A Farewell To Arms: Style Essay, Research Paper
A Farewell to Arms: Style
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. Take the following passage:
We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to
realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on
somebody’s staff? No. He was. It was all balls.
The style gains power because it is so full of sensory detail.
There was an inn in the trees at the Bains de l’Allaiz where the woodcutters
stopped to drink, and we sat inside warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine
with spices and lemon in it. They called it gluhwein and it was a good thing to
warm you and to celebrate with. The inn was dark and smoky inside and afterward
when you went out the cold air came sharply into your lungs and numbed the edge
of your nose as you inhaled.
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, the tangible: “hot
red wine with spices, cold air that numbs your nose.” A simple “good” becomes
higher praise than another writer’s string of decorative adjectives.
Though Hemingway is best known for the tough simplicity of
first passage cited above, if we take a close look at A Farewell to Arms, we
will often find another Hemingway at work–a writer who is aiming for certain
complex effects, who is experimenting with language, and who is often self-
consciously manipulating words. Some sentences are clause-filled and eighty or
more words long. Take for example the description in Chapter 1 that begins,
“There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain”; it paints an
entire dreary wartime autumn and foreshadows the deaths not only of many of the
soldiers but of Catherine.
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 in Chapter 3:
I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room
whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk,
when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking
and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so
exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure
that this was all and all and all and not caring.
The rhythm, the repetition, have us reeling with Henry.
Thus, Hemingway’s prose is in fact an instrument finely tuned to reflect his
characters and their world. As we read A Farewell to Arms, we must try to
understand the thoughts and feelings Hemingway seeks to inspire in us by the way
he uses language.