السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته
This is a helpful critical study of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms which is extracted from the book Cliffs Note
:smile (101):
Hemingway’s
A Farewell
to Arms
Introduction
A Farewell to Arms is not a complicated book. Rather, it is a simple
story well told, the plot of which could be summarized as follows: boy
meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. Ernest Hemingway conveyed
this story chronologically, in a strictly linear fashion, with no flashback
scenes whatsoever. In fact, the novel contains very little exposition at
all. We never learn exactly where its narrator and protagonist, the American
ambulance driver Frederic Henry, came from, or why he enlisted
in the Italian army to begin with. (For that matter, we read chapter after
chapter before even learning his name.) Nor do we discover much about
his lover Catherine Barkley’s past, other than the fact that her fiancé
was killed in battle, in France.
There are no subplots, and the minor characters in A Farewell to
Arms are minor indeed—for the simple fact that they are not needed.
The power of this perennially popular book comes from the intensity
of Frederic and Catherine’s love for one another and from the power of
the antagonistic forces that ultimately tear these two apart.
A Farewell to Arms is set against the historical and geographical
background of World War I. Thus it contains numerous references to
people and places, governments and fronts that Hemingway could safely
assume his audience would recognize. In fact, certain basic information
isn’t alluded to in the book at all, as it was once common knowledge.
(The book was published in 1929, only eleven years after the armistice
of November 11, 1918, that ended the war.) For a contemporary
audience, however, making sense of these references can be difficult.
The continuing popularity of A Farewell to Arms attests to the fact that
enjoyment of the novel does not depend upon understanding its
particular setting. Here, however, are some basics:
World War I, or the Great War as it was then known, began in
August 1914 with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis
Ferdinand. The war pitted the Central Powers (Germany and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire) against the allied forces of Great Britain,
France, Russia, and Italy, who were joined in 1917 by the United States.
The action of A Farewell to Arms takes place from 1916–18 in four locations,
for the most part: 1) the Julian Alps, along what was then the
border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2) the city of
Milan, which lies in the plains of northern Italy, far from the front; 3)
the Italian resort town of Stresa on Lake Maggiore, which straddles the
border between Italy and Switzerland; and 4) various towns and villages
of the Swiss Alps.
At the start of the book, the Italian army is busy keeping the Austro-
Hungarian forces occupied so that the latter cannot assist the Germans
on the war’s western and eastern fronts. Later, Russia will withdraw due
to the communist Revolution of 1917, and near the book’s climax
German troops will join the Austro-Hungarian forces, necessitating Italy’s
humiliating retreat from Caporetto. (This event, which the book’s first
readers would have recognized, provided the author with the opportunity
for some of his most dramatic and effective writing ever.) Keep in
mind as you read that Switzerland shares a border with Italy—and that
Switzerland was neutral during World War I.
The context of A Farewell to Arms is not simply the First World War,
however, but all the wars that preceded it, as well—or rather, the general
notion of war as an opportunity for heroism. Hemingway writes
here in the tradition of the greatest war stories ever told: Homer’s Iliad
and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. And certain techniques of Homer
and Tolstoy (for instance, juxtaposing what we might call a “widescreen”
view of battle with “close-ups”) were put to extremely effective
use in A Farewell to Arms, starting in the book’s very first chapter.
But like The Red Badge of Courage, the famous novel of the Civil
War written by Stephen Crane (one of Hemingway’s favorite American
authors), A Farewell to Arms also reacts against the Iliad and War and
Peace and many lesser stories of battlefield bravery. It tries to tell the
often-ugly truth about war—to honestly depict life during wartime
rather than glorifying it. Thus this book contains not just deserters
(Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley themselves), but illness and
injury and incompetent leadership; it contains profanity (or at least
implies it) and prostitution at the front. Frederic Henry’s injury is
incurred not in valorous combat but while he is eating spaghetti. The
retreat from Caporetto disintegrates into sheer anarchy.
A Farewell to Arms is probably the best novel written about World
War I (with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front a
strong runner-up), and it bears comparison to the best American books
about World War II (Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller among them), Korea (James Salter’s The
Hunters), and Vietnam (The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien).
