A Farewell to Arms Essay | Critical Essay #3

A Farewell to Arms Critical Essay #3

In the following excerpt, Schneider reveals how Hemingway systematically uses images of rain, desolation, and impurity to reinforce the events in the novel.

Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is I think one of the purest lyric novels ever written. But if we are fully to appreciate its power-and the power of a number of other works by Hemingway-we are driven to examine the poetics of this lyricism and to assess, if we can, the extent to which Hemingway has exploited the possibilities of the type....

In A Farewell to Arms the dominant state of mind-the sense of death, defeat, failure, nothingness, emptiness-is conveyed chiefly by the image of the rain (with all its tonal associates, mist, wet, damp, river, fog), by images and epithets of desolation (chiefly bare, thin, small, and fallen leaves), and by images and epithets of impurity and corruption (chiefly dust, mud, dirt, and...
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