Student Research Websites--Spring 2011

Frederic may have escaped the brutality and cruelty of war, but ultimately there is no way to escape pain, and solitude, and the difficult aspects of life. There is only entrapment, wherever one turns.

Hemingway makes use of some very important symbolism in this novel. Even as early as the first paragraph, he sets up two major symbols — the plains and the mountains — which will be in conflict throughout the story. Hemingway represents the plains as dangerous, miserable, dry, and barren. The mountains, on the other hand, represent safety, happiness, and good health. The military action that Frederic Henry witnesses takes place on the plains, and his escape, through the cleansing, baptismal ritual of jumping into the river, reaches its end in the secluded mountain chalet with Catherine. But when Frederic must take Catherine out of the mountains and back down to the city below to the hospital where she is to give birth, disaster strikes again. Rain is another important symbol throughout the novel. Often the rain suggests impending doom; there is a storm the night that Frederic learns he must leave Italy at once to avoid being arrested, Catherine dreams that she is dead in the rain, and indeed at the conclusion of the novel, it is raining when Frederic returns to his hotel.

Book III provides a climactic turning point: Frederic's desertion of his post in the army and his decision to return to Catherine. In Book IV it looks as if Frederic and Catherine have successfully escaped the threats of the past, only to meet a tragic end to their love in the final book, which brings the drama to a close like the last act of a tragedy.

Frederic is left alone in a world in which nothing is permanent, all is subject to chance, and the best one can do, ultimately, is to face that world with acceptance.

Hemingway worked hard to write in such a way as to give his readers highly descriptive passages without distracting them with "big words," and he hoped that his writing would leave his readers with distinct visual impressions, without their being able to recall anything unusual or memorable about the language itself.

Ernest Hemingway is known for his distinctive writing style, an unusually bare, straightforward prose in which he characteristically uses plain words, few adjectives, simple sentences, and frequent repetition