American Journal Of Philological Sciences
283
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue04 2025
PAGE NO.
283-286
10.37547/ajps/Volume05Issue04-73
Ideological and Artistic Characteristics of
The Work “A
Farewell to
Arms”
Askarov Dilmurod
Acting Associate Professor of the Tashkent Branch of the University of Business and Science, Ph.D., Uzbekistan
Received:
28 February 2025;
Accepted:
29 March 2025;
Published:
30 April 2025
Abstract:
This article analyzes the depictio
n of war in the works of Ernest Hemingway, the writer’s artistic skill,
the role of the depiction of war in illuminating the characters of the heroes, and the emergence of an attitude to
reality based on the heroes’ internal monologues. The skillful use of
dialogues by the heroes of the work shows
their superiority over the traditional long-winded means of artistic depiction.
Keywords:
War, novel, artistic means, dialogue, monologue, skill, image, writer, hero.
Introduction:
It is no exaggeration to say that the
adventurous life and creative path of Ernest
Hemingway (1899
–
1961), a famous writer of the 20th
century, were closely connected with the historical
events of the era. The writer's novel "A Farewell to
Arms" (1929) is primarily a work directed against war,
emdiving Hemingway's thoughts on the First World
War. Hemingway very touchingly describes the
difficult, carefree days of the war, the terrible scenes of
the battles that took place, the short days of peace on
the battlefields, the fearful, frightening life in frontline
cities, the heartbreaking, demoralizing, and sad
conditions in military hospitals. The rains continue on
the front line along the Italian-Austrian border, the
plague epidemic is spreading among the troops, and
the soldiers, who are mentally exhausted, are avoiding
fighting. The novel convincingly depicts the defeat of
the Italian army near the city of Caporetto due to its
weakness. The life of the main character of the novel,
Frederick Henry, develops against the backdrop of
these battles. We see that Hemingway tried to emdiv
in this image what he experienced, what he saw in life,
and the experience he gained. Frederick Henry, a
lieutenant in the medical service, an American by birth,
goes to the front and realizes that his previous fantasies
and ideas about war are crude and unfounded, and he
does not even know how he fell into despair. His
personal experience, which he accumulates every day,
his friendly relations with Italian soldiers and officers,
and his readiness to help each other, eventually lead
Henry to realize that war is a senseless, cruel massacre.
Undoubtedly, Hemingway strongly condemns war and
its terrible image in this novel. But the strong protest
against war is subjective, individualistic in nature. While
retreating from a fierce attack from the front line,
Henry is wounded and ends up in a military hospital. He
falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barclay,
who takes care of him, and love breaks out between
them. Henry throws down his weapon, abandons his
friends, and flees with Catherine to Switzerland.
According to the author, personal happiness was the
only way out of the difficult situation that had arisen,
and in a broader sense, to escape from the war.
However, this escape to personal life is also tragically
depicted in the work. The sincere and innocent love
between Henry and Catherine is sharply contrasted
with the war. Two young people, faithful to each other,
who loved each other with all their heart, are overcome
by passionate feelings, they want to forget the horrors
and terrible scenes of war, build a wall between
themselves and the outside world with their love, and
distance themselves from worldly worries. But
Catherine dies prematurely, and Henry again finds
himself alone. At the end of the novel, Henry realizes
the meaninglessness and cruelty of life. The artistic
style of the novel is distinguished by the restraint,
sometimes very concise and precise development of
the narrative. Hemingway expresses his thoughts
simply, but behind this simplicity lies a vast world of
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284
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American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
–
2771-2273)
complex meanings, thoughts and feelings, which in
most cases can only be understood from the context of
the work. According to Hemingway, a writer should
know what he is writing about. In this case, the writer
“can leave out much of what he knows, and if he writes
honestly, the reader will still feel the omitted event, as
if the writer had already touched on it.” Thus,
Hemingway tried to establish in his work the “iceberg
style”, which requires the skill of distinguishing the
most important events, words and details. “The beauty
of the iceberg is that only one-eighth of it rises above
the water surface. A writer who leaves out a lot due to
ignorance simply leaves blank spaces.”
