Imagery In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms

A Farewell to Arms A Farewell to Arms, written in 1928 by Ernest Hemingway, is the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry and his time as an ambulance driver for the Italian Army during the first world war. After being injured at the front Henry is sent to a hospital in Milan where Nurse Catherine Barkley, a woman he met where he was stationed, cares for him and they fall in love. As the story progresses Henry and Catherine’s relationship goes through a drastic change when we find out that Catherine is pregnant, so the two run away to Switzerland and wait for the baby to be born. Throughout the novel, Hemingway uses simple and complex imagery to portray the effects of the war and Henry’s emotions, paired with detailed description, repetition and strange dialogue to help develop his characters. Hemingway begins the book by describing where “we” (the troops) lived, he talks about the riverbeds and the mountains, the dust and plants, but more importantly, the rain. Rain is prevalent throughout the book and comes most often when Henry is feeling sad or upset, or when something has gone wrong. The first example of this is the last two sentences of the first chapter, “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and by the end of it only seven thousand died of it in the army.” (Hemingway, 4) The rain symbolizes sadness and death and can sometimes act as