An Analysis Of Hemingway's Narrative Techniques In A Farewell To Arms

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous 20th century American writers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for "masters the modern narrative techniques "1. He is famous for his simple narrative style, which made him different from his predecessors and contemporary writers, who created a new writing style. A Farewell to Arms is his representative works respectively in his late works. According to his own war experience he writes this novel that has a strong color of his own image. And it shows us a story in which the war has caused irreparable physical and mental trauma to the younger generation. There are a certain scale of researches on Hemingway and his A Farewell to Arms at home and abroad, and those studies had already yielded rich fruits. But most of them focused on Hemingway code hero, the tragic sense, nihilism, etc. There are still vacancies in the field of narratology and ecology, especially from the perspective of narratology. There are fewer studies for Hemingway's narrative art. With the combination of researching the narrative theory and reading the novel, my paper will analyze Hemingway's narrative techniques in A Farewell to Arms from the following three chapters.The first chapter mainly discusses the narrative time in this novel. Hemingway skillfully intersperses flashback and prolepsis, and at the same time he employs summary, ellipsis and dramatic scene, he makes a good regulation of the discourse time and the story time by changing the narrative frequency, which made the rhythms of the novel changeable and conveyed striking narrative effects.The second chapter mainly discusses the narrative situation in this novel. Hemingway employs internal focalization by using a large amount of first-person dialogues. His skillful shifts of the narrative situation among the first-person, second person, and figure obtain the "show" artistic effect, and all these techniques make the novel get closer to reality.The third chapter mainly discusses the narrative voice in A Farewell to Arms. It mainly discusses how Hemingway employs the absent narrator and multiple voices to increase the charm of the novel and deepen the novel theme.The conclusion part concludes that when analyzing this novel from the perspective of narratology, we should not only use the narrative theory to make analysis of Hemingway's writing styles and narrative techniques, but also we should combine the theme of this novel to reveal the charm of the narrative art in A Farewell to Arms and its great influence on Euramerican literature and the world literary.