The Doomed Trick Of Life And Death

A Farewell to Arms is an important novel of Ernest Hemingway who is thefamous American writer. The setting of this novel is placed in World War I which is amechanized horror unprecedented in human history. The novel of A Farewell to Armsdescribes how the young American architect Frederic Henry is destroyed fromentering the war to escaping from the war. Besides, this novel tells of a love storybetween Frederic Henry and the Scotch nurse Catherine Barkley.Under the influence of his personal experiences on the battlefield and suchphilosophers as Friedrich Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Hemingway isessentially a sober-minded writer with a strong tragic consciousness. In his earlycreations, Hemingway places his special emphasis on depicting the brutality of theharsh world and the desperate struggles of individuals. According to Hemingway, lifeitself is a solitary life-and-death struggle and the only finality of it is nothingness ordeath. Through discussion about the question of life and death in his literary works,Hemingway reveals the inevitable tragedies of human beings.It should be kept in mind that Materialist dialectics hold that external causesbecome operative through internal causes. So, rather than regarding the tragedies ofcharacters in literary works as the social tragedies, it would be better if they areregarded as the disposition tragedies of the characters.In sense of delineating the inner world of human being, psychology and literatureshoulder the same task. What's more, the development of psychoanalysis supports thecombination of psychology and literature with a further juncture.Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud advances the topographical model ofmind and the three structures of personality on what he has observed during hislong-term clinical practices. According to Freud, personality has three aspects, namelythe id, the ego and the superego, which work together to produce all of the complexbehavior of human beings. Besides, all of these three components need to be wellbalanced in order to have a large amount of psychic energy and maintain reasonablemental health. It is in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1920 thatFreud starts to discuss the notion of the death instinct within a clarification of thetheory of instincts.Psychoanalysis casts its golden rays of reason on the dark realm which is in theinner world of humankind, revealing the tragic conflicts between life and death, loveand hate and good and evil. When the psychological concepts of the life instinct andthe death instinct are adopted to interpret literary works, it is easy to gain a fairly deepunderstanding of the characters' tragedies caused by the inter-transformations betweenthe life instinct and the death instinct.On the basis of the psychological data the writer has collected, this thesis aims atinterpreting the tragicalness of A Farewell to Arms from a new angle of psychology,which is also the new trail of research on Hemingway and his works blazed by thisthesis.In the structure, the main body of this thesis includes introduction, four chaptersand conclusion. In the first chapter, special emphasis is laid on the relationship ofaffinity between literature and psychology. Psychologists often name theirpsychological discoveries after the characters in relevant literary works. Besides,some psychologists quote literary works to prove their principles of psychology. Atthe same time, psychological principles can be adopted to interpret literary worksfrom new angles.The second chapter of this thesis first makes a systematic exposition of thepsychological theories of the life instinct and the death instinct. And then, this thesisaims at discussing the close relationship between A Farewell to Arms and the theoriesof instinct in the following respects: the creation background, the structure, the imageand the theme of this novel.The discussion in the third chapter centers on the interpretation of the idea of"the disposition tragedy" which is caused by the inter-transformations between thelife instinct and the death instinct. The major objective of this chapter is theexplanation of the fact that the death instinct can manifest itself in the guise ofstruggling for survival. In this sense, the aim of all life is death, which is identicalwith the tragic consciousness of Hemingway.In the last chapter, this thesis aims at interpreting the tragedies of Henry andCatherine one by one under the guidance of the psychological theories of instinct. Thefirst part of this chapter discusses Hemingway's tragic consciousness and its influenceon his creations. Next, in the following two parts, the tragedies of Henry andCatherine are analyzed thoroughly with the help of psychological theories of instinct.The focal point in this chapter is to explain how the death instinct resorts to all sortsof tricks to achieve its own ends. In this way, the finalities of Henry and Catherine aredoomed from the very beginning.All in all, the novel of A Farewell to Arms reveals the disintegrations of twoyoungsters under the impact of war. The tragedies of Henry and Catherine should beregarded as the disposition tragedies that are caused by the struggles between the lifeinstinct and the death instinct. In A Farewell to Arms, by constructing the plots ofHenry's adversity and Catherine's death, Hemingway aims at pointing out thetragedies of his hero and heroine, that is, before the brutality of the harsh world, idealand love are fragile and transient. In the eyes of Hemingway, life itself is an inevitabletragedy and no one can extricate himself from worldly worries and agonies. Throughinterpreting this novel from the angle of psychological principles, this thesis aims atunderstanding the tragicalness of A Farewell to Arms profoundly.