MACHINES,MEDICINE,AND MORTALITY:A POSTHUMAN READING OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN BODY IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S A FAREWELL TO ARMS

Abstract

This article offers a posthuman reading of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), arguing that the novel’s representation of war, medicine, and the wounded body anticipates key ideas in contemporary posthuman theory. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s (1999) notion of the posthuman as the end of a specific liberal-humanist conception of the autonomous subject, Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg figuration, and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) account of the technologically mediated posthuman subject, the paper reads Lieutenant Frederic Henry as an early “cyborg” figure whose identity is continually reconfigured by machines, medical technologies, and institutional systems. Mechanized warfare shatters pre-war ideals of a unified and heroic body and replaces them with images of fragmentation, prosthesis, and mechanotherapy. Hospital spaces and surgical interventions reassemble human bodies according to a “body-as-machine” logic, even as they expose the limits of clinical control. Finally, Catherine Barkley’s death in childbirth, despite sophisticated obstetric care, confronts both characters and readers with mortality as the irreducible limit of technological power. By putting Hemingway into dialogue with posthuman theory, trauma studies, war literature, and medical humanities (e.g., Caruth, 1996; Dodman, 2006; Gul et al., 2025; Higonnet, 2001), this article shows how A Farewell to Arms registers a crisis of embodiment in the first mechanized world war and offers a deeply ambivalent vision of what it means to be human in an age of machines.