Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist Frederic Henry says A Farewell to Arms with a double meaning. The novel title is word play reflective of first, Frederic’s desertion of the war. His second farewell is to the arms of his beloved, Catherine Barkley after her death in childbirth. Wandering stoically through life, looking for some natural progression, Frederic lets one circumstance lead him to the next. At first, Frederic exhibits the hedonistic aspirations of a college fraternity pledge, motivated only by drinking and sex. His selfish motives take him into a courtship with Catherine and they fall in love. He displays apathy and has no passion or conviction until the accidental attraction. The relationship matures him. It becomes his salvation. It gives his detached life purpose. How and why we fall in love is random, complicated, and unpredictable. No matter how we get there, love is such an important experience that as poet Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote, “Tis better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all” (lines 15-16). Frederic begins the story a naïve young man and emerges filled with grief, but matured having experienced a devout and deeper love.
Frederic is an American joined with the Italian forces fighting in World War I. He is a lieutenant assigned to an ambulance unit. His involvement in the war is as a surreal experience. He tells himself that the war is “no more dangerous to me myself than war in a movie” (37). He shows his ignorance saying, “Well, I knew I would not be killed, not in this war, it did not have anything to do with me” (37). Drinking and women are his coping mechanisms. He opts to spend his leave time drinking and with whores, rather than go to the peaceful Abruzi as suggested...
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Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner's, 1957.
Kleinman, Craig. "Dirty tricks and wordy jokes: the politics of recollection in 'A Farewell to Arms.'." The Hemingway Review 15.1 (1995): 54+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
LitCharts Editors. "LitChart on A Farewell to Arms." LitCharts.com. LitCharts LLC.
2014. Web. 16 Apr. 2014."The Structures of the Fiction." Ernest Hemingway, Rev. ed. Earl Rovit and Gerry Brenner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. 62-89. Twayne's United States Authors Series 41. Twayne's Authors on GVRL. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Spanier, Sandra Whipple. "Catherine Barkley and the Hemingway Code: Ritual and Survival." In Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 131-148. VCCS LitOnline. Web 16 Apr. 2014. .
Rovit, Earl. "On Ernest Hemingway and 'Soldier's Home.'" The American Short Story. Volume I. Ed. Calvin Skaggs. New York: Dell, 1977: 251-255.
Analysis of Hemingway’s Narrative Technique as a Short- Story Writer. For many years, the narrative technique of Hemingway has been under debate. Writers before him had already achieved works that bear the characteristics of the modern short story, and many of their works could stand today, with those of Hemingway and of writers like Faulkner, as representative short stories of modern times. What distinguishes Hemingway both from his predecessors and from his contemporaries, however, is the theory he produces to deal with the challenge of spatial limitation which every short story writer has to face: how can he say more than his space actually allows him to say?
Ernest Hemingway used an abundant amount of imagery in his War World I novel, A Farewell to Arms. In the five books that the novel is composed of, the mind is a witness to the senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. All of the these senses in a way connects to the themes that run through the novel. We get to view Hemingway’s writing style in a greater depth and almost feel, or mentally view World War I and the affects it generates through Lieutenant Henry’s eyes.
In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1208-1209. Hemingway, Ernest. A.
Rebecca Makkai’s short story, “The Briefcase” embraces Hemingway’s self-described Iceberg Theory of writing. Bare and cold, “The Briefcase” is a story of omission; the structure deep beneath the surface of the printed word floating on a page. Makkai’s war time setting is like a treatise on life. The need to live find us drifting, grasping for self-definition. It matters who we are as individuals; to make sense of our lives. Makkai turns us upside down; our puffed up secure universe of self. War reveals our real self is only concerned about survival. Life is about surviving hard times. If you haven’t had hard times, keep living.
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
" The Hemingway Review. 15.1 (Fall 1995): p. 27. Literature Resource Center -.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Soldier's Home." The Bedford Introduction to Literature, 6th Edition. Ed. Michael Meyer. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2002. 152-57.
In A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, the novel concerns itself primarily with Hemingway's philosophy of life: unordered and random. There is no God to watch over man, to dictate codes of morality, or to ensure justice. Hemingway’s hero must accept his place as something insignificant, yet continue to fight endlessly against the meaninglessness of life. The universe is indifferent to man's plight. In the book, this indifference is best exemplified by the war -- an ultimately futile struggle of man against man and the death of Catherine Barkley – someone good and pure. She did not die due to her “sins”, but merely because life is short, unfair, and unorderly.
...ugh, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.’ Hemingway was not big on self-analysis; he said upon receiving his Nobel Prize that "a writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." But the facts of his life are important, for Hemingway he believed that a good writer ought to draw always upon personal experience for his material. He wrecked his body in pursuit of a macho ideal. He wrecked his relationships in pursuit of… well, who knows what exactly he was after. After a lifetime of celebrating striving and stoicism, Hemingway ended his life wracked in mental and physical pain. Whatever his personal challenges, Hemingway's professional legacy is clear. American prose is different because of him, and his unique style has influenced art, film and countless other writers. We can only imagine that Papa would be proud
Trogdon, Robert W. Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Print.
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about love and war. Frederic Henry, a young American, works as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I. He falls tragically in love with a beautiful English nurse, Miss Catherine Barkley. This tragedy is reflected by water. Throughout the novel Ernest Hemingway uses water as metaphors. Rivers are used as symbols of rebirth and escape and rain as tragedy and disaster, which show how water plays an important role in the story.
From an early age, Ernest Hemingway found himself obsessed with the subject of heroism. He looked up to his grandfather, who he saw as a hero, and sought to fulfill the war legacy left behind by joining the army. Hemingway was a participant in many wars, but one in particular shaped the rest of his life and his outlook on the world. It was during the end of World War I and Hemingway was serving the Italian army as an ambulance driver. During the battle at Fossalta di Piave, Hemingway circulated the trenches with chocolates, providing them to soldiers. Out of nowhere, an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded a few feet away from Hemingway, killing one man and wounding many others (Meyers, p.30). Hemingway was one of these wounded men. It was once said by Ted Brumback that Hemingway had acted heroically, for once he regained consciousness, he picked up a wounded man and carried him to the first aid dugout despite his own serious leg wounds (Meyers, p.30). Considered the turning point in his life, Hemingway had faced death but been called a “hero” as a result of it. Even though Hemingway’s obsession with heroism was still prevalent throughout his life, and this event on July 8, 1918, made its way into many of his novels, the heroes Hemingway wrote about never forsook glory or fortune. They were more concerned with the righting of wrongs and the longing of experience (Baker (2), p.129). In Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Frederic Henry is more obviously a form of Hemingway, but also a prime example of the heroes Hemingway liked to write about. Even though Henry faced danger, pain, and death throughout this wartime novel, none of it was glorified. Despite his obsession with heroism in war, while writing the novel...
“A Farewell to Arms Essay – A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 115 (1929): 121-126. JSTOR. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.