And yet, A Farewell to Arms is at the same time a tender love story—
one of the most tender and affecting ever written. It has been compared
to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the reference is an apt
one. Both stories concern young lovers antagonized by their societies.
(In Shakespeare’s play, the Montague-Capulet blood feud is the problem;
in Hemingway’s novel, the Great War is to blame.) Both stories
seem to vibrate with a sickening sense of doom that only increases as the
stories near their respective conclusions. And both end in heartbreaking
tragedy. If not one of the greatest love stories ever told, A Farewell to
Arms is certainly among the greatest of the twentieth century.
Actually, it is the very combination of love and war that makes this
book so potent and memorable. Regarding the woman he loves, the
hero of Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls tells himself “You
had better love her very hard, and make up in intensity what the relation
will lack in duration and continuity.” Frederic Henry of A Farewell
to Arms could say the same thing of his affair with Catherine Barkley.
Because they meet in a time and place in which every day could be their
last together, Frederic and Catherine must wring every drop of intimacy
and passion from their relationship. (Notice how soon Catherine begins
to speak of love, and how soon—especially considering the conservative
mores of the time in which the book is set—they sleep together.)
The result is an affair—and a story—almost unbearable in its intensity.
A Farewell to Arms is certainly one of Hemingway’s finest novels. In
fact, some critics have called it his best. Though not as inventive—as
extreme, really—in subject and style as The Sun Also Rises (published
three years earlier), this book actually benefits from its comparatively
conventional approach to storytelling; it seems more sincere, more
heartfelt. (Of course, The Sun Also Rises is about World War I, too. It
merely focuses on the war’s tragic aftermath.)
And like William Faulkner’s Light in August, A Farewell to Arms
proves that its author was not merely a Modern master. He could also
produce a big book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth century
novel. In retrospect, it is no surprise that A Farewell to Arms is the book
that made Ernest Hemingway famous. As Robert Penn Warren wrote
in his Introduction to a later edition of the novel, “A Farewell to Arms
more than justified the early enthusiasm of the connoisseurs of
Hemingway and extended this reputation from them to the public
at large.”
A Farewell to Arms feels less propagandistic than Hemingway’s other
great war story, For Whom the Bell Tolls—which relies partly on flashback
for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism
that marred the author’s later work. A Farewell to Arms is vastly
superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not
and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published
Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The
Torrents of Spring and The Old Man and the Sea. In fact, the only other
volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with
A Farewell to Arms is the writer’s debut story collection, In Our Time.
That book’s postwar tales, “Soldier’s Home” and “Big Two-Hearted
River,” can almost be read as sequels to A Farewell to Arms, or at least
to the events that inspired the novel.
A Brief Synopsis
A Farewell to Arms begins in the Alps around the frontier between
Italy and present-day Slovenia. Allied with Britain, France, and Russia
against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, Italy is responsible
for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting the
Germans on the war’s western front, and Russia in the east. The novel’s
narrator and protagonist is eventually identified as Lieutenant Frederic
Henry, an American who has volunteered for the Italian army because
the United States has not yet entered the war. Henry supervises a group
of Italian ambulance drivers.
After a wintertime leave spent touring the country, Lieutenant
Henry returns to the captured town at the front where his unit lives.
One evening his roommate, a surgeon and lieutenant in the Italian army
named Rinaldi, introduces Henry to two British nurses: Catherine
Barkley and her friend Helen Ferguson. Catherine and Henry talk of
the war and of her fiancé, killed in combat the year before; clearly she
has been traumatized by the experience. On his second visit to the
British hospital, they kiss. When Henry again visits Catherine, she tells
him that she loves him and asks whether he loves her. He responds that
he does.
One night, Lieutenant Henry and his fellow ambulance-drivers
settle into a dugout across the river from the enemy troops. While the
drivers are eating, the Austrian bombardment wounds Henry in the leg
and kills one of the other drivers. Henry is transported by train to an
American hospital in Milan.
