第一次大戦と語り手フレデリックの「学び」―『武器よさらば』に見る同盟・共闘―

抄録

The First World War (1914-1918), the background to A Farewell to Arms (1929), encompassed most nations and areas of the world. It began as a single and minor conflict between Austria-Hungary and the Republic of Serbia but systematically ballooned into a world-sized war through alliances and the old diplomacy of secret agreements. In the 1920s, a criticism of this faulty system of international relations replaced the Kaiser’s personal responsibility for World War I, and in the midst of the public disclosure of these secret documents, A Farewell to Arms was written and published.

Focusing on these unregulated alliances and secret agreements, this essay attempts to reread A Farewell to Arms from the standpoint of a “joint action.” The narrator of this novel, Frederic, has learned the contradictions of joint military action defined by the Allies and has recognized his own inner patriotism. Regarding these awareness and recognition as his lessons from World War I and relating them to the narrator’s choice of words and scenes such as a “separate peace,” disrespect for Italy and hostility to Japan, the tragic nature of this love story will appear in a context of a “joint action.”

The narrator Frederic calls his own cowardly, yet inevitable departure from the warfront a “separate peace” and associates this personal retreat from the war with Russia’s peace, achieved against the wishes of the Allies. In another case, the narrator Frederic sets twice the scene of Englishperson’s disrespect for the Italian people. English nurses such as Catherine and her head nurse criticize Frederic for joining the Italian army, considering it disgraceful. The nurses’ contemptuous attitude is probably representative of the animosity that an Englishperson might feel when meeting an American enlisting not in the British army but in the Italian army, which only unexpectedly joined the Allies because of a secret agreement with England and France (“The Treaty of London” in 1915). This international politics behind the nurses’ resentment, however, is ignored by Frederic, who was ignorant of the secret agreement and oblivious of his own national identity. As if engaging with this national insensitivity, the narrator Frederic sets out the dialogue between him and an Italian military priest, who tries in vain to make Frederic notice his patriotism as a lesson that each of the Allies had its own expectations.

This dialogue is followed by the scene in which Fredric criticizes Japan and Japan’s partner in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, England. Frederic gets drunk and tells some Italians that the United States would declare war on Japan as well as on Turkey and Bulgaria, and accuses Japan of wanting Hawaii. This choice of scenes by the narrator Frederic might reflect his knowledge of the US-Japan conflict over the hegemony of Hawaii and the Pacific, evident from the late 19th century, and the secret agreement that Germany attempted to make with Japan, which was suggested in a coded telegram called the “Zimmermann Telegram.” To the narrator Frederic, drunk Frederic’s joking accusation against Japan probably seems to reflect his own patriotism and nationalism and contradicts the cooperative agreement of joint action, which are the lessons the Italian priest wanted Frederic to learn.

By narrating his relationship with Catherine and other characters in the context of “joint actions,” the narrator Frederic creates a new tragic nature, mixed with the war absurdities of World War I, in this love story.