Intimacy Between Writing and Reading

Let us take a look at the first paragraph of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. The first thing to note about this passage is that the narrator does not tell the reader what year he is talking about or what the name of the village is, or that of the river and the mountain. How is the reader supposed to respond to this passage? A little reflection (or an instant intuition) will tell the reader that he/she doesn't need to have the names in question spelled out, because he/she always already knows them. In other words, the narrator "assumes" that the reader knows the name of the village and the river, etc. There is, then, an instant intimacy established and called for in the passage. Hemingway is connecting with the reader (me, for example) by means of an assumption that the reader (me, again, for example) will take on the role of the person who is always already in the know. But let us now cease to use these "technicalities" and move on to briefly analyzing all that's packed into this opening paragraph.

The narrator uses terms like "dry and white in the sun" and "bare and white." And the narrator also tells the reader that the soldiers marching by caused dust to rise, and even somehow hastened the falling of the leaves. What the reader may subconsciously pick up on is that things that are dry and white may refer to skeletons, and that "dust" may invoke the final destination of all skeletons. So the passage implicitly associates the marching soldiers with death and dying. And, of course, death and dying are the "fruits" of war. In short, the very opening paragraph of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms invokes the theme of the entire novel, which is a profoundly anti-war novel. The good reader will (or should) notice all this going on in the text. And the real pleasure of the text comes from precisely this kind of careful reading. The reader becomes the "writer," and his/her pleasure in the text connects to this very fact.