homework 2nd for June 11th

Journalism : Book review about 'A Farawell to Arms


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.
The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters's beliefs. The harsh, 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 style, Taking 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.
Thus, Hemingway's prose is in fact an instrument finely tuned to reflect his characters and their world. As reading A 'Farewell to Arms', I was deeply inspired by the thoughts and feelings Hemingway seeks to express in us by the way he uses language.