A Farewell To Arms: Style

Part I of Essay
Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words; they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened t ....

Part II of Essay
.... simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters'--beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete, the tangible: "hot red wine with spices, cold air that numbs your nose." A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives ....