HEMINGWAY’S STYLE
Hemingway’s unembellished style in Farewell to Arms was a direct outcome of his participation during the First World War in Italy 1918 and the injury caused in it. As Hemingway recovered from his injury he developed a direct but evocative prose style that haunted both readers and writers for generations. Lieutenant Frederic Henry narrates the day-to-day life of a small Italian town of Gorizia caught in the dusty road to battle and sets the modernist tempo of the war drama. The novel sets the tone and direction of a modernist, semi-historical novel from the start,
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.
The first person narrative and the contrasting motifs of a sparkling river and the dusty road give both intensity and surreal turmoil to the story. Hemingway captures the futility and brutality of war through a crisp pictorial style. The vividness and simplicity catches the attention of the reader as if he was reading a journalistic report straight out of the war, but with more time to spare. Hemingway is more interested to convey to us the actual details of the event rather than its abstraction. The grammar is simple, the words accessible. The confessional mode, often entering journalistic stream-of-consciousness reportage, creates a dreamy intensity that makes the narration plausible.
As the reader would notice the main clauses are short and loosely connected with a coordinate conjunction—“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” Most of the details are cut out and this reduces the prose to its barest minimum. Hemingway uses the simplest verb “said” and avoids adjectives and adverbs. He communicates his images simply through nouns and verbs.
Also it is worth noting that the first paragraph has three compound sentences and the second too has three. There is only one complex sentence in the beginning of paragraph one. All the compound sentences are bound together by the conjunction and. Here ‘and’ is not used as cause-and-effect word as Hemingway does elsewhere in his fiction, but more as a tool to describe the flow of events. Hemingway’s use of conjunction makes his prose more declarative in the way King James’ Bible is declarative. The conjunction also introduces a sense of resignation in the speaker and a tone of monotony in the description. The use of the conjunction ‘and’ and the definite article ‘the’ create a rhythmic monotony of the unending and monotonous nature of war. For example in the following sentence there are four ‘and’ and four ‘the’:
In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
The repetitive use of conjunctions and definite articles forces the reader to concentrate on the pictorial images the words denote—beautiful nature against manmade war.
Hemingway attempts to show a sequence of events, an objective correlative, and an iceberg principle to evoke a specific emotion. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway suggested that a writer must “omit” things and the reader will understand the unstated—“The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Hemingway follows Jane Austen in his penchant for understatement and economy.
Hemingway was disillusioned by pretense and inauthenticity hiding in words such as patriotism and glory. Such words had no meaning in the cruel reality of war. Henry is “embarrassed” by abstract words such as “glory, honor, [and] courage” and finds them “obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates (p.133). Hemingway omits details to show the real nature of chaos and destruction caused by war. The simplicity is unmistakable.
In the paragraphs quoted above, Hemingway used declarative sentences joined together with the conjunction “and.” The repetition of “and” creates the monotony of war, of soldiers coming and going, of the seasons affected by war, the trees losing leaves and everything gray and dismal. As winter arrives it rains. There has been regular rain and it is in the rain that Henry’s beloved Catherine Barkley dies. Gradually the image of rain turns into a symbol of death and sadness. The unreliable narrator in Henry becomes somewhat enigmatic. There is often the soul floating out of the body experience. Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker wants us to believe that Hemingway based his story on antipodal images of the mountains and the plains. It would be appropriate to say that Hemingway based the story on the opposing themes of rain and dust.
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