The Metaphorical Writing Of "a Farewell To Arms"

This thesis reinterprets Hemingway's representative work "A Farewell to Arms" by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory about metaphor and related semiotic theories. Starting from the pun of title and the inherent metaphorical nature of Hemingway's "Iceberg Principle", this thesis firstly analyzes the metaphor chain of death composed by "rain", "snow"and "dust" from the angle of syntagmatic relations; then it argues the heroine Catherine's mortality and Hemingway's "anti-hero" tendency behind his "tough-guy" complex from the perspective of paradigmatic relations. Finally, it makes a conclusion:this novel uses an unbidable "farewell" to outline modern life's nature as well as contemporary citizen's ultimate predicament, and meanwhile to construct a "co-exist" human world with readers, so it can be rated as a metaphorical prototype text of the entire mankind's tragic fate.