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 style seen in the 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.
