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The story to me, besides being about WWI and the love interest between Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henri, is also about writing. Hemingway uses a lot of different methods: reciting dialogue in prose instead of quotations, sparse dialogue itself, observing incongruous juxtaposed details to create a larger, immediate description, for just a few examples. My third Hemingway novel and enjoyable.

Zhivago wonderfully portrays a christian philosophy throughout Book One, along with discussions of "consciousness" and nature. Pasternak contrasts how Christ created the individual, banishing the pagan Roman idolatry with how the 1917 Russian Revolution in its language of individual liberation actually suppressed individual expression in favor of a collective state ideology: an historic regression and not progress.

Zhivago's character espouses christian philosophy, naturalism and psychology "consciousness" themes. His views of christianity interestingly parallel the Russian Revolution since he believes that Christ created, separated a new mankind, the individual, from the Roman, pagan past while the 1917 Revolution created a new country, a new, collective, man. Pasternak lauds the prior and criticizes the latter.