Blog #5: Personal Review

The novel A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, is a heart throbbing story about an American man named Frederic Henry who enlists in the Italian army and discovers the love of his life, a nurse named Catherine. Although he is skeptical of love at first, Frederic discovers that love is not only the most import thing in life, but that love will endure any battle or war. This book particularly intrigued me with the unique usage of syntax in order to express concise and often irritated dialogue between characters. This allowed the reader to establish a more personal relationship with the characters and created stronger bonds between the characters themselves. However, Hemingway’s tedious and explicative descriptions of the scenery in the novel were slightly irritating and dull because there were very little usage of metaphors and analogies in these descriptions. I found myself reading details about a single mountain range for close to an entire paragraph, and the descriptions of the scenery were completely irrelevant, at times, to the development of the novel. The combination of both the vast descriptions and the interesting dialogue do, however, provide for a well-synthesized novel.

A Farewell To Arms is not only about a soldier’s love for a woman, but also about the soldier’s love for war. This fact was troubling because at times it felt as if Lieutenant Henry loved war more than he loved his family. He is so incapable of loving something more than war itself, it takes him many months to actually admit to himself that he loves Catherine, and, fearful of the thought of being removed from his post, Frederic does not ever marry Catherine. My least favorite part of the novel was the conclusion of the novel, which ends with Catherine dying after childbirth, and Frederic, not being able to accept this loss, disregards his newborn child and leaves the hospital. Although A Farewell to Arms is monotonous at times, the overall plot development and connection to the reader makes this story an impressive novel.