A Farewell To Arms Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Author, Ernest Hemingway, in his novel, A Farewell To Arms, pinpricks certain rhetorical devices in his first chapter. Hemingway’s purpose is to establish the initial tone and mood of the novel. Hemingway adopts a desolate and detached tone in order to illustrate the inner workings of the main character’s mind and the general mood of the novel. The rhetorical devices of diction, symbolism, and imagery utilized in the first chapter sets the desolate tone for the entire novel to follow.

Hemingway creates a desolate tone in the first chapter of his novel with his simple yet elaborate diction. In the first few pages Hemingway’s distinct writing style is quickly displayed to the reader. This writing style being that of short sentences embedded

with specific and substantial details and his series of sentences strung together with conjunctions. For example, "The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." Hemingway’s style of writing also does not allow the reader to see what the characters are thinking, however the impressions and descriptions of the characters allow for the reader to envision the thoughts of the characters without expressly saying them. “if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.” Hemingway gives the reader gets a sense of the narrator's attitude of the war by his description of the king and his stoic and grim statement of “how things were going.” Hemingway relies on rather his lack of details to create the tone and mood of the characters and setting of the story.
Hemingway also uses the rhetorical device of Imagery with the juxtaposition of life and death in his first chapter.

The once lively trees become entrapped in dust, causing the leaves to fall sooner than they should. “The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.” These leaves that are supposed to be symbols of life are now taken to hide symbols of death by the soldiers. “There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors.” By using this imagery and symbolism Hemingway places the of themes of dying and death at the main focal point of the opening chapter of A Farewell to Arms. However the most notable symbol in the chapter is that of the rain. The rain is not symbolized as being life-giving and preserving but rather as life-taking and devastating, similar to the war itself. The first few pages tell of a plain that is illustrated as "rich with crops” but as the pages progress the rain is first seen as a symbol of death with the line, "In the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn." The symbolism of the rain is presented further with the line “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came cholera. But it was checked and; in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” The explicit connection between rain and death in this line is emphasized by the rain being followed by cholera and ultimately resulting in the death of soldiers. The beginning chapter is extremely important to the novel, as it is an

introduction through the rhetorical device of imagery to the various symbols and motifs that are established further in the novel.
Although the first chapter of A Farewell to arms is fairly short it is extremely significant for setting the desolate and dreary tone of the entirety of the chapters to ensue. The first chapter sets the stage for a Farewell to Arms to be a bleak story about the harsh truths of war and takes on the overlying topic that war is not to be glorified for it is in equal measure dangerous and bleak as it is life-taking. Hemingway successfully uses the rhetorical devices of imagery and short, cise diction in the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms to establish the stoic and desolate tone of the novel.