A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Published 1929 · 352 pages · 90,122 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance, War Fiction

How hard is A Farewell to Arms to read?

A Farewell to Arms scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
Hemingway's famous stripped vocabulary—simple words, concrete nouns, minimal adjectives. The style's achievement lies in what it leaves out. Anyone can read these words.
Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
Short declarative sentences. 'And' connects clauses without subordination. The syntax is deliberately primitive, creating rhythm through repetition.
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
Hemingway stays concrete—rivers, mountains, food, wounds. Abstract words like 'glory' are explicitly rejected as obscene. Meaning must be inferred from things.
Information density: 42 out of 100
The novel covers a love affair and a war, but Hemingway uses white space, leaving out connective tissue. Readers fill gaps. The density is emotional, not informational.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
Hemingway's iceberg theory: what matters lies beneath the surface. Frederic's feelings emerge through what he notices, not what he says. The style forces inference.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Rain means death; mountains mean safety; the separate peace means love beyond war. Hemingway's symbols are obvious by design—the repetition makes them insistent.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
The gap between official rhetoric and front-line reality generates bitter irony. Frederic's detachment protects him from caring too much—until it fails.
Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
The famous ending—Catherine's death, Frederic walking back to the hotel in rain—refuses consolation. But the event is clear; only its meaning stays suspended.
Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
Chronological narrative of war and love. The structure is traditional; Hemingway's revolution was stylistic. The form is transparent.

How A Farewell to Arms is regarded

A Farewell to Arms holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where A Farewell to Arms sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (175 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Farewell to Arms scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic (shading Ironic)
I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine.
Symbol: Formal
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.
Genre: Novel + Confession
I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine.

Where the story of A Farewell to Arms takes place

  • The Italian front, 1917-1918 (1917 to 1918), the main setting
  • Italian front, Gorizia and the Isonzo, to the Caporetto retreat (1916-1917) (1915 to 1918)
  • Milan, American hospital, summer-autumn 1917
  • Lake Maggiore, Stresa, then Switzerland (Montreux, Lausanne), Nov 1917 to spring 1918 (1917 to 1918)

6 things that are true of A Farewell to Arms, with the passage for each

  1. Henry cannot see his own influence on the ambulances while on leave.

    Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not.

  2. Henry shoots a retreating sergeant who refuses his order to help free a stuck ambulance.

    I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired.

  3. The Italian battle police execute officers at the Tagliamento bridge, and Henry escapes by diving into the flooded river.

    I ducked down, pushed between two men, and ran for the river, my head down. I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash.

  4. The barman Emilio offers his boat and tells Henry how to row to Switzerland, thirty-five kilometres up the lake.

    It's thirty-five kilometres.

  5. Henry and Catherine arrive in Switzerland by rowing a boat, and they are arrested after breakfast.

    They arrested us after breakfast.

  6. The baby is delivered by Caesarean and is stillborn.

    They couldn't start him breathing. The cord was caught around his neck or something.

Scenes in A Farewell to Arms that Frye would name

15 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Sparagmos, untitled
His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser Passini's body is torn apart by the trench mortar, the book's first mutilation of the human body.
Pharmakos, untitled
Abandoned his troops, ordered to be shot, The battle police execute officers separated from their units, scapegoats for the national defeat.
Pathos, untitled
He died while I was stopping up the two holes. Aymo, the kindly driver, is shot by retreating Italian soldiers in a death that is arbitrary and without meaning.
Alazon, untitled
I've got the bronze twice and three silver medals, Ettore Moretti is a braggart soldier whose boasts about medals and wound stripes are mocked by everyone.
Katabasis, untitled
The water was very cold and I stayed under as long as I could. I could feel the current swirl me Henry descends into the flooded Tagliamento and emerges released from his obligation, a baptismal descent.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. Under the canvas on the flatcar Henry recognizes that he is done with the war and with the army's claim on him.

Books that share these scenes with A Farewell to Arms

About the author

Ernest Hemingway