The skill of expressing the diversity of emotions, the
tragic, social and spiritually rich content through
seemingly insignificant conversations and simple facts
was especially manifested in Hemingway's stories
"White Elephants", "Cat in the Rain", "The Gifted
Wandering Bird".
In such novels as "A Farewell to Arms", "For Whom the
Bell Tolls" (1940) (Russian translation "Fiesta"), "To
Have and Have Not" (1937), Hemingway describes his
heroes in times when their physical and spiritual
strength is undergoing severe tests. In turn, this leads
to a sharp and rapid development of the plot, each
action becomes full of meaning, and heroic feelings are
manifested in the characters' characters.
It is worth noting that in Hemingway's works, the
dialogue between the characters has its own meaning.
Here, each word not only expresses a direct thought,
but also carries a different, hidden meaning, which can
be achieved through the rational use of words, their
selection and placement in the right place.
The writer also widely uses internal monologue in the
process of description. This method is important in
determining the attitude of the characters to the
events and phenomena taking place. For example,
Henry tries to convince Catherine that he is deeply in
love with her during their first meeting, and this is
where his inner monologue is given: “I knew that I did
not love Catherine Barkley, and that I did not want to
love her. It was a game like bridge, only instead of cards
there were words. Just like in a bridge game, you
pretend that you are playing for money or something
else. Not a word is said about the course of the game.
But to me it was all indiffere
nt.” The reader
immediately understands that this monologue is a
mistake: in fact, Henry really did love Catherine. It is
worth noting that Hemingway has a unique style. From
the time the writer’s first stories and novels were
published, critics have paid special attention to the
importance of dialogue in his works. The dialogue
supplanted the author's descriptions of the characters,
lengthy
lyrical
digressions,
and
insignificant
statements, enhancing the dramatism of "Hemingway's
prose." At the same time, it is worth noting the brevity
and conciseness of the dialogue, its lexical
simplification. Hemingway's characters speak in simple
language. Their speech is devoid of poetic metaphors.
In this superficial simplicity, a lively, exciting thought is
felt, which remains not in the words, but in the essence
of the work. This essence can be understood only after
a deep understanding of the hero's mental state.
Hemingway's style reflects the worldview of a great and
honest, conscientious writer who, at the cost of many
hardships, sought solutions to the problems of the
time. Reading the writer's works means understanding
many things in life. Through his books, one can
distinguish superficial patriotism from the great duty of
serving one's country and peace, and understand
people of different generations. The freshness of
Hemingway's work always captivates the reader, the
heights he reached as a great person and his
achievements are worthy of admiration, which is why
the name Hemingway really sounds proud.
The composition of the novel "A Farewell to Arms"
attracts the reader's attention with its fragmented,
disconnected parts. The author does not begin to cover
the lives of the characters in detail, they suddenly
appear before the reader as people living actively
today. As for their past, it is rarely mentioned, and
sometimes not at all. Their future is also uncertain.
Where the characters came from often remains
unknown, and the reader is left wondering what their
fate will be.
Only by moving in a circle - from content to form, and
back from form to content - can one describe the vast
space occupied by Hemingway's work in the reader's
mind, heart, and imagination.
Here a reasonable question arises. What is the artistic
era? What is the essence, effect, and, moreover, the
significance of this literary category in the
interpretation of the work, and most importantly, in
the analysis of the writer's (in our example,
Hemingway's) artistic thinking?
If the subject of analysis is the unity of content and
form in a particular work of art, then it is necessary to
find the “mediator”, or rather, the “third”, connecting
link between content and form, the basis that
strengthens the integrity between them. Having found
this “third”, we will be able to interpret the work of art
in terms of the unity of content and form. It is the
category of artistic time that plays the role of such a
“mediator”, an “aesthetic link” between the content
and form of the work, the components of the work and
its integrity.
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American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
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2771-2273)
Time is a category that leads the artistic image to
perfection; it is the main internal characteristic of the
work, it determines the principles that connect
individual aspects of the content, and also represents
the “map” of the artistic meaning of the work.
Considering the work through
this “guide map”, we
perceive the events and characters described in the
work as a whole.
At the same time, the problem of artistic time in
Hemingway’s work is not at all philosophical, but rather
a literary criticism problem: it is a question of finding a
unique narrative style, interesting content and a form
suitable for it, a problem of Hemingway’s artistic
thinking. These aspects (points of view) are not a
pictorial style in the writer’s work, but a form required
by socio-historical reality, fundamental changes that
occurred at the beginning of the 20th century.