Catherine Barkley arrives at the hospital, to which she has been
transferred. Once again, she and Lieutenant Henry declare their love
for each other, after which they have sex in the hospital bed. Henry and
Catherine spend the summer together while he recuperates from an
operation on his leg, visiting restaurants around Milan in the evening
and then spending nights together. At summer’s end, however,
Lieutenant Henry is ordered back to the front, and Catherine tells him
she is three months pregnant. On their last evening together in Milan,
Henry buys a pistol, and he and Catherine take a room in a hotel.
Soon after Lieutenant Henry’s return to the front, the Austrians (now
joined by German troops) bombard the Italian army and eventually
break through the lines near the town of Caporetto. Henry and the
other ambulance drivers retreat with the rest of the Italian forces in a
long, slow-moving column of troops and vehicles. They pick up two
Italian engineer-sergeants. Finally, the ambulances pull off the main
road. When one of the vehicles becomes stuck in the mud, the two sergeants
refuse to assist in the effort to dislodge it and disobey Lieutenant
Henry’s order to remain with the group. He fires at them, wounding
one; another ambulance driver then uses Henry’s pistol to finish the
job. Henry and the three drivers abandon the ambulances and set out
on foot for the Tagliamento River, across which lies safety.
Soon they spot German soldiers in the distance. One driver is shot
to death by fellow Italians firing in error. Another driver flees, to
surrender to the Germans. Finally safe from the enemy, Lieutenant
Henry observes that Italian army officers like himself are being shot by
the military police for deserting their troops. He also fears being mistaken
for a German spy. And so he dives into the Tagliamento River,
deserting the Italian army, and swims ashore downstream. Henry crosses
part of the Venetian plain on foot, then boards a moving train, hiding
among guns stored beneath a tarpaulin.
Frederic (no longer Lieutenant) Henry arrives in Milan, incognito.
Catherine Barkley and Helen Ferguson are absent from the hospital,
having gone on holiday to the Italian resort town of Stresa. So Henry
travels via train to Stresa, where he finds Catherine and Helen.
Discovering late one night that Henry will be arrested as a deserter in
the morning, Henry and Catherine quickly prepare to escape into
neutral Switzerland. Through the stormy night, they travel in a small,
open boat across Lake Maggiore. The following day they are arrested
and briefly detained by Swiss officials, after which they are released.
Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley move into a chalet on a
mountain above Montreaux and spend an idyllic winter there. At winter’s
end, they leave the mountains for a hotel in Lausanne. Finally,
Henry takes Catherine to the hospital, where her baby is stillborn. Then,
as a result of multiple hemorrhages, Catherine dies as well.
List of Characters
Frederic Henry An American second-lieutenant in the ambulance
corps of the Italian army during World War I.
Catherine Barkley A British nurse who falls in love with Henry
following the death of her fiancé in battle.
The Priest The chaplain in Henry’s unit. Baited by the other officers,
he is befriended by Henry, to whom he offers spiritual advice.
Rinaldi Henry’s roommate and friend, an Italian lieutenant and
surgeon.
Helen Ferguson Catherine’s friend and fellow nurse.
Passini and Bonello Ambulance drivers serving under Henry.
Manera, Gavuzzi, Gordini, Piani, and Aymo Other ambulance
drivers.
Mrs. Walker An American nurse at the hospital in Milan.
Miss Gage Another American nurse, sympathetic to Henry and
Catherine’s affair.
Miss Van Campen The hostile superintendent of nurses.
Dr. Valentini A highly competent Italian surgeon, full of joie de vivre.
Meyers A somewhat sinister American expatriate.
Ettore Moretti An Italian-American from San Francisco serving
with distinction in the Italian army.
Ralph Simmons An American student of opera and a friend to
Henry.
Count Greffi An aging but vigorous Italian who befriends Henry
in Stresa and serves as a mentor to him.
Weather Symbolism
In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway attempts to tell the unvarnished
truth about war—to present an honest, rather than a heroic,
account of combat, retreat, and the ways in which soldiers fill their time
when they are not fighting. Yet Hemingway’s realistic approach to his
subject does not rule out the use of many time-honored literary devices.
