and, as such, robs it of meaning. Men and women, caught in the war, despair and move to bitterness and