This dissertation will take two different approaches towards alcohol abuse. On the one hand, it will analyse alcohol as a means of coping with emotional as well as physical distress, a sensation that, in Hemingway’s writing, is often related to an inability to deal with the horrors of war. Novels such as A Farewell to Arms (1929) describe a world scarred by these experiences. Its characters, in their quest for a new purpose and a sense of normality, seek refuge in excessive drinking. A first section will therefore aim at closely analysing individual passages in order to investigate the way in which the novel’s major characters act under the influence of alcohol and elaborate on the way in which liquor alienates people from their own sense of reality.

Furthermore, I will focus on The Sun Also Rises (1926), which will allow me to reveal a more multi-faceted side to alcoholism. While the main issue, namely the characters’ inability to deal with reality, still remains, I will try to identify the different types of alcoholics within this novel and underline the ways in which they react to alcohol abuse.

In general, I will closely analyse specific conversations from the two aforementioned novels, primarily focusing on the purpose of alcohol in a specific context and, in a second stage, underlining the way in which alcohol abuse leads to anxiety, aggression and deterioration. One of the main questions I will try to answer is to what extent and at what cost the two novels’ major characters, along with Hemingway himself, struggle to defend their fortress, which is their own artificial, alcohol-induced reality, from sobriety and, consequently, from the disillusionment and despair of their situation.