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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 3 page paper considers whether or not A farewell to arms can be said to reveal Ernest Hemingway's nihilistic philosophy. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
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3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVHemNih.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
that was new; it also spawned equal amounts of praise and condemnation. This paper considers whether or not A farewell to arms can be said to reveal his nihilistic philosophy.
Discussion Perhaps the first question we need to tackle is whether or not Hemingway is a nihilist. For our purposes, well define a nihilist as someone who doesnt believe that
God exists and that, by extension, also does not believe life has any meaning. This type of thinking can sometimes lead to outrageous or undisciplined behavior, since there is nothing
to lose and no one to answer to. That seems to fit the situation in the novel, when Frederic and Catherine appear to finally be starting a life together, only
to have everything torn apart when she and their baby both die in childbirth. After everything theyve survived-his wound, deserting his unit, the flight to Switzerland-for him to lose her
seems like the ultimate trick of an uncaring fate, thus confirming the authors philosophy of nihilism. However, we have to be careful in attributing all of Frederics motivations and feelings
to Hemingway himself. While its true that he has a strong autobiographical element in all his fiction, the novels and stories are still not truly autobiographies. Its true that
Frederic and Hemingway both drove ambulances, and were both wounded, and both fell in love with their nurses. But, to take a trivial example, Hemingways wife didnt die, they were
divorced; if it were a true parallel, Hadley would also have died. While some critics continue to see Hemingway as essentially nihilistic, others apparently view him as a sort of
knight errant whose time has long passed. "The most pervasive element of his writing is his development of a hero whose values are clear, who lives by a code, and
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