A Farewell to Arms and the Sun Also Rises "After a while I went out, left the hospital and returned to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel provides an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is very different from that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are driven by external forces, in this case World War I, whereas the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood for his life, he abandons everything but Catherine and lets the river carry him to a new life that becomes increasingly difficult to understand. However, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the greatest American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, restrained, and journalistic. These are all good words that apply to everyone. Perhaps because of his training as a journalist, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been compared to a boxer's punches: right and left combinations hit us relentlessly. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The doorman carried the bag. He knew what was in it", you can see that Hemingway's style is direct and easy to understand. Simplicity and sensorial richness derive directly from the beliefs of Hemingway and his characters. The incisive, vivid language has the immediacy of a news report: these are facts, Hemingway tells us, and they cannot be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like “patriotism,” so Hemingway distrusts them. Instead, look for the concrete and the tangible. A simple “good” becomes higher praise than another writer’s string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style also changes as he reflects the changing moods of his characters. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method of pouring a character's inner thoughts onto paper. Henry's thoughts are usually unsteady, staccato, but when he gets drunk his language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone nowhere like it except in the smoke of coffeehouses and nights when the room swirled And you