Reading Response Prompts
 
These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Even if you choose to pursue an idea of your own, however, or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. In any case, I suggest doing the reading first, then checking the prompts.  For more information, review the listserv assignment.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms: Book Four, Chapters XXXV-XXXVII, Book Five, Chapters XXXVIII-XLI

We have not talked about the structure of this novel. Hemingway divides the novel into five books and forty-one chapters, but both divisions are uneven. The books end on pages 67, 140, 201, 245, and 284, but contain twelve, twelve, eight, five, and four chapters. Chapters vary wildly in page length. Chapter XXXIX is four pages long; Chapter XLI is twenty-one pages. What rationale can you suggest for this variety?

The subject of religious faith continues to come up in these chapters: in Henry’s conversation with Count Greffi, in Catherine’s admission to the hospital, and in Henry’s response to the threat to Catherine’s life. On top of that, Hemingway writes at least two passages that directly address metaphysical questions. I have suggested that this is a proto-existentialist novel, even though the term existentialism was not coined until the 1940s and did not become popular until Jean-Paul Sartre used it just after World War II. What evidence do you find for or against this characterization?

At one point Catherine says she wants to “ruin” Henry, and Henry claims that that is what he wants, too. Do they get their wish? Does Catherine ruin Frederic Henry? Obviously, to answer this, you must consider what it means to be ruined in this book. Is it the same as or different from being “broken”?
 
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