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Critical essays on farewell to arms
Critical Analysis of A FAREWELL TO ARMS’
A farewell to arms literary analysis
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The Symbolism of Water in A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
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.
Rivers in A Farewell to Arms represent rebirth. They symbolize a departure from a previous life and an entrance to a new one. The first evidence of this comes during the retreat of the Italian troops from their post. While walking with his fellow soldiers, Frederic is arrested and fears that he will be executed. "He jumps in the river with a splash" allowing it to float him along. It is like when Frederic jumps in the river, he is baptizing himself and cleansing his soul.
The trip down the river gives him time to think about his future life with Catherine, even though he is uncertain if there will ever be a future between them again. The river eventually takes him to a railroad where he makes the decision that he is done with the war and that he made his "farewell to arms". Hemingway uses water as a metaphoric cleansing for Frederic’s past experiences. When Henry emerged from the river, it was as if he was reborn.
Rivers in this novel can also be a symbol for an escape. Weeks later, when Frederic hears from the barman about his expected arrest, he and Catherine escape for Switzerland by boat. They leave their old lives behind in search of a clean start in Swit...
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...o be correct. Hemingway uses rain as a sign of death, sadness or to give one of his characters the state of being afraid. The despair brought by rain, Frederic says „ good-bye to [Catherine], and then „[leaves] the hospital and walk[s] back to the hotel in the rain". The rain described as he walks home represents again a cleansing in which Tenente will be forced to start a whole new life now.
Ernest Hemingway uses water as a metaphor that foreshadows events in A Farewell to Arms. He distributes water through the entire story. Escape, or a cleansing effect, of Frederic Henry takes place in a river. Rain predicts unfortunate events, such as the death of Catherine, which causes Frederic to sadly begin a new life. However, this time he does not have a companion - he must learn to survive alone. Hemingway uses a lot of water to show many symbols and affect the story.
After swimming to safety, Frederic boards a train and reunites with Catherine. She is pregnant with their baby. With the help of an Italian bartender, Catherine and Frederic escape to Switzerland, and plan to marry after the baby is born. When Catherine goes into labor, the doctor suddenly discovers that her pelvis is too narrow to deliver the baby. He attempts an unsuccessful Cesarean section, and she dies in childbirth with the baby. To Frederic, her dead body is like a statue; he walks back to his hotel without finding a way to say goodbye, seemingly lost forever.
In his short story, “Big Two-Hearted River”, Ernest Hemingway focuses on the mental and emotional state of Nick, the protagonist, who “le[aves] everything behind” during a wilderness fishing trip. Traumatic thoughts and memories haunt Nick, but the cause of his inner turmoil is not disclosed in the story. Other short stories by Hemingway, however, reveal that Nick Adams is a wounded veteran who served in the First World War. To distract himself from these painful memories, Nick concentrates on the physical details of his journey such as making camp and preparing food. In addition to self-distraction, he attempts to inhibit his ability to think through hunger and physical exhaustion.
Suddenly, it enters your thoughts and streams throughout your mind; you begin to think, you are in a stream of consciousness. You are in your own world of random words and sentences, amounting to nothing, and at times making all the sense in your world, a world that only exists within your mind. That is exactly how a stream of consciousness works, according to Charles Bohner and Dean Dougherty (1216). Ernest Hemingway himself traverses into three streams of consciousness of his own in order to develop Henry's character and the over all theme of A Farewell to Arms, war and love and all feelings in between. For instance, while Henry is not really required to go to war, he volunteers, without thinking of the consequences and horrors of war. However, along the way, he manages to encounter love, incur physical pain, and realize the horrors of war. And so, having to face a possible death while at the front, Henry finds himself in an extraordinary position. He is somewhere between life and death and while between these two extremes his experiences shapes him into a more mature character.
The changes in atmosphere from tranquility to uproar and chaos, creates this uneasiness and striking opposite in the details of the river. Kurtz shows this atmospheric change when he says, “… in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and heat,” (Conrad 104). The imagery of the sun setting creates this ideal calm and tranquil feeling, yet he juxtaposes this by saying, “… to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” (104). Kurtz changes the atmosphere and makes the reader feel eerie, dreadful and struck with fear. With this said, the atmospheric change in this line critiques the reasons for these nationalistic expeditions on the river in anticipating death and destruction during these expeditions through the allusions of ships and their reason for sailing.
