A Farewell To Arms Rhetorical Analysis

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When an author wants to portray something a certain way they have to use literary and rhetorical devices to lead the reader through the book. In A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway uses imagery, diction, foreshadowing and many other literary devices to send the reader through the lives of the characters. The devices Hemingway uses makes the characters become more realistic to the reader. With this being said the purpose of Hemingway’s writing is to give the reader a visual sense of the characters, but without the literary and rhetorical devices this would not be able to happen. Hemingway starts off with using imagery to create a scene of an Italian village that the main character is going through during World War 1. The imagery in the beginning is completely opposite from the imagery in the end. …show more content…
Hemingway uses light very colorful terms to describe the scene, but in the end Frederic Henry, the main character, is walking the rain. In the end scene Hemingway uses dark, gloomy words to describe the ending of the book. From the very beginning of the book Hemingway deceived the reader into think the book is going to end with a lighter tone. Having the book start off with the lighter tone masks the dark reality of the book. Hemingway wanted the reader to not suspect the dark tragedies that are faced later on in the chapter. Other than the first couple of sentences in chapter one, the rest of the book remain dark. Although the light hearted tone does not last long the reader is still faced by the sudden change in tone. Hemingway uses images of a town in war, a town that has been taken over by war. The rest of the first chapter sets up the rest of the book for the reader. It even foreshadows some of the feeling towards the war by may of the characters. Hemingway used diction all throughout the book to explain his imagery. His words were planned out precisely so the reader would feel the effect that Ernest wanted them to feel. For example, “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 houses and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the tree”(Hemingway, 1). Hemingway didn’t add a transition word to ease the reader into the war scene. It went from zero to one hundred, a calm peaceful scene to a scene that was laid out to be almost violent but not on purpose. Hemingway wanted the reader to feel that the soldiers didn’t mean the destruction, they were doing there job, but they still flung up dust onto the trees disturbing the peaceful town. Without this quick change in tone Hemingway wouldn’t have set the book up right. This sudden change snaps the reader back to the realities of the war like most of the citizens in the towns, like the one described, felt. Although the first page doesn’t have a major impact on the rest of the book it has a major importance on foreshadowing the possible ways the book will play out. Hemingway did on many accounts, use some metaphors. The one that

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