A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to ArmsCritics 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...
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