Analysis of a Farewell to Arms Chapter One.

Elia Abou Rached

Literature II Essay

Professor Curtis Brown

Chapter one of A Farewell to Arms opens with a descriptive overview of the setting the narrator is in, but the author doesn’t give away any information neither about the location of the battle nor about the identity of the narrator. Although the author is writing about war, he doesn’t focus on the gore or glory aspect of it. The description is detached and almost journalistic, with a mournful and repetitive tone. The language used here is emptied of passion, and this might be caused by the harshness and cruelty the narrator had been exposed to. The dominant tone of this opening chapter is irony, and it reaches its peak at the end of the chapter when nature and war combine forces and conspire against man.

The chapter moves through different seasons of the year and portrays the constructive and destructive aspects of nature. One of the key images used by the author is rain. By rain here, he is not referring to the life-giving rain, like the fertilizing showers of spring; instead he means the life-taking, cold autumn rain, which is associated with death. Another image is bareness. The author uses the word bare repetitively to describe trees and other scenes of nature. This could be interpreted as a pacifist point of view that compares war to the bareness or “death” of nature. The image of dust is also significant. One can relate the trees that have lost their beauty because they are covered with dust to the land that has been “covered” or infected with war.

The first chapter has very little obvious metaphors with the most prominent being the comparison of the soldiers and their equipment to pregnant women “gone with child”. Even this obvious simple-worded metaphor has hidden meaning and the word gone acts as a portent of the deaths of these soldiers. The rest of the chapter may seem to contain simple descriptions, but these descriptions are there to show the despair beneath the surface. At the...