Abstract:
This study argues that the modern war story records not merely physical trauma
but the breakdown of the rituals that once gave suffering purpose. Drawing on Edward
Tick’s concept of the “warrior’s return,” it examines how the language of healing
shifted from communal and spiritual frameworks to clinical and individual ones. In
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry’s incomplete initiation
reveals the moral and spiritual disintegration of modernity itself. Where ancient
warriors were guided through death toward renewal, Hemingway’s hero wanders
without ceremony, seeking meaning in love and loss. The novel’s austere style, its
silence, repetition, and restraint, acts as a substitute ritual, transforming private grief
into shared remembrance. In this convergence of myth, psychology, and art, the
modern age’s failure of faith becomes literature’s last surviving form of ritual.
