Comparing A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises :: comparison compare contrast essays

A Farewell to Arms & The Sun Also Rises   After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked mainstay to the hotel in the rain (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingways port and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Fredericks actions are determined by his countersink until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingways style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually recognise Hemingways style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his tra ining as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxers punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it, one can see that Hemingways style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingways and his characters beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they cant be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like patriotism, so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple good becomes higher acclamation than another writers string of decorative adjectives. Hemingways style changes, too, when it reflects his characters changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henrys point of vie w, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henrys thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you