Significance of Chapter One of a Farewell to Arms by Ernest hemingway

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        8/18/2008 9:51 PM

  • 1.nature—rain is a symbol of death, etc.
  • 2.mechanical, detached narrative
  • 3.maybe that’s because the narrator has suffered too much pain.
  • Hemingway’s writing style
  • The pregnant thing
  • “only 7,000 died”—how death has become common, narrator is unemotional in saying so
  • we know nothing about henry
  • dominant tone of irony and understatement-reaches it peak at the end of the chapter where rain+cholera result in casualties
  • narrator is stationary and seems to be standing on the sidelines. Although we don’t know it yet, this is the tone for the rest of the book, as henry will always remain in the periphery of the conflict (ambulance driver)-literally & philosophically
  • Finally, we get a sense from this chapter of the narrator’s attitude toward the unpleasant and difficult, the painful and even tragic. Regarding the cholera outbreak, he tells us that “in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” Only seven thousand! Like all of Hemingway’s heroes, the narrator of A Farewell to Arms is a stoic, understating rather than exaggerating, and grimly accepting what he cannot change.

Though the opening chapter of the book, “A Farewell to Arms” is quite brief, it does, in fact, hold great significance, as it firmly sets the tone for the rest of the book.

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The reader is introduced almost immediately to the death and desolation that are to become commonplace as the book progresses. At first one seems puzzled by Hemingway’s almost agonizingly painful attention to detail, especially when it comes to portraying the narrator’s surroundings and landscape. However, on reading more closely one finds that his purpose in doing so is to send the reader a message through his explicit descriptions of the prevalent climatic conditions:

 Almost from the very first page itself, we realize that Hemingway considers rain to be a bad omen, or the bearer of bad luck, even death. Though ...

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