The above aspects can be used to prove that the
problem of artistic time embodied in Hemingway’s
work has become a unique artistic concept. For
example, in the works of Hemingway's contemporaries
- T. Mann, W. Faulkner, T. Woolf, T. S. Eliot and other
writers, we observe that the problem of the artistic
time has become a kind of artistic concept. This
problem can be explained by the fact that traditional,
"eternal" values, or rather universal human values,
have not been able to adapt to the situation and
conditions in which they arose, have lost their value.
The reason is that, from the point of view of real time,
real historical experience, the ideas about bourgeois
culture have been fundamentally revised and have not
been able to influence the framework of the "new
worldview" that emerged at the beginning of the 20th
century. Another important aspect is that in the novel
"A Farewell to Arms" for Hemingway and his hero, the
question "What is the world?" cannot be separated
from the question "How to live in it?" The questions
that determine the worldview, as in other works of
Hemingway, are not abstract problems, but aspects
that connect universal human values, points of view
that determine the present time, and the relationships
between the events described in the work. For
example, what is the subject of knowledge for a
philosopher, partly for an intellectual wordsmith, for
Hemingway's heroes, and also for Hemingway, a writer
with his own style, is understood through universal
human values, feelings of dignity, humanity,
enlightenment, and peace that have been formed over
the centuries. This is the perfect manifestation of
literary activity, its highest peak.
Therefore, considering such high values embodied in
Hemingway's work allows us to study the content and
form, "found" in a certain pattern in the writer's artistic
thinking, the writer's ideological and artistic evolution.
Let us pay attention to a number of considerations that
study the problem of artistic time and space in
Hemingway's work from the point of view of a certain
scientific concept.
Observations devoted to the study of the problem of
artistic time and space in Hemingway's work belong to
the Russian researcher I.A.Kashkin. In his large-scale
scientific work devoted to the writer's work, I.A.Kashkin
wrote: "... When Hemingway spoke about his work, in
my imagination, it seems as if he had in mind the
dimension of time, directed his strength, attention,
sharp gaze to the present day, to exert a direct
influence on it" [1, 251].
Thus, I.A.Kashkin puts forward the problem of artistic
time in Hemingway's work, the main criterion, the goal
that forms the basis of his artistic thinking. At the same
time, Kashkin draws attention to the important
importance of the present: in his opinion, it is the
present that forms the basis of the worldview
expressed through the writer's artistic thinking. Thus,
in Hemingway's artistic world, the category of time has
the property of encompassing both the past and the
future. Thus, I.A.Kashkin, through his deep reflections,
comes much closer to correctly posing and studying the
problem of artistic content and form in Hemingway's
works.
Another researcher who has studied Hemingway's
work in detail, I.L.Finkelstein, devoted his observations
to the problem of the "nature of action" embodied in
the novel "A Farewell to Arms". The researcher sees the
“subordination to time” of the heroes described in the
novel, or rather, “their willlessness leading to inevitable
dest
ruction”, “submission to fate”. In his opinion,
“…fate itself is manifested in the form of time, and the
attempts of the heroes to escape its traces, the
judgment of history, the use of all their strength, prove
the futility and meaninglessness of their actions [2, 90].
Here, the researcher, without going beyond the
framework of the novel “A Farewell to Arms”, brings
the problem of time closer to the problem of tragedy.
I.L. Finkelstein sees in the novel “A Farewell to Arms”
“the embodiment of not only a ne
w compositional
principle and a new concept of time for Hemingway,
but also the concept of tragedy, which was just as
important to him” [2, 92
-93].
An attempt was made to develop an approach to
Hemingway's artistic thinking (on the example of the
novel " A Farewell to Arms"), taking it as a unique
system. In our opinion, artistic time and space are
objective criteria for the creative spirit of a work. To
study artistic time and space in Hemingway's work, to
study the specific paths of artistic content and form in
his works, distinguishing them separately. Most
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
286
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
–
2771-2273)
importantly, an attempt was made to show the
objective connection of Hemingway's work with the
artistic prose of the 20th century, and its influence on
it.
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