The Wounded Hero and the Broken Veteran: Hemingway’s Lyrical Tragedy vs. Faulkner’s Antiheroic Realism in the American World War I Novel

Abstract

World War I reshaped American modernist literary depictions of veteran trauma, yet critical canonization has disproportionately elevated Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (1929) while marginalizing William Faulkner’s debut novel ‘Soldiers’ Pay’ (1926). This comparative literary study employs trauma theory, masculinity studies, and Paul Fussell’s framework of Great War pastoral elegy to contrast two opposing aesthetic visions of post-war life. Through qualitative close reading of both texts, the analysis evaluates five core dimensions: constructions of heroism, representations of war trauma, depictions of wounded masculinity and sexuality, home-front community failure, and narrative form. Findings demonstrate that Hemingway crafts a cohesive lyrical tragedy that frames wartime suffering as a singular, catastrophic narrative complete with romantic closure and a dignified tragic hero. In stark contrast, Faulkner’s antiheroic realism rejects redemptive tragedy entirely, centering a facially disfigured, cognitively broken veteran trapped in endless, quotidian post-war stagnation, with no satisfying narrative resolution. The paper argues that contemporary literary criticism overvalues Hemingway’s aesthetically neat tragic mode at the cost of Faulkner’s more ethically rigorous account of mundane, unromanticized veteran disillusionment. This study fills a critical scholarly gap by offering the first systematic side-by-side comparison of the two novels, re-evaluating the place of ‘Soldiers’ Pay’ within the American WWI literary canon and proposing paired classroom instruction to balance dominant Hemingway-centric pedagogical frameworks.