How Does Alcohol Reflect Trauma In Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms?

Portable Corona number three. That's been my analyst. Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was a war veteran and an alcoholic. Much of the previous literature has established these two aspects of Hemingway's life but few scholars have engaged in critical discussion on how they might intersect. As the above quotation demonstrates, Hemingway placed great emphasis on writing as a form of therapy: '.trauma provided material for his writing and writing provided a therapeutic outlet for trauma'. Yet, it was often alcohol which acted as a more immediate panacea. There has been a great amount of biographical focus on Hemingway's (and many other writers') personal relationship with alcoholism, which has sometimes segued into textual analyses of the depiction of alcohol in his novels. The alcohol consumption of Hemingway's various protagonists is frequently analysed in regard to his own drinking habits. This form of critical engagement is predominantly useful in the understanding of Hemingway's oeuvre, elucidating important similarities and distinctions between the man and his work. Inevitably, this type of research is further able to illuminate the broader relationship between alcohol and literature - numerous canonical writers were alcoholics. Like Hemingway, some of these authors (for example, Raymond Chandler) had, to varying degrees, experiences of war and conflict. However, as well as it is important to display an awareness of Hemingway's personal familiarity with war and alcoholism, it should not obscure the way in which Hemingway employed these experiences as literary motifs in his writing. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to explore the potential textual relationship between war trauma and alcoholism. In light of such an aim, this essay will analyse Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929). Dodman writes extensively on the subject of AFTA as a trauma narrative, arguing that '.the novel stands as a record of [Frederic Henry's] narrative collision with the violence of trauma'. However, somewhat inexplicably, Dodman neglects to position the role of alcohol anywhere within his explanation of Frederic - the novel's protagonist - and the narration of trauma. This seems to be a significant oversight considering that the motif of alcohol is almost omnipresent throughout the novel. Norton, conducting a statistical analysis on the alcoholic content in AFTA, found that thirty different types of alcoholic beverage feature in the text and alcohol is alluded to in '.104 pages out of a total of 342 printed pages'. The omission in critical scholarship regarding the relationship between alcoholism and war trauma in AFTA is therefore what this essay will attempt to address. In applying Robinett's research on narrative and trauma as a framework, this essay will ultimately argue that Hemingway uses alcohol in AFTA to reflect Frederic's experience of war trauma. Firstly, this essay will proceed to outline: Robinett's model on trauma and narrative; the competing medical frameworks of alcoholism; and Hemingway's personal relationship with war and alcohol. This will establish the prism of analysis for exploring Hemingway's use of alcohol, to reflect trauma, in the content, style and form of AFTA.