A philosopher reads A Farewell to Arms

A few remarks on style

A Farewell to Arms is, famously, a novel about the senselessness of war, and maybe of life itself. It is also, like Hemingway’s writing generally, famous for its style. The novel’s nihilism I find hard to write about, but about its style I might have something to say.

The style is marked by heavy use of parataxis: the laying of independent clauses side by side, joined simply with “and.”  Robert Alter, in Pen of Iron, cites the King James Bible as a paradigm of parataxis and a key influence on Hemingway. To illustrate, he quotes Genesis 33:22-24:

and he [Jacob] rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and set them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

“and...and...and...and...” That’s parataxis. Hemingway is devoted to it. Here is the narrator, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, describing buying a gun:

“It must fit this,” I said, opening the holster. It was a gray leather holster and I had bought it second-hand to wear in the town.

This would be smoother if the final clause were subordinate, but the parataxis would be lost:

It was a gray leather holster that I had bought second-hand to wear in the town.

Another example:

I remembered it as a little white town with a campanile in a valley. It was a clean little town and there was a fine fountain in the square.

A prepositional phrase in the second sentence (as in the first) would be smoother, but less paratactic:

It was a clean little town with a fine fountain in the square.

Last example: Henry dives into a river to escape the Italian battle police, who are indiscriminately executing officers during a retreat from the front; he later crawls ashore:

My clothes felt wet and clammy and I slapped my arms to keep the circulation going. I had woven underwear and I did not think I would catch cold if I kept moving. They had taken my pistol at the road and I put the holster under my coat.

“...and so I slapped my arms,” and “...and so I did not think I would catch cold if I kept moving,” are clearer, but would break the equality of the clauses.

This, the fact that parataxis is a stand-out feature of Hemingway’s style, is something you might learn in a literature class. I took a lot of literature classes, and I remember how, after a class meeting, I would read the next chapters of whatever novel we were working through, and I would be excited to find another use of a symbol, or another use of a literary technique, that the teacher had discussed; and I would make a note in the margin. This felt like an accomplishment and some kind of progress, but I do not remember always knowing how it helped me understand the story. Since I am older now, I want more than just the ability to spot parataxis; I want to know what it contributes to the novel.