Farewell to Arms essays

Farewell to Arms essays Ernest Hemingways novel A Farewell to Arms uses nature to provide symbols that foreshadow events and also replace human emotion. In Hemingway the symbols are implicit; they follow the laws of reality to such a degree that in themselves form a whole, full-blooded stories (Bjorneboe). The replacement of emotions with symbols allows Hemingway to frequently understate what is really going on in the action. The symbols are used repeatedly therefore unifying the book and at points the reader even knows what the weather is going to be like. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway portrays his points through the natural symbols of rain, mountains, and plains. Throughout A Farewell to Arms, rain is used not as a symbol of life but as a recurring symbol of death and despair. The inexorable march of tragic warning which is echoed in the imagery, the rain(Rovit 105). This is a rain associated with darkness, mud, and death. In A Farewell to Arms the dominant state of mind- the sense of death, defeat, failure, nothingness, emptiness- is conveyed chiefly by the image of rain with all its tonal associates, mist, wetness, dampness, river, and fog(Schneider 286). Hemingway uses rain to foreshadow the coming of war. As winter came to an end and the snows change to rain the fighting commences. After a great battle the soldiers come home wet and muddy with a look of death upon their faces. The retreat begins, orderly, wet and sullen, with troops marching under the rain(Schneider 294). The rains also foreshadow Fredericks relationship with Catherine. It is not until March when it begins to rain and that old failure and bitterness threatens to shatter the lovers happiness (Schneider 296). The rains relentlessly follow the lovers wherever they go, and are present when the two lovers try to escape the army by rowing across the lake. The rain, which they have become to r...