War and Trauma in American Literature

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.