Farewell To Arms Essay, Research Paper

The book A Farewell to Arms, written by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic about the

love story of a nurse and a war ridden soldier. The story starts as Frederick

Henry is serving in the Italian Army. He meets his future love in the hospital

that he gets put in for various reasons. I thought that A Farewell to Arms was a

good book because of the symbolism, the exciting plot, and the constant moving

of the main character. The symbolism in A Farewell to Arms is very much

apparent. Ernest Hemingway has always been one who is big on the symbolism of

night as being bad. To the main character in Hemingway’s novels, nights have

always been a sign of death, or something negative to happen. Another one of the

symbolisms in A Farewell to Arms is when Henry tries to escape from the Italian

army by jumping off one of the ships the army was traveling on and running away

from the army. This symbolism was the water that he jumped into was a symbolism

of the new, clean life that he was going to live from now on. At this time,

Henry goes off and finds his wife to be. The plot in A Farewell to Arms was

always active. They were never staying in one place too long. It had a very good

story line, which was a love story that ended up in a tragedy. The main

character’s wife got pregnant and she was off to have her baby when problems

started occurring. They had to have a caesarean, and the baby dies, and when the

mother of the child starts to hemorrhage Henry knows that it was over for his

wife and he was right. From the beginning of the book until the end, the action

was up. Ever since the front page Henry was traveling around to different towns

so it was not boring for the reader. That made it very interesting for the

reader because it was always a new town coming up so they were being introduced

in the new characters quite often. As the story goes on, the reader is not

introducing as many new people, but they are still traveling around quite a bit.

Hemingway has a way with arranging the plots of all his stories. They all have

that right timing to them. He always introduces only people that will affect the

story, he does not introduce someone who will be in the scene for five minutes

and then leave. I felt that the author’s planning on putting this novel together

was very good. Ernest Hemingway has always been one of the world’s best known

classic writers. His style and technique of symbolism is much different than

others. He uses then in very strong ways that you the reader does not always

pick up. I am sure that I missed some of the symbolism that went on in the book.

I picked up a few though and they were very interesting. I recommend this to

anyone who is interested in a love story that does not get too intimate.