...The book A Farewell to Arms, written by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic about the love story of a nurse and a war ridden soldier. The story starts as Frederick Henry is serving in the Italian Army. He meets his future love in the hospital that he gets put in for various reasons. I thought that A Farewell to Arms was a good book because of the symbolism, the exciting plot, and the constant moving of the main The symbolism in A Farewell to Arms is very much apparent. Ernest Hemingway has always been one who is big on the symbolism of night as being bad. To the main character in Hemingway's novels, nights have always been a sign of death, or something negative to happen. Another one of the symbolisms in A Farewell to Arms is when Henry tries to escape from the Italian army by jumping off one of the ships the army was traveling on and running away from the army. This symbolism was the water that he jumped into was a symbolism of the new, clean life that he was going to live from now on. At this time, Henry goes off The plot in A Farewell to Arms was always active. They were never staying in one place too long. It had a very good story line, which was a love story that ended up in a tragedy. The main character's wife got pregnant and she was off to have her baby when problems started occurring. They had to have a caesarean, and the baby dies, and when the mother of the child starts to hemorrhage Henry knows...
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...Ernest Hemingway’s “A Cat in the Rain”: Symbolism. AUTORA: Vanesa Duque León “A Cat in the Rain” is a non-fiction story that belongs to Ernest Hemingway’s collection. In a 1958 interview, Hemingway expressed his literary concern in a way that shows how his art both depends on and radically departs from conventional “realism”: “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all the things that you know and all those that you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than any thing true and alive. (The Harper American Literature, 1156) In “A Cat in the Rain,” Hemingway demonstrates his ability to portray real women with problems and to respond to their unhappiness with real sympathy. “A Cat in the Rain” is, on the surface, a simple tale of an American couple in Italy. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Cat in the Rain” However, the reader soon realizes that this uncomplicated story illuminates much deeper meanings. This seemingly mundane plot becomes symbolic and purposeful under the reader’s gaze. There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel...
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...Ernest Hemingway The author's life: * Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a physician, and his mother, was a musician. * Beginning his career as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway chose the newspaper instead of pursuing a college career, and although he only stayed with the Star for a mere six months, he used the newspaper’s style guide as a foundation for his writing. Later, The Star named Hemingway its top reporter for the last hundred years. * Unable to pass the physical examination due to poor vision, Hemingway could not join the United States Army as his father had hoped. Instead, he chose the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and served on the Italian front. One of his first short stories entitled, A Natural History of the Dead was written after witnessing the brutalities of war. After a war injury, a romantic relationship with one of his nurses spurred the writing of A Farewell to Arms and A Very Short Story. * After the war, Hemingway returned to newspaper work with the Toronto Star. In 1921, he married his first wife and they eventually moved to Paris and then to Canada. During this time period, Hemingway wrote some of his greats such as The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, and In Our Time. * In 1927 Hemingway divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer. * The rest of his life contained triumphs such as For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Pulitzer Prize in...
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...despairingly, a soldier’s worst nightmares overshadow his dreams and cloud his days. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” a wounded soldier returns home, scouring the wreckage of his life for sanity and spiritual restoration. The short story presents a journey through symbolism, metaphor, and imagery, pessimistically depicting the battles that a soldier faces after war’s mortars shatter his livelihood. In this story, Nick embarks on a journey to cope with the horrific memories that haunt his every thought and action. As he passes through the burned-over town of Seney to his ideal camping ground, Nick tries to forget about his nightmarish past through the distractions that nature flourishes. Charles Oliver reveals in Hemingway A to Z the tension tugging Nick’s thoughts back from present to past: “Nick is on the camping trip in order to not think about whatever it is that has traumatized him. . . . Nick is working hard to forget it so he can get his life back together” (26). As Nick treks alone through the forest, he allows nature to soothe his mind and body and guide him back to his roots, abandoning his concerns. Though the war has ended, and Nick survived, he feels as though his soul has already died. Nick’s trip satisfies his disposition as an avid camper, but also it serves as a spiritual journey in which he heals his psychological wounds. In The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, writer Thomas Strychacz asserts that Nick’s journey regenerates his spirits and...
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...A farewell to Arms The novel A Farewell to Arms possesses a circular plot. This is because in the beginning Henry is alone and he is still alone in the end. Another reason is because the first chapter reports the death of soldiers whereas at the end the novel deals with Catherine’s death. A sense of somberness runs through the whole novel (Merklein 2003). The main theme that stands out in this novel is that of a flattering perception of love and a negative perception of war. The novel is neither a love story nor is it entirely an anti-war piece. This paper explores Hemingway’s use of symbolism in the novel and some of the criticisms that concerning his use of this literary tool. Symbolism The author, Ernest Hemingway, effectively uses a variety of symbols to represent abstract concepts or ideas. It will be observed that there are some key symbols running throughout the novel. They are; mountains, rain and plains. The first chapter introduces mountains which recur throughout the novel. They signify dignity, love, good life, happiness and health (Dahiya 1992). Further on, they symbolize respect to God and a sense of worship to Him. In contrast, plains serve to signify suffering, death, irreligiousness, war, obscenity, disease and indignity. In the novel, the priest talks of his Abruzzi, his homeland. He tells Henry how it is a place with natural beauty, hospitality, polite and kind people and surrounded with mountains with snow. In this context the mountains are contrasted to...
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...English 2328 Spring 2011 Unit Two: Early Twentieth Century Review Sheets |Survey Highlights |Modernism in American Literature |Imagism, Imagery, Image | |Major Authors |Some distinguishing characteristics— |From Pound's "A Retrospect": | |Historical Context |Rejection of traditional values and assumptions, in society and art. |—Three principles of Imagism: | |Intellectual Movements |Strong break with traditional literary forms and techniques of |1. Direct treatment of 'thing' whether subjective or objective. | |Genres, Elements of Literature |expression. |2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the | |Authors |—Avant-garde, innovative |presentation. | |Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot |—Frost's "old-fashioned way to be new" |3. As regarding...
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...inner and outer conflicts may arise when a child in unexpectedly conceived. In Ernest Hemingway’s ambiguously ending short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”, a man, referred to as “the American”, and a girl, Jig, sip on drinks at a train station as they talk of whether or not to have an abortion. David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good People”, portrays a story line similar to Hemingway’s and follows the tumultuous thoughts of nineteen-year-old Lane Dean Jr. as he sits on a bench in quiet with his, equally submersed in thought, pregnant girlfriend Sheri. Writer Nilofer Hashmi asserts in her analytical essay, “’Hills Like White Elephants’: The Jilting of Jig,” that in Ernest Hemingway’s story the girl will go through with the abortion, but the American leaving her. Evidence exists, however, to prove that Jig will in fact have the abortion and the American will stay. Similarly, but entirely contrasting to Hashmi’s assertion, “Good People” insinuates that Lane will ultimately stay with Sheri should she fulfill his predictions and tell him she will raise the baby. Aspects such as whether or not love exists between the couples, the difference between Foster Wallace’s and Hemingway’s depiction and portrayal of the males and females, and symbolism disprove Hashmi’s analysis in favor of the previously proposed scenarios. Whether or not the relationship contains any sort of love separates Hemingway and Foster Wallace’s short stories. Love does not exist between the American and...
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...analysis is written by a well-known American writer of XX century Ernest Hemingway. One of his main topics was animals as symbols and we can see this tendency in the title of the story. Cat in the Rain was written in the 1920’s. It is about an American couple who spends their holidays in a hotel in Italy. It is a rainy day and the American woman sees a cat on the street and she wants to protect it from the raindrops. When she goes out of the hotel and wants to get the cat, it has already gone. As wife returns to the hotel room, she starts a conversation with her husband George and tells him how much she wants to have a cat and a lot other things. Her husband is not interested at all. Later there is a knock on the door and a maid brings a cat for the American woman. The text of the story is not homogeneous: it presents a piece of narration intercepted with dialogues, descriptions and open ending. It is also divided into several parts according to the change of the place of narration: in the room, in the hotel and outside The general slant of the story is emotional, pathetic, depressive and tense. As the author was a war journalist and a representative of the lost generation. Cat in the Rain contains several semantic fields. The semantic field of colour: bronze, blue, green; of nature: sea, palms, rain, cat; of emotions: liked, smiled, disappointed, laughed, feeling of being of supreme importance, tired; of water: sea, rain, wet, dripped, glisten. A rigorous analysis of the vocabulary...
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...Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway employs symbolism in many forms. Hemingway uses water in various states throughout the progression of the novel such as the use of rain and rivers to symbolize life and love as well as death and danger. Hemingway uses symbols to allude to the events that will occur in the coming chapters of the novel if the reader is keen to heed them. Hemingway’s use of the “bridge” and the rivers they cross, represent the lives of people and the hazards people encounter when they approach and cross a bridge in an effort to reach what is waiting on the other side. The novel opens with a beautiful description of life and of living our lives. “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels”(3). Life’s river bottom is littered with small problems and with large problems. When things are going well, our lives are blue skies and sunshine and we are eager to have life pass rapidly. Hemingway is making a stand on the political atmosphere that was prevalent in America in the late 1920’s and one which can be applied in contemporary America as well. I must Wharton2 disagree with Thomas P. McDonnell, who wrote in an article for the National Review in 1985, remembering Hemingway and his works, “Politically, of course, Hemingway was a naïf. Where...
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...Symbolism in Literature In literature, symbolism is used to provide meaning to the writing beyond what is actually being described. The plot and action that take place in a story can be thought of as one level, while the symbolism of certain things in the writing acts on another level to enhance the story. It is a product of the culture of the day and reveals the culture in return. Symbolism can take place by having the theme of a story represented on a physical level. A simple example might be the occurrence of a storm at a critical point, when there are conflicts or high emotions. The storm might symbolize these. Similarly a transition from day to night, or spring to winter, could symbolize a move from goodness to evil, or hope to despair. A river in a scene could represent the flow of life, from birth to death. Flowers can symbolize youth or beauty. Take The Loons as an example, it is just a typical novel with symbolism from beginning till the end, with “the loons” throughout as a symbol of Piquette. Through the parallel of loons and Piquette, it is easy to find their common inability to change themselves and their environment——loons are unable to adapt to modern human invasion; Piquette is unable to escape the cultural stereotypes imposed on her. The novel reflects the ecological and ethical crises between man and nature and among humans for conquest and criticizes the power ideology embodied in the crises. Vanessa casually describes Piquette’s tuberculosis...
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...Course Review of 2013-2014 Winter Semester of LITR 221 The amazing thing about literature is that it can be interrupted differently by each person who reads it. Which means that while one piece of writing is amazing, creative, and witty to one person to another person it could be the most boring, uninteresting, and redundant piece of literature they have ever read. In this semester of Literature 221, I was given the opportunity to read works from many different genres, time periods, and styles of writing. Some of which, like Emily Dickinson’s Life I and Life XLIII, Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, and Sherman Alexie’s What You Pawn I Will Redeem I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from. While others such as Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, Mark Twain’s excerpt When The Buffalo Climbed a Tree from Roughing It, and the excerpt from Sula by Toni Morrison weren’t exactly my cup of tea. Emily Dickinson is a remarkable poet who often writes from a very emotional and self-examining perspective. This is why I really enjoyed the two selections of her work we had to read this semester. In her first poem Life I, the very first two lines make you stop and think, “I’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?” (Dickinson 2) Bam! I was hit in the face with self-reflection. Am I somebody? Or am I a nobody? Emily Dickinson continues by saying “how dreary to be somebody!” (Dickinson2 ) as if to be somebody is a bad thing. I love that Emily Dickinson questions...
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...option or the other? The short story Hills Like White Elephants depict a situation in which many, if not all readers can relate to at one point in their lives. The author Ernest Hemingway describes this scenario with a young couple who are at a crossroads in their life, and they are unsure of the future. The young couple are forced, but shying away from the rather large “white elephant in the room”, deciding to go through with having a child or an abortion. The theme in Hills Like White Elephants is expressed using typical thematic literary elements. Hemingway uses elements such as character, setting, conflict, and irony all to express the short story theme and symbolism. All of these elements help to develop the theme of decision making and sacrifice. The reader gets very little background on the relationship of the young couple but at the same time receives insight into the norms of the relationship between the “American man” and Jig the “girl” who is pregnant. Jig is represented as a young dependent girl, in article Tim O’brian writes, “Even the nickname "Jig" develops this central conflict. The name suggests a dance, the music for the dance, and a joke, for instance, and thereby exposes the man's ultimately condescending attitude toward her: she is entertainment, material for an interlude, perhaps. “Hemingway uses the character as an element to his short story as well. He uses the characters to depict different stages of life, even though the couple does not agree on the stage...
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...NORTH AMERICAN FICTION BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Before starting our study of American Fiction we must understand what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know...
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...Nick Adams’ Journey to Recovery In the story “Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway, Nick Adams is a young man recovering from traumatic experiences he suffered during his past wartime experiences. Nick seems to be an outdoorsman and throughout the story, his mental recovery progresses and he begins to leave behind some tragic experiences from his past by escaping civilization and completely immersing himself in what he knows- nature. Nick’s escape from civilization into nature is not only a physical journey but a journey of healing and self renewal from his traumatic experiences. His journey allows him to first retreat into physical activity in order to clear his mind, begin to process and accept his traumas, and eventually return to himself and civilization. At the beginning of Nick’s excursion, the narrator describes, in detail, Nick’s actions as he goes about his trip. In doing so, the narrator focuses on Nick’s physical actions rather than focusing on Nick’s thoughts and feelings. He allows the readers to see that Nick is avoiding his emotions and is allowing himself to be absorbed in his physical activity as a form of therapy. By returning to nature and activities he is familiar with, Nick can just go through the motions without letting his thoughts and feelings surface: “He felt he left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.” (210) Here the narrator shows Nick attempting to escape from civilization and...
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...eloquently and succinctly put those thoughts onto paper. Because he wrote a combination of fiction and nonfiction, it is difficult to categorize Mark Twain as an author. According to Neil Schmitz, Mark Twain was, “a southern humorist gone over, not just a deserter, a dissenter, but a literary scalawag, a southern writer in unionist discourse and narrative” (91). Most people recognize Twain’s brief, witty, straightforward proverbs that are often quoted today. He also wrote many novels, a few nonfiction books, a plethora of short stories, and essays. Mark Twain uses a variety of rhetorical devices including carefully chosen, colorful language, satirical tone, and unique symbolism to entertain and to enlighten his readers about the moral dilemmas and the beauty of the America he knew. According to Ernest Hemingway, all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, Huck Finn vii). Although this statement may seem hyperbolic, it does indicate the important place Mark Twain holds in American literature. Early Nineteenth century American writers tended to try to write like English writers with flowery, ostentatious language (Schmitz 100). Twain’s writing style was innovative when it was written and is still absolutely unique. He writes with simple prose and careful word choice. Each word is carefully selected and each sentence is meticulously crafted. Twain writes, “The difference between the almost right word and the right...
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