Dec 26, 2009

A Farewell to Arms | Social Concerns

In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is concerned with the effects of war on its participants and victims. However, since the focus here is not the aftershock of the war, as it is in The Sun Also Rises, but the war itself, the intensity and concreteness of the war's impact on individuals is far more vivid. At the same time, the general effects of dislocation on an entire nation — Italy — are rendered as the novel's backdrop. Finally, though, it is as a great romantic tragedy — Hemingway called it his Romeo and Juliet — that A Farewell to Arms is generally read...