Apprehensive Irony and Disappearing Communities in the War Fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Heller.

Abstract

This study seeks to excavate a certain line of irony running through the war fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, and Joseph Heller. Bookended by brief engagements with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the study of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942) and Sword of Honour trilogy (1965), and Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) seeks to map out the emergence of a kind of irony that is best understood to function as a mode of apprehension. As the publication dates of these novels would suggest, my concern relates predominantly to the literature produced after the First and Second World Wars; all three men saw war firsthand, and in this way theirs is also a kind of experiential irony. At the same time as the work traces the emergence of this mode of irony, it also argues that a concurrent decline in the existence of sympathetic communities formed around shared experiences (what Linda Hutcheon calls “discursive communities”) took place – a decline which served to unsettle the successful transmission of irony. The fate of the individual in wartime at times appears to be closely bound to their participation in a series of these communities, and protagonists like Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Basil Seal, Guy Crouchback, and John Yossarian each demonstrate a different level of cohesion with the social group – with differing results. Woven through the analysis is a consideration of the inheritance of this line of irony, with an unexpected outcome being the emergence of the curious kinship of Hemingway and Waugh. Ultimately this project will contribute to the vastly dynamic area of irony studies. With its specific focus on the use of irony in war fiction born out of the two great global conflicts of the twentieth century, this thesis offers an exploratory reading of a historically contingent mode of irony that is used to such devastating effect in the novels listed above, and that underwrites the fraught and fractured character of ironic discourse in a postmodern world.