A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

By Bright Summaries

Unlock the more straightforward side of A Farewell to Arms with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, which tells a story of turbulent romance against the backdrop of the First World War. Its protagonist Frederic Henry is serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army when he meets and falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a nurse in the British hospitals who lost her fiancé in the Battle of the Somme. The novel draws on Hemingway’s own experiences (he was an ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross during the First World War and fell in love with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky), and provides an intensely realistic and often horrifying brutal depiction of conflict and the ways it changes those who live through it.

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This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:
•A complete plot summary
•Character studies
•Key themes and symbols
•Questions for further reflection

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
• Release date: Dec 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9782808012867

Book preview

AMERICAN WRITER

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899.

Died in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961.

Notable works:

The Sun Also Rises (1926), early Modernist novel

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), war novel

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987), posthumous collection

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the first and most influential American Modernists. Between 1920 and the mid-1950s, he published seven novels, six short story collections and two works of non-fiction. In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his last major work of fiction, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hemingway is remembered for his use of the ‘iceberg theory’, an economical, minimalist style alternatively known as the ‘theory of omission’. As he writes in Death in the Afternoon, the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water (1999: 154). By focusing on surface elements of the story (just one-eighth), Hemingway believed that the underlying significance of the narrative could shine through more poignantly and powerfully, despite not being obviously referred to. As Hemingway’s iceberg style aims to capture the truth, his novels are considered to be works of realism. Thematically, Hemingway often uses the setting of war to examine the effects of conflict on human love, lust, fear, loss, guilt and betrayal.

WAR NOVEL WITH A ROMANCE NARRATIVE

Genre: