Wharton1

David Wharton Dr. Northcutt ENG 1020-04 April 10, 2012 “What a Beautiful Bridge” In the writing of A 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 other literary figures such as George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, et al, were merely grossly wrongheaded about the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was more or less innocently confused about it; and worse, he nurtured and romanticized on the side of the Loyalists the illusion