Hemingway's Artistic Style As Seen From A Farewell To Arms

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most outstanding novelists in the history of western literature. His A Farewell to Arms is considered as a great genuine masterpiece among its contemporaries. It is noted for its "tough guy spirit", its iceberg style, its precise language, its combination of realism and modernism. It is eulogized as a model in modern American literature. This paper is meant to give an analysis of this novel from various angles, such as the historical background, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology and artistic method. Readers are expected to get a glimpse of the permanent artistic charm of A Farewell to Arms.A Farewell to Arms is a war novel, not in the sense that it glorifies the war, but as it is known, it describes the cruelty, madness of the war which deprives human life and happiness. The antiwar attitude is perceived throughout the novel. In the description of battle fronts, experiences, conversations, and even the hero's monologues, the novel provides a panorama of how the war destroyed either people's lives or their spirits, and how the young generation was lost after World War I. Catherine Barkley's death and Frederic Henry's sufferings demonstrate that people were defeated either physically or spiritually. In the madness of war, the only meaning and order is what individual supplies. Everyone is permanently at risk. "The world breaks everyone. It kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially." Everyone is broken, though differently. World War I caused the generation to lose their hopes, their religion and their belief. As one of the strongest spokesman of the lost generation, Hemingway contributed to the world his greatest work in which the disappointment, misery, wound, and the death of the lost generation came to be known to the later ones. There is no reason why it is widely acknowledged as a classical work that is enjoyed by the world with its everlasting attraction.The novel is a great study in doom. It is a tragedy in modern sense. Hemingway persists in the study of the tragic nature of life itself, and he embodies his view of life in Catherine's death. The hero and heroine were presented as something more than victims, whose fate might inspire pity but not fear. They are not portrayed as moral innocents: they are very much aware of the unjust world that victimizes them. Hemingway had made a formal tragedy. He had made an innovation in the form. Unlike Aristotle's theory, the '"mistaken" actions of the hero have nothing to do with his fate. It is the universe, that dark and destructive context for all that happens in A Farewell to Arms.Tragic devices such as the rain provide a reversal situation in which all disasters take place. The development of the rain is more systematic and sustained than other image patterns, until in the final image, Henry walks back to the hotel in the rain.Hemingway employs several techniques in A Farewell to Arms, the most important of which include realism and modernism. A Farewell to Arms follows a realistic principle. As spokesman of the lost generation, Hemingway along with other young people experienced the cruelty during and after the war. The work itself is a combination of truthfulness, concreteness, typification and generalization of life. In his writing, Hemingway also adopted modernistic methods, such as surrealism, imagism, psychoanalysis and symbolism.Hemingway has created a unique style, the style of iceberg, in which he follows the principle of omission, adopts images expressed in language of vitality, all of which give the novel an everlasting position in world literature.