Wounded Soldiers Seeking Home: William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Despite the centrality of the war experience in the lives of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, neither writer engaged in combat during the First World War. Faulkner, still in training when the Armistice was declared, “never got to Europe and it is virtually certain that he never flew a plane during his service” (Kartiganer 630). Hemingway, although posted to the Italian Front, was an ambulance corpsman who “After only a few weeks at the front . . . was seriously wounded when a trench mortar exploded in front of him” (Keene 59). Nonetheless, both men regarded wounding as integral to the mythology of combat heroism, a mythology they were each determined to cultivate upon returning home. Their reasons for doing so, Keith Gandal writes, were because “each desired to be part of the military’s elite. . . . But they were all deemed unsuitable as candidates for the air corps or command in the field, and the ultimate consequence was that they felt themselves ‘emasculated’” (36–37). Though Faulkner received no injuries during training, upon returning home in December 1918, he had “developed a limp and complained of headaches from a steel plate in his head.” These claims ensured that he had “had his war: the best of all wars, pure fiction” (Kartiganer 630). Likewise, Hemingway’s wounding, though not a direct result of combat, “gave the budding novelist a way to reinvent himself as a combatant in the eyes of those at home” (Keene 62). Their novels, Soldiers’ Pay and The Sun Also Rises, depict combatants returning home wounded, signifying the validity of war experience.

In Soldiers’ Pay, Donald Mahon returns home scarred, blinded, and near death. His scar becomes a site of disgust, “the mirror into which all the characters look, seeing themselves in pity and revulsion” (Polk 113). In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes attempts to establish a new life for himself, expatriating to Paris after being wounded in the genitals and subsequently “invalided home from a British hospital” in 1916 (277). The wounds of both men serve as the context in which readers witness their postwar lives. Having been wounded during service, they are irrevocably damaged and are not who they were before departing for duty. They each suffer from profound degrees of alienation as a result of their scarring, as Faulkner writes of Donald, the “man that was wounded is dead and this is another person” (97). Their wounds to the head and the groin function as an apt metaphor for the “calamity for civilization” (Hemingway 14) that the war signified.

Despite constantly searching for a place to call home, neither Donald nor Jake fully settles back into civilian life. Their communities and, more importantly, the women within them, are unable to enact the process of what Beth Linker terms “the rehabilitation ideal” (8). Linker characterizes rehabilitation as the belief that “after six months of medical care, disabilities would disappear and wounded soldiers would be able once again to enjoy the rights and luxuries regularly taken for granted by able-bodied men” (8). Rehabilitation necessitated that disabled veterans “be toughened up, lest they become dependent of the state, their communities, and their families” (6), and was inextricably linked to “the disabled man’s desire to marry and support a wife” (62), a desire explored and critiqued in both novels. The women in these texts—Cecily Saunders, Margaret Powers, and Brett Ashley—are responsible for reintegrating Donald and Jake into what Jennifer Haytock calls “a woman-centered domesticity” (100). However, these women are also victims of war wounding, though on a psychosocial rather than a physical level. None of these women are able to reintegrate these men into the postwar communities of either Charlestown or Paris—they fail to provide the “structure for the continuation of life” necessary for rehabilitation (Haytock 101). This essay, then, charts the frustrated attempts of the communities in both novels to reconcile the physical wounds and emotional trauma that arise from the war. A central question at the heart of these novels is: How can those who are...