The presentation of the book

The presentation of the book

I’m going to present you a book “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway, which will be useful for you as it has been taken from the list of books for exam on literature.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works.

Ernest Hemingway is a major contributor to Modernism, a genre literally born from the tragic events of World One. It was impossible to process the millions of casualties and the scope of the war’s destruction. Hemingway and other Modernists are known as "The Lost Generation"  because they were lost in a world blown to pieces by the war. They sought to make something new out of some of those pieces, to find something new which could help the world to heal.

Ernest Hemingway is known for his especial writing style-"Iceberg Principle" or theory of omission. All the reader needs is the surface information (the part of the iceberg we can see) to understand the situations being discussed (or the water below the visible iceberg). Whether it’s a world at war or the battles raging within human minds, the situations in A Farewell to Arms are chaotic. This is what Modernism is all about, creating a form, in this case a very ordered one (for a more chaotic form of Modernism see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.) to represent the chaos of the times.

The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Rinaldi introduces Henry to Catherine Barkley; Henry attempts to seduce her, and their relationship begins. While on the Italian front, Henry is wounded in the knee by a mortar shell and sent to a hospital in Milan. The second book shows the growth of Henry and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Henry falls in love with Catherine and, by the time he is healed, Catherine is three months pregnant.  Here we can trace a conflict of the novel. Henry thinks that love is the last thing he needs .Anybody can die at any moment, but, in the middle of a war, death weighs heavy on the scales of chance. So who wants to fall in love?I n the third book, Henry returns to his unit, but not long afterwards the Austro-Germans break through the Italian lines in the Battle of Caporetto, and the Italians retreat. Henry kills an engineering sergeant for insubordination. After falling behind and catching up again, Henry is taken to a place by the "battle police", where officers are being interrogated and executed for the "treachery" that supposedly led to the Italian defeat. However, after seeing and hearing that everyone interrogated is killed, Henry escapes by jumping into a river. After you swim across the river to get to the woman you love, climax is ensured. In the fourth book, Catherine and Henry reunite and flee to Switzerland in a rowboat. In the final book, Henry and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains. Here author creates suspence as everythind seems to be so peaceful and in can’t be so for quite a long time. So it started when Katherine goes into labor. After a long and painful birth, their son is born dead. Catherine  soon dies, leaving Henry to return to their hotel in the rain. Denoument is revealed through the question how to say good-bye to love.  And conclusion is that Henry can evade death, but he can’t help Catherine do it. And, at the end, he is all alone in the rain.

We are given specific place names, and specific events, and even days of the week. The author pays a great attention to the description of the weather in the novel. The rain, for instance, is a metaphor for death in the story. Most significantly, when Frederic leaves the hospital after Catherine has died, we are told that he walks back to the hotel in the rain. He is familiar with the ability of death , like the rain, to fall upon anyone at anytime. And rain is also serves as a symbol in this novel.

The novel is narrated from the first-person point of view. Mr. Henry narrates his story in the past tense; the story is a memory of the events being described. On the surface, Frederic Henry is an unreliable narrator. He’s always boozing, he’s going through severe trauma, and he admits to lying to other characters in the novel, while at the same time supposedly telling us how he really feels.

The title of the novel can be characterized as the dual meaning of the word "arms." "Arms" refers to the "arms" or weapons used in wars, and to the embracing "arms" of human beings.

Hence, the following  themes can be concluded:

1. Love. Love is dangerous in A Farewell to Arms. The characters keep on trying to love, even with tragedy exploding all around them.
2. Warfare. Set mostly in Italy during World War I, A Farewell to Arms weeps the horrors of war while giving a human face to those involved in it.
3. Men and masculinity. Farewell to Arms shows men fulfilling what are often consider traditional male roles, or even stereotypes – they drink hard, fight hard, play hard, and commit heroic acts of bravery.
4. Women and Femininity.  They challenge gender roles revealing themselves as simply human – breakable, strong, daring, and often full of love.
5. The characters in A Farewell to Arms push bravery to the limits as they try to do the right thing in a world breaking apart before their eyes under the pressures of war.
6. The characters in A Farewell to Arms struggle for understanding through effective communication, and we struggle right along with them. This Modernist classic, and Hemingway’s style in general, continues to influence literary, journalistic, and even personal modes of communication.
7. Foreignness . The country of pain. But pain is not the only thing that neutralizes foreignness in Ernest Hemingway’s tragic romance. Love does an even better job. The novel is a loving portrait of Italy, and its people, even the foreigners.