The rain used in the beginning of the story symbolizes sadness. The drunk man thought Andy was drunk laying in the alley. But Andy was really stabbed. "The boy laying in the rain bleeding. He was 16 years old," (1). The rain symbolizes sadness, and it is sad when the drunk man is too drunk to help Andy. If the drunk man wasn't drunk and would've helped Andy it would've prevented murder. The sidewalk is a
Hopeless Suffering in A Farewell to Arms Near the end of A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway has Fredrick Henry describe the time he placed a log full of ants on a fire. This incident allows us to understand a much larger occurrence, Catherine's pregnancy. Combined, both of these events form commentary on the backdrop for the entire story, World War One. After he finds out his son was stillborn, Lt. Henry remembers the time when he placed a log full of ants on a fire.
"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
Hemingway uses different scenes and events to show Henry’s different personalities, such as on the front line in one chapter then in a behind the lines town setting in the next. This shows the readers the difference in Frederick's attitude between the war and when Henry goes back to town on his breaks. Hemingway also uses Henry’s conflicts to show how he reacts to situations. For example, Henry gets hurt and moved to a hospital but still tries to make the best of his situation.
At this point, he seems to go a little crazy himself and gets scared. He needs a way to escape immediately and ends up separating himself again through love. Frederic had not been prepared for the stress and pressure of the reality he had faultily deluded himself from.
The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.
"All fiction is autobiographical, no matter how obscure from the author's experience it may be, marks of their life can be detected in any of their tales"(Bell, 17). A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is based largely on Hemingway's own personal experiences. The main character of the novel, Frederic Henry, experiences many of the same situations that Hemingway lived. Some of these similarities are exact, while some are less similar, and some events have a completely different outcome.
The Powerful Symbol of Water in Beloved Water. It expresses its’ power in the form of hurricanes and flash floods. It displays its gentleness, washing dirt off a child's scabbed knee. Water has been used to quench the thirst of many longing throats; and it has been the cause of death to those who unfavorably crossed its path. It possesses the power of total destruction, yet it holds the bases of all life. Generally, is a natural purifier, washing the dirt from our bodies. Water is a symbol of transition from dirty to clean. In Beloved, Morrison uses water to introduce a transition between stages in a character's life. Water separates one stage of a character's life from another. Paul D.'s escape from Alfred, Georgia was directly helped and represented by the rain that had fallen in the past weeks. Paul D. was sent to Alfred, George because he tried to kill Brandywine, his master after the schoolteacher. In Alfred, he worked on a chain gang with forty-five other captured slaves. They worked all day long with "the best hand-forged chain in Georgia" threading them together. They A man's breaking point was challenged everyday. It was hell for Paul D. Then it rained. Water gave Paul D. his freedom. The rain raised the water level in the in-ground cell so they could dive, "down through the mud under the bars, blind groping," in search of the other side (p. 110). One by one each of the forty-six men dug through for the ground. They dug for breath, they dug for each other, and they three separate times to make the reader aware that water is the main cause of the transition in Paul D.'s life (p.109-10). Paul D.'s is now a free black man. A free black man traveling to 124. Water represents Sethe's transition from slavery to freedom.
Santiago went through many turmoil’s in his life and his story is one of wisdom in defeat from the lengthy time of which he could not catch anything to that of his loss of the marlin to the sharks after such a lengthy battle to catch it then attempt to bring it back to shore. Now I could go on and on like any other paper about all the symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea but no matter what I did while reading it, in almost every aspect it screamed out to me as an impersonation or reflection of Hemingway’s own life in a multitude of ways that no one can deny. The Old Man and the Sea was an allegory referring to the Hemingway’s own struggles to preserve his writing i...
Symbolism in Cat in the Rain by Ernest Hemingway In his short story Cat in the Rain, Ernest Hemingway uses imagery and subtlety to convey to the reader that the relationship between the American couple is in crisis and is quite clearly dysfunctional. In other words, the reader has to have a symbolic reading of the images. In fact, what seems to be a simple tale of an American couple spending a rainy afternoon inside their hotel room serves as a great metaphor for their relationship. This symbolic imagery, hided behind common objects, gives the story all its significance. This short story contains a great number of striking and literary symbols.
Theme is a literary element used in literature and has inspired many poets, playwrights, and authors. The themes of love and war are featured in literature, and inspire authors to write wartime romances that highlight these two themes. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms deals with the collective themes in the human experience such as love and the reality of war. A Farewell to Arms is narrated from the perspective of Fredric Henry, an ambulance driver in the Italian army, and pertains to his experiences in the war.