Trauma Theory: No “Separate Peace” for Ernest Hemingway s “Hard-Boiled” Characters

This paper applies trauma theory to Hemingway’s post World War I writing. His work, for example, A Farewell to Arms, shows how soldiers are traumatized by their war experiences, and how they suffer from such aftereffects as flashbacks, nightmares, inability to sleep and social maladjustment. Although examining Hemingway’s work in terms of shell-shock has been established, this paper suggests that traumatized characters in Hemingway’s work carry what the trauma theorist Cathy Caruth calls an “impossible history.” It suggests that survivors of trauma experience a sudden or catastrophic event that is beyond the normal realm of human experience. Since traumatized individuals often do not process catastrophic events as other normal events, they have access to it through disturbing flashbacks and nightmares. These psychological manifestations provide snippets of the individuals’ impossible history which they never fully possess or normally store. By tracing these psychological manifestations, e.g. flashbacks and nightmares, this paper shows that traumatized survivors struggle with a traumatic history, haunting them in day and night.