Cailyn Newell
The End?
Trauma affects everyone differently, but the one thing that unites all victims of scarring events is the recovery process. Although each person’s process may slightly differ they all possess similar symptoms: repression, denial, displacement, projection, regression, and sublimation. In the novel A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Frederic Henry suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; Henry’s honest narration of the novel reveals his struggle with the different stages of defense mechanisms with his completion of the novel itself being the ‘final’ stage in order to show how recovery is a never ending process. The initial reactions to deal with trauma are repression and denial. Furnham defines repression as “the …show more content…
While describing the aftermath of Catherine’s death Henry withdrew all emotional description, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. The End” (Hemingway #). Henry does not give any more details than needed when recounting his reaction to Catherine Barkley’s death. The lack of emotions represents Henry quickly falling back into the process of defense mechanisms. Henry’s use of ,“The End” to conclude his story gives the audience the feeling of an abrupt ending to more realistically illustrate the nature of repression and denial. He begins the novel unwilling to talk about his experiences, eventually overcomes his fear of self expression, to only slip back into his fear after facing another tragedy. Commonly, people who face another trauma after ‘overcoming’ Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are even more vulnerable than the first time. These additional traumas act as a trigger which is a “is a stimulus such as a smell, sound, or sight that triggers feelings of trauma”(Citation). The feeling of trauma forces the victim to restart the process as another attempt at recovery. This is a laboring process that takes time as the human mind is very fragile as shown by Frederic Henry and his relapse into