Narrating the war :|Jacob’s Room, The Return of the Soldier, and A Farewell to Arms

Abstract

This M.A. thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in relation to the possibilities of narrating personal accounts war, with special attention to, trauma, death and drastic change succeeding the Great War. It aims to analyse the effects of the Great War on gender roles and personal relations. All three novels featured in this study revolve around the war yet they refrain from narrating explicit fighting scenes and focus on the psychology of multiple individuals influenced by the sorrowful atmosphere surrounding them. Each novel employs its unique pattern to reflect the overwhelming consequences of the war: Jacob’s Room and The Return of the Soldier omit soldiers’ voices whereas A Farewell to Arms appoints a soldier as the narrator. This study argues that regardless of their different methods all three novels find a common ground on the horror caused by the war and show how the Great War led to a fracture in masculine world order instead of securing men’s reputation as glorious and victorious heroes.