This year, we have to write a termpaper in form of book report. I have been reading some books in English for book reports and for my own fun, and I have just finished reading a famous old novela, “A Farewell to Arms.”
As the title of the novela reveals, the story of the book is about war, especially the World War 1. The protagonist is an American solider driving an ambluance, participating in the WW 1 on the side of Italy. It seems a little absurd that an American soldier is on the side of Italy, but this point makes this novela more outstanding: the overall story of the book tells the experience the author of the book went through: Hemingway.
When I was reading the book, I couldn’t get any sense of the teaching the book was giving to me. The story just seemed to be filled with love between a young man and a girl and the war itself. He longed for his lovely girl as he was participating in the war, and after escaping from the war he met his girl and they had a baby but failed to give the baby a birth; to make things worse, his girl died. Nothing was sovled. Nothing went into the way he wanted it to go. Nothing was fufilled; everything ended up being the failure. The end of the story seemed to me that this book tried to tell readers that the world goes into which people not always want. I could feel the weakness of humanbeing in front of the flood of adverse and gruding happenings. After reading this book, I was poked to look more deeply into the mindset of people and how people react to the adversities that they have to face in their lives.
<Reference>
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Fourth edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1972.
Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected articles and dispatches of four decades. Edited by William
White, with commentaries by Philip Young. Collins: London, 1968.
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