Ernest Hemingway and A Farewell To Arms
"We did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things" (Hemingway 13). This single sentence voiced early in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms by the American protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, sums up the rather pessimistic and drab tone and mood presented in Hemingway's works, particularly this novel, which also reflects the pessimistic and judgmental mind housed within the author. Regardless of the unhappy circumstances and heart-breaking situations which prevail throughout the novel, A Farewell To Arms certainly deserves a place in a listing of works of high literary merit.
Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois at the closing of the 19th century, Hemingway soon abandoned the Land of Lincoln and exposed himself to the pain, suffering and defeat of humanity as a reporter for several American newspapers. Characterized as a "robust, belligerent American hero" (Donaldson 13), his experience in the arenas of deep-sea fishing, bullfighting, boxing and hunting, coupled with his professional life as a war correspondent and ambulance driver in the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars, the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 and the Spanish Civil War between 1937 and 1938 well qualify Hemingway as a recorder of the human condition during times of conflict and of pain, which is clearly evident in A Farewell To Arms.
Hemingway's life would further prove to be one of extremes. Rising to the prestige of attaining the status of Pulitzer and Nobel laureate in 1953 and 1954 respectively, plus the added honour of receiving the 1954 Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he fell unfortunately and dramatically...
... middle of paper ...
...such things" (Hemingway 13). But perhaps others will...
Works Cited and Consulted:
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway. New York: Chelsea House, 1987
Donaldson, Scott, ed. New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Elliott, Ira. "A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway's Crisis of Masculine Values." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 4.4 (1993) 291-304.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell To Arms. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986.
Norris, Margot. "The Novel as War: Lies and Truth in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms." MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 689-710.
Reynolds, Michael, et al. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. New York: Maxwell, 1994.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1998.
One observation that can be made on Hemingway’s narrative technique as shown in his short stories is his clipped, spare style, which aims to produce a sense of objectivity through highly selected details. Hemingway refuses to romanticize his characters. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of s...
Tim O’ Brien’s narrative, How to Tell a War Story depicts the livelihood and experience of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. More so evaluating the life Tim O’ Brien and several other characters in his platoon. The sequences of stories reveals the thoughts and behavior of many post-Vietnam veterans and also can be related to the behavior of many veterans today. Throughout the segments of stories, “How to tell a War Story”, “Speaking of Courage and Notes”, and “The Things They Carried”, O’ Brien illustrates a common theme of guilt and sacrifice among the key characters Lieutenant Cross, Rat, and O’ Brien himself. Each character are presented with an unexpected responsibility and are forced to serve their state. A sense of discomfort
Assadnassab, Sara. "Hemingway´s Depiction of Women in A Farewell to Arms.”. http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1773/2005/117/LTU-CUPP-05117-SE.pdf (accessed April 17, 2013).
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.
"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.
Penn Warren, Robert. "Ernest Hemingway," Introduction to Modern Standard Authors edition of A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949.
Glasser, William A. "A Farewell to Arms." The Sewannee Review 2nd ser. 74 (1966): 453-69. JSTOR. Web. 9 Dec. 2013. .
Waldhorn, Arthur. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism (Contemporary Studies in Literature). Chicago: Syracuse University Press, 1978.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is a novel set in Italy during World War I. It tells the story of its protagonist, an ambulance driver named Frederic Henry (most often referred to as simply Henry), and his love for a nurse named Catherine Barkley during a time in which Henry has sought to escape from the war around him. A Farewell to Arms, which is notable for its melancholy plot, strongly resembles some aspects of Hemingway’s own life; he committed suicide after a lifelong case of depression, and he too experienced the tragedies of war. He communicates one major theme through A Farwell to Arms—the inevitability of the loss of happiness. Hemingway expresses this idea through his ingenious use of symbolism, motif, and irony.
Ernest Hemingway in His Time. July, 1999. Universtiy of Delaware Library, Special Collections Department. 29 Dec. 2000
There are indications in each of the novel’s five books that Ernest Hemingway meant A Farewell to Arms to be a testament against war. World War One was a cruel war with no winners; ”War is not won by victory” (47). Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the book’s hero and narrator, experiences the disillusionment, the hopelessness and the disaster of the war. But Henry also experiences a passionate love; a discrepancy that ironically further describes the meaninglessness and the frustration felt by the soldiers and the citizens.
“A Farewell to Arms Essay – A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 115 (1929): 121-126. JSTOR. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.