An Iceberg Under The Water-a Study On The Response-inviting Structure In Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms

Ernest Miller Hemingway, laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature, has a profound influence on the world literature. As his rich experience of war, Ernest Hemingway had recognized the ruthlessness of war and took love, death, war and the cruelty and nothingness of war as the theme of his works. Since Hemingway’s journalist experience, he formed a special writing style that use simple words and terse sentences during the process of writing, furthermore leaves blanks in literary works. This writing style is well known as iceberg principle and impacts later generation in literature field.Plenty of critics have studied the narrative method, the character and theme of this novel. However, seldom of them combine Wolfgang Iser’s response-inviting structure and Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg principle to analyze the response-inviting feature in A Farewell to Arms. The writing technique --iceberg principle lead to plentiful blanks in the text. Meanwhile, these blanks construct the response-inviting feature in the literary works. Based on the response-inviting structure theory, this thesis will analyze the response-inviting structure in this novel and analyze Hemingway’s special writing technique.Scholar of reception theory Jin Yuanpu classified blanks and indeterminacies in literary text into to four parts, which are blank of the semanteme, blank of the syntax, blank of the structure and blank of the artistic conception. This thesis interprets the response-inviting feature from these four aspects, which are response-inviting structure of semanteme, response-inviting structure of sentence structure, response-inviting structure of structure and response-inviting structure of artistic conception.This thesis attempts to combines the iceberg principle writing technique and response-inviting structure theory to analyze the response-inviting feature in A Farewell to Arms. And it eagers to analyze the conciseness of this novel’s language and the validity of the response-inviting structure, which further proves the aesthetic value of this novel.