An Analysis On The Narrative Features In A Farewell To Arms

Ernest Hemingway ((1899-1961) enjoys huge fame as a great writer. His fiction A Farewell to Arms, a masterpiece with its timeless quality, attracts the interests of criticism for decades around the world and in China too. Hemingway's contribution to literature lies in his narrative techniques. Basing on linguistics and philosophical language, narratology, as a new literary theory, tries to do scientific reading to the text. The theories of narratology create a new field in literary study.The essay is an attempt to discuss the narrative features in A Farewell to Arms. Apart from introduction and conclusion, the thesis is divided into four parts.Chapter One tries to discuss the narrative structure:the novel written in pronarration, that is, the story is progressed in causal, linear and chronological order. The events in the discourse are narrated in the order as what happened in the story. In several occasions, Hemingway interjected analepsis and prolepsis to serve his writing.Chapter Two reveals its advantages of first-person narration. The first-person narration traces the psychic voyage of the author. The book is the reflection of author's experience in the World War I, his love affair, his wounding in the war and his understanding to life. The fiction is narrated in first-person narration, which focuses on objective description displaying in dialogues between characters.The third chapter deals with the pronominal shifts from "I" to "you" and "we". Hemingway shifts from the first-person "I" to "we" and second-person "you" in many places for various purposes. Sometimes pronominal shifts are used to attract the readers' attention and narrow the distance between the narrator and the readers, and sometimes is used by narrator Frederic Henry to express the activities of his inner heart and monologue.The last part of the essay mainly discusses double-voiced narration in A Farewell to Arms. Though tried to keep an objective narration, Hemingway told his values and ideas to life through Frederic's mouth.The paper attempts to discuss the narrative features in A Farewell to Arms, on one hand, it's a beneficial try to apply the theories of narratology to the practice of text analysis, on the other hand, it can make us have a better knowledge to Hemingway's novel and his understanding to life and a better enjoyment to his achievements in fictional art.