Submission to Academia Letters

Hemingway’s Narrative Technique in The Sun Also

Rises and A Farewell to Arms
Zeeba Shaikh, University of Oxford; Karnavati University

ABSTRACT
Ernest Hemingway occupies a major place in American Literary history by
his integral revolutionary role in twentieth century American fiction. By ren-
dering a realistic portrayal of the inter-war period with its disillusionment and
disintegration of old values, Hemingway has presented the flushed out condi-
tion of the modern man in “a world which increasingly seeks to reduce him
to a mechanism, a mere thing”. This paper will analyze two novels by Ernest
Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms from the context of
Hemingway’s Art, Narrative technique, and the use of stock images to build
collages that depict the flux of life through Symbolic Objectivity.
INTRODUCTION
In The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway scores a vari-
ety of literary devices, including one bold variation of this principle by which
– to present fully the pervasiveness of subsurface emotion – he metonymically
associates objects in the story with parts and functions of the anatomy. In such
instances, Hemingway interposes metonymies that suggest anatomical condi-
tions which, in turn, are the focus or reminder of the narrators’ anxieties. Since
the narrator does not articulate the emotional association, the reader discovers
it as his/her own, and the effect on the reader of this independent discovery is
a feeling of heightened empathy with the narrator, as well as a jolt from hitting
the submerged part of the iceberg.
NARRATIVE IMAGERY IN THE SUN ALSO RISES
Imagery within the novel The Sun Also Rises serves as a function of epiphany.
Simply stated, an “epiphany” is a showing forth of character through some

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seemingly inconsequential action or detail. It can also be described as a moment
of truth or revelatory manifestation, especially of a divine being. The minimalist
style that Hemmingway so effectively utilizes within this novel allows for a
simple and descriptive line of prose to hold, very simply, a weight of meaning.
A seemingly inconsequential image or moment that Jake Barnes journalistically
describes may bring forth a level of symbolic meaning that is never actually
stated. Minimalism encourages the reader to look beyond the words and absorb
the images, to draw conclusions and make connections where one sees fit. In
essence, it bestows the reader with an intimate and unique relationship to the
prose. One such image that functions as an epiphany is the moment when Jake
looks upon Pedro Romero in his dressing room just prior to Romero’s bullfight.
However, the epiphany does not lie within the mind of Jake Barnes, instead it
is made evident to the reader.
To fully comprehend the Objective Symbolism and Correlative Imagery of the
scene in Romero’s dressing room, one first must analyze the role bull fighting
plays within this novel. The role of the steers in the bullfight especially must be
considered. Steers are castrated bulls that are used to calm down the bulls as
they enter the arena. They are not aggressive like the bulls; they simply want to
“make friends with them” and lead them into the corrals. However, they often
take the grunt of the bulls’ aggression and physically pay for it with their lives.
A parallel can be drawn between the role of the castrated steers among the
bulls and the role of sexually impotent Jake Barnes among his sexually viable
friends. One can sense this parallel when Jake describes the steers’ part in the
bullfight:
“They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have the steers
in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in
the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down.”
“Do they ever gore the steers?” […]
[…] “No. They’re trying to make friends.”
Jake’s personification of the steers as “old maids” is relevant in the fact
that he perceives castration to be feminization; therefore, he interprets his own
castration to be feminizing. The parallels between Jake and the steers go beyond
their similar states of sexual impotence. Jake’s relationship with other men can
be compared to that of the steer and the bull. Jake consistently takes the

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mediating back seat within any of the confrontations between his friends. In
the scene where Mike confronts Cohn and expresses his irritation with him, both
Brett and Bill take some sort of action to do something about the encounter.
The masculine ideal that Jake holds is manifested in the talented, young
bullfighter, Pedro Romero. The image that Jake describes as he first encounters
Romero in his dressing room is evidence of this ideal:
“There were two beds separated by a monastic partition. The electric light
was on. The boy stood very straight and unsmiling in his bull-fighting clothes.
His jacket hung over the back of his chair. They were just finishing winding
his sash. His black hair shone under the electric light. He wore a white linen
shirt and the sword-handler finished his sash, stood up and stepped back. Pedro
Romero nodded and seemed very far away and dignifies when we shook hands…He
was the best-looking boy I had ever seen.”
The very language of this passage evokes the notion that Jake looks upon
Romero as the supreme “man”. The description of the beds being separated by
a monastic split brings forth a religious implication to the image. The rest of
the description depicts Romero as being almost kingly, which correlates with
the religious elements of his dressing room, as kings were often believed to be
directly below God in the hierarchy of beings. The dressing of Romero and the
tying of his sash by his many attendants are reminiscent of a king being dressed
by his servants.
Hemingway has drawn on the unforgiving expediency of life to initiate images
that pertains to nature and life; reality and fiction merge themselves to create a
united whole of truth, the effectiveness of correlative symbology. Cohn, the bull,
unreasonably lashes out on Jake, the steer, because of his aggression that has
been triggered by unrequited love. Cohn’s aggression was stirred because of the
sexual nature of his and Brett’s relationship. In fact, all the men that had sexual
relationships with Brett were at some point stirred to violent confrontation. The
only man who does not interact violently with other men is Jake, who is also
the only man who is unable to consummate his love for Brett with sex. Once
again, Jake’s ineffectualness renders him the passive observer and mediator of
sexually potent men.
Hemingway relates to Eliot in the water images in the narrative. Eliot’s
magnificent correlation to water in his poem Marina, Pericles’ daughter, reflects

