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Paul travels for several days and then loafs, awaiting his company. He is worried about his friends; the company has been designated a \"flying division,\" one assigned wherever the need is greatest. How relieved he is when they return, and Kat, Muller, Tjaden, and Kropp have all survived! The slightly moldy potato cakes serve for a meal of celebration. All are delighted to be issued clean new gear for once, too. But they get to keep the clothi ... mehr
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By pure good luck eight men, including Paul\'s \"whole gang\"--Detering, Kat, Kropp, Muller, Tjaden--draw an assignment that feels like soldier heaven: guarding an abandoned village and supply dump. The only cloud is that by now Haie Westhus isn\'t with them; he has died even though Himmelstoss had rescued him. Despite some shelling, life near the supply dump means real beds, excellent food, and all the cigars they want. Even when they leave, t ... mehr
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By now Paul has lost a great deal: youth itself, faith in his elders, belief in the traditions of Western civilization. He\'s even lost much of his own ability to rise about pure animal reactions--to feel and think as a sensitive human being. Only comradeship now keeps him going, and he has already seen several friends killed or maimed. In this chapter Paul records the collapse of the Western Front during the last terrible year of World War I, ... mehr
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Soon it is autumn. Paul has been on two weeks\' rest because of gas poisoning. On leave, he sat in the sun listening to news that the Armistice would come soon. But now he is back at the front alone, confronting the future dully, without even fear. Still he believes there is some bit of life within him that will seek its way out.
And then we come to a break in the text. The narration switches to third person--someone else, not Paul, is speak ... mehr
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DIXIE Oval-shaped British army cooking kettle (from the Hindi degshi, a pot or vessel). The navy equivalent is a fanny.
FROGS, FROGGIES The French, from an ancient heraldic device (symbol for a shield or coat of arms) consisting of three frogs.
JOHNNY As used in context in Chapter 7 it refers to a Russian. This is similar to an American\'s referring to Russians as Ivans. Ivan, Johann, and John are the same name in three different langu ... mehr
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Feel free to pronounce the names in this novel as they appear. You will have a problem being more precise, since English consonant and vowel sounds are not identical with those in German. For instance, the German sound for the ch spelling in the middle of a word is our k or h after a guttural sound we do not have in English. At the end of a word, ch is more like our sh. Also, the two dots over a vowel (called an umlaut) indicate a vowel sound ... mehr
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Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, as the second child of Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher. Ernest Hemingway graduated from high school in June 1917 and took a job as cub reporter on the Kansas City Star in October.
In 1918, he sailed to Europe to assume duties as ambulance driver in Italy. He was injured in Fossalta and sent to Milan for hospitalisation. I ... mehr
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Ernest Hemingway once gave some advice to his fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. If something in life hurts you, he said, you should use it in your writing. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway followed his own advice. The painful experiences of his own life that, consciously and unconsciously, he placed in this novel help make it a major artistic achievement.
The first of these experiences was a physical \"hurt\" that occurred on July 8, 1918. O ... mehr
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Frederic Henry is a young American studying in Italy when World War I breaks out. He volunteers as an army ambulance driver. He is commissioned sotto-tenente (2nd lieutenant), and sent to the northern mountains where Italy is fighting Austria.
In the fall of 1916 the snows come early and the Italians put off any more attacks until next year. Henry is given leave. The chaplain urges him to visit his family who live in the country, but Henry g ... mehr
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Hemingway gives few facts about his hero. Henry is young (exactly how young you don\'t know), American, a student of architecture, and apparently without strong family ties. His grandfather, who regularly sends him money, seems to be the only relative he keeps in touch with. The rest of what you learn about him has to come from observing how he acts and reacts.
Henry\'s a good example of the developing character. When you first see him, he\' ... mehr
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She\'s an English volunteer nurse\'s aide. As with Henry, Hemingway gives you little of her background. She, too, is young, but how young we aren\'t told. She seems to be from a good family, although she seldom mentions it. Prior to coming to Italy she had been engaged to a British soldier, but he was killed. When you first see her, she is, in her own words, \"a little crazy\" from the shock.
If she\'s a developing character--and many reader ... mehr
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A FAREWELL TO ARMS: THE PRIEST
He\'s an admirable character, taking the officers\' teasing with dignity, earning Henry\'s respect. His goal in life is to return home after the war, live in his simple, rural district, love God and serve Him.
^^^^^^^^^^A FAREWELL TO ARMS: RINALDI
Henry\'s roommate, a surgeon, prompts mixed reactions. You can admire him for his skills: \"I never hurt anybody. I learn how to do it,\" he says. You can condemn ... mehr
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The gap between humanity\'s noble words and its ignoble deeds was never more apparent than during World War I. For this reason the war serves brilliantly as the setting for Hemingway\'s novel of love and disillusionment, A Farewell to Arms.
The war began with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife. Soon sides were drawn--France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, and (three years later) the United States a ... mehr
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Critics usually describe Hemingway\'s style as simple, spare, and journalistic.
These are all good words; they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer\'s punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at you without pause. Take the following passage:
We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. ... mehr
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Literary critics call the point of view employed by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms limited, first-person narrator/participant. This means that he writes from the point of view of one of the characters in the story (in this case, Frederic Henry), and that the character tells you only what he himself sees, hears, feels, and thinks, never reporting scenes in which he wasn\'t involved, never entering other characters\' minds.
Perhaps the greate ... mehr
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Hemingway once called A Farewell to Arms his Romeo and Juliet.
The resemblance goes deeper than the fact that both tell tragic love stories. Both works are constructed along the same lines. A Shakespearean tragedy has five acts that work out the plot in a standard pattern: 1. introduction; 2. complication; 3. climax; 4. resolution; 5. conclusion. As the acts progress toward the conclusion, they get shorter, the fifth often being half the len ... mehr
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Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms shares a number of traits with the heroes of other Hemingway books: Nick Adams of In Our Time, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, and Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Because all these characters seem to have come from the same mold, they have been merged by some critics into a single Hemingway hero, and the ideals they try to live by have been seen as a sort of Hemingway heroic code. Indeed, becaus ... mehr
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Hemingway begins his story of war with a seemingly peaceful portrait of an Italian village in the summer and autumn of 1916. His rich visual images evoke a natural world that appears at first glance to be changeless. The narrator is merely an observer of the shifting seasons and the apparently distant war.
NOTE: HEMINGWAY\'S TECHNIQUE Hemingway says a lot by saying little, and his technique is easily seen in this opening chapter. Although h ... mehr
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Hemingway\'s portrait of military triumph is as understated as his portrait of failure: \"The next year there were many victories.\" The war has moved closer, but it still hasn\'t much affected life in the town, perhaps, the narrator suggests, because the Austrians hope to return to the pleasant spot when the war is over and so don\'t \"bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way.\" Life goes on. The first snowfall of winter si ... mehr
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Spring, the narrator, and signs of a nearing war all return to the small Italian town. The narrator goes back to the house in which he and the other officers had been barracked the previous fall and finds it unchanged. You meet his roommate, Rinaldi, who immediately begins pumping him about his leave, trying to begin a locker-room conversation about their respective sexual adventures. Rinaldi is spirited, bubbly, Italian; Henry is offhand, iron ... mehr
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