Jose Carillo's English Forum - My Thoughts Exactly

MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY

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Something to learn about Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”
By Charlie A. Agatep

It was author Joan Didion who “woke me up” about the deceptively simple sentences which Ernest Hemingway used in the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms.

Here is how Hemingway wrote the first paragraph:

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. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

If you examine this first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, there are:

- 4 simple sentences
- 126 words
- Only one word has 3 syllables
- 22 words have 2 syllables
- 103 words have only one syllable
- 24 of the words are “the”
- 15 of the words are “and”
- there are 4 commas
- the commas are in the second and fourth sentences
- the commas are absent in the first and third sentences
- the repetition of “the” and “and” create a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of “the” before the word “leaves” in the fourth sentence (“and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling”) casts a chill, a premonition of the story about to come.
- there is a deliberate omission of facts which makes the story mysterious from the start.

In the late summer of what year? What river? what mountains? what troops?

From his biography and from Hemingway and Gellhorn, the recent TV drama in HBO with Nicole Kidman as his wife, we know more about the life of this brilliant Nobel Prize laureate who, after his many successes, became so depressed that on the Sunday morning of July 2, 1961, he got out of his bed in Ketchum, Idaho, took a double-barreled Boss shotgun from a storage room in the cellar, and emptied both barrels into the center of his forehead. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, said in her 1976 memoir How it Was: “I went downstairs and saw a crumpled heap of bathrobe and blood, the shotgun lying in the disintegrated flesh, in the front vestibule of the sitting room.”

The manner of his death somewhat made us forget that here was a writer who made the English language a New Medium that changed how the next generations would speak and write and think. Hemingway’s grammar dictated a certain way of looking at the world... and as Joan Didion wrote, “so pervasive was the effect of Hemingway’s diction that it became the voice not only of his admirers but even of those whose approach to the world was in no way grounded in romantic individualism.”

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