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man’s ancient blood link to the sea and the water as the necessary object. Water
appears on multiple occasions as a symbol of purification and relief. On Jake
and Bill’s fishing trip, water seems to have the therapeutic effect of soothing
Jake. While the men drink loads of wine while fishing, they first chill it in
the river. It inadvertently brings down the wine’s temperature but its effect;
rather than creating a sense of drunken chaos, the wine revitalizes them and
stimulates Bill’s ingenuity. When Jake leaves Pamplona for San Sebastian,
he wants nothing more than to swim in the ocean. The water relieves and
strengthens him, and he feels buoyant and supported. Finally, Brett is always
going off to bathe, signifying her own innate desire to purify herself and perhaps
disassociate herself from her actions.
NARRATIVE IMAGERY IN A FAREWELL TO ARMS
Frederic Henry, in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, endures an
enlightenment into existentialism. In the beginning of the novel, Henry is a
wanderer reflexively searching for a meaning in life. As Henry gradually dis-
covers the frivolities and dreads of existence, he becomes “authentic”, which
means discovering the existential idea that life has no meaning and learning to
deal with it. Religion, patriotism, love, and several other outward forms pose as
temptations that Henry must conquer in his quest to become authentic. Henry’s
second temptation is that of the outward forms of objects. Critic Ray West Jr.
suggests that “When the words became separated from the acts they were meant
to describe, then they meant nothing.” What Ray West Jr. is acknowledging is
an existential idea of “existence precedes essence”. In other words, an object is
just that and nothing more. Hemingway believes in the existential idea in that
there are no outward forms. The character Frederic Henry is also distilled with
Hemingway’s theory as he demonstrates an existential view:
“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and
the expression of vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain
almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had
read them, on proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred,
and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the
stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There
were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names
of places had dignity.”

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 A sacrifice as Henry puts it as “wasted meat”. An example of that idea is
reminiscent of ancient Mayan civilization’s human sacrifices that accomplished
nothing. Virgins were sacrificed to false Gods with no reciprocation from the
Gods above.
This separation of the seasons helps to set up the transition in the plot
from good to bad. “Good” is represented by the dry season, “bad” by the
wet season. The first page of the novel describes the bed of the river as being
“dry and white”, an image that changes radically by the end, where the river
has turned into a raging torrent. Hemmingway also uses rain to devalue the
obvious or replace emotions. For instance, when Catherine dies, there is no
emotional outpouring. Instead, the novel just ends with the word “rain” as the
only hint of the emotional stress that Henry is undergoing:
“At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came
the cholera. But it was checked and, in the end, only seven thousand died of it
in the army.”
In this passage, rain and death are linked for the first time, yet there is no
emotional content connected to the fact that seven thousand men have died.
This understatement, we come to see, are a key feature of the novel and will be
used every time a death occurs. For instance, when Aymo, the driver is shot to
death, Henry informs the reader that, “He looked very dead. It was raining.”
Throughout the novel, we see that Hemmingway conjugates the imagery of rain
with death or emotions, allowing him to forebode what ensue in the novel.
As part of the extended imagery, Catherine’s death foreshadows on her quite
in the same fashion: she fears the rain because it conjures images of death in her
psyche. Henry soothes her and stops her crying; however, Hemingway shows
that this is a false comfort; in one of the very infrequent uses of the word “but,”
the chapter ends with the sentence, “But outside it kept on raining”. Here
the author assures the readers that the rain foreshadows Catherine’s upcoming
death. It is raining while Henry rides the train to Stresa as a fugitive. It is
raining when he arrives and raining while Henry and Catherine spend the night
together in his hotel room. Their boat trip across Lake Maggiore takes place in
the rain, with an umbrella used as a sail. Paradoxically, the umbrella breaks,
also possibly foreshadowing one of their deaths. Hemingway weaves the rain
symbol to infuse a concrete belief that it plays the role of active foreboding.

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 Finally, when Henry leaves the hospital for lunch during Catherine’s delivery,
(Page 226) “The day was cloudy, but the sun was trying to come through”—
a literal ray of hope. During the operation, however, he looks out the window
and sees that it is raining. Just after the nurse has told him that the baby is
dead, Henry looks outside again and “could see nothing but the dark and the
rain falling across the light from the window.” Catherine in fact dies of a blood
loss from the Caesarean. The baby also dies during the operation. On the last
page of the novel, Henry leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel in the
rain. This symbolic phrase represents the death of the only person he has ever
loved and the sadness that Frederic is feeling. It is raining all the way from the
first chapter of this novel to the last word, which is evidence of the weather’s
importance in the story overall.
One of the main forms of symbolism in this novel is nature and it is here
that Hemingway draws on the pure essence of Objective Correlative, identifying
dryness and abundance by summer, contrasting summer with autumn, its wet-
ness and bareness. The first part of the story takes place in dryness up until
Catherine tells Henry that she is pregnant. Once she tells him her news, the
rain comes, ending the dry part of the novel:
“It turned cold that night and the next day it was raining…”
images of water, using them not only to set the scene but as symbols for
both destruction and happiness. The rain always is the messenger of grim news,
the omen of destruction and death. Whatever momentary happiness Catherine
and Henry can grasp; the rainstorm invades. However, Hemingway uses other
images of water, such as rivers and lakes, to indicate joy and life. In this novel,
Hemingway offers water to be both a symbol of death and ruin and a bearer of
life and happiness, as this whole novel is the fight between love and war.
The stunning compliments of deference and acceptance into a world of fatal
loneliness permeates through Henry’s life. Catherine herself becomes an object
of symbolism in the narrative and Catherine’s physicality plays a key role in
the culmination of the narrative. Hemingway expertly draws correlatives to
Catherine’s hair. In the early, easy days of their relationship, as Henry and
Catherine lie in bed, Catherine takes down her hair and lets it cascade around
Henry’s head. The tumble of hair reminds Henry of enclosures inside a tent or
behind a waterfall. This charming description stands as a symbol of the couple’s

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quarantine from the world.
With a war raging around them, they construe an idyllic seclusion, believing
them protected by something as delicate as hair. Later, however, when they are
truly isolated from the ravages of war and living in peaceful Switzerland, they
learn the harsh lesson that love, in the face of life’s cruel reality, is as fragile and
ephemeral as hair. Yet the marriage and the love are treated objectively to be
separate, and Hemingway is meticulously merciless in this approach. Marriage
in this sense is the outward form of their love. Marriage in the physical sense
before or after the fact means nothing as with Catherine’s early comment of “I
couldn’t be any more married.” Henry and Catherine surely learned that they
were in love no matter married or not. Having a ring on the finger does not
make the love any stronger it just a psychical representation of their love.
The theme of rebirth punctuates the theme of death in the conclusion of
A Farewell to Arms. Henry loses his child and his lover. He finally achieves
the status of being authentic in the final scene “It was like saying good-by to a
statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the
hotel in the rain.” Henry prior to Catherine death was seeking hope. During
Catherine’s final hour Henry prayed to God once more only to go unanswered:
“Please, please, please, dear God, don’t let her die. […] You took the baby but
don’t let her die. That was all right but don’t let her die. Please, please, dear
God, don’t let her die.”
He now knows all the things around him are false. Henry now knows the
true forms of religion, patriotism, and love is empty forms of hope. He knows
that any hope must only come from within. Henry is now an authentic in that
“He walks quietly back to the hotel in the rain.” and knows that only he can
shape his destiny.
CONCLUSION
The prevalence of satire throughout the novel is another useful device, which
adds ironic tone toward the destructive world and war. In addition, special
lexicology and sentence pattern are means to follow the iceberg principle. In
general, the stories in Hemingway’s novels depicts comparisons tersely but the
deconstructed meanings need the reader’s careful exploration. It is through “ice-
berg principle” that Hemingway leaves unlimited room for the readers’ response,
and that fills his work with enormous attraction.

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References
Beegel, Susan (2000). “Eye and Heart: Hemingway’s Education as a Natural-
ist”. in Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed). A Historical Guide to Ernest Heming-
way. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 978-0-19-512152-0

Hemingway, Ernest. (1975). “The Art of the Short Story” in Benson, Jackson
(ed). New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
Durham: Duke UP. ISBN 978-0-8223-1067-9

Miller, Linda Patterson. (2006). “From the African Book to Under Kiliman-
jaro”. The Hemingway Review, Volume 25, issue 2. 78–81

Scholes, Robert. (1990). “New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of

Ernest Hemingway”. in Benson, Jackson J. Decoding Papa: ‘A Very Short
Story’ as Work and Text. 33–47. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN
978-0-8223-1067-9

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