For instance, weather is to this day a fundamental component of the
war experience. Hemingway depicts weather realistically in A Farewell
to Arms, but he uses it for symbolic purposes as well. Rain, often equated
with life and growth, stands for death in this novel, and snow symbolizes
hope: an entirely original schema.
Snow
In stories such as “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, snow and ice
quite logically represent danger and death. After all, one can freeze to
death, fall through thin ice and drown, or perish beneath an avalanche.
In Chapter II of A Farewell Arms, on the other hand, it is snow that
ends the fighting described in the book’s first chapter. Thus snow stands
for safety rather than its opposite. (Note, though, that although snow
covers the bare ground and even the Italian army’s artillery in Chapter
II, stumps of oak trees torn up by the summer’s fighting continue
to protrude—a reminder that winter is of course not permanent
but merely a reprieve from combat, a cease-fire.) Shortly thereafter,
Frederic Henry describes the priest’s home region of Abruzzi as a
“place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was
clear and cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery . . . ,”
and the context leaves no doubt that this characterization is a
positive one.
Late in the novel, the argument between the Swiss policemen
over winter sports not only provides much-needed comic relief; it also
marks the beginning of Henry and Catherine Barkley’s second idyll.
(The first takes place in summertime, in Milan.) Immediately afterwards,
Henry and Catherine find themselves in the Swiss Alps, with
snow all around. Thus they have temporarily achieved a life of both
purity (the mountains symbolize purity in this novel, versus the
corruption of the lowlands) and safety. These chapters positively radiate
contentment.
Rain
Starting in the very first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, rain clearly
symbolizes death: “In the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from
the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with
rain,” Henry tells us. “The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too
and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn.” The
rain symbolism is not entirely a literary conceit, either, as rain actually
precedes an outbreak of fatal illness, the cholera that kills seven
thousand that fall.
Later, during their Milan idyll, Catherine makes the symbolism of
the rain explicit for Henry—and for the reader: “I’m afraid of the
rain because sometimes I see myself dead in it,” she says to him. “And
sometimes I see you dead in it.” Lo and behold, during Henry and
Catherine’s trip from the armorer’s to the hotel near the train station
on his last night with her, the fog that has covered the city from the
start of the chapter turns to rain. It continues to rain as they bid one
another farewell; in fact, Catherine’s last act in this part of the novel is
to signal to Henry that he should step in out of the rain. Back at the
front, “the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy.”
It rains almost continuously during the chapter when the tide of
battle turns and the Italians begin their retreat from Caporetto—and
from the Germans who have joined the fighting. The rain turns to snow
one evening, holding out hope that the offensive will cease, but the snow
quickly melts and the rain resumes. During a discussion among the
drivers about the wine they are drinking with dinner, the driver named
Aymo says, “To-morrow maybe we drink rainwater.” Hemingway by
this time has developed the rain symbolism to such a degree that the
reader experiences a genuine sense of foreboding—and indeed, the
following day will bring death to Henry’s disintegrating unit.
It is raining while the fugitive Henry rides the train to Stresa,
raining when he arrives, and raining while Henry and Catherine spend
the night together in his hotel room. The open-boat trip across Lake
Maggiore takes place in the rain, with an umbrella used as a sail.
(Ominously, the umbrella breaks.) And in Chapter XL, as Henry and
Catherine are bidding farewell to their wintertime mountain retreat for
the city in which Catherine’s baby is to be born, Henry tells us that “In
the night it started raining.”
Finally, when Henry leaves the hospital for lunch during Catherine’s
protracted, agonizing delivery, “The day was cloudy but the sun was
trying to come through”—a literal ray of hope. During the operation,
however, he looks out the window and sees that it is raining. Just after the
nurse has told him that the baby is dead, Henry looks outside again and
“could see nothing but the dark and the rain falling across the light from
the window.” At the novel’s end, Henry leaves the hospital and walks back
to his hotel in the rain. In fact, the final word in A Farewell to Arms is
“rain,” evidence of weather’s important place in the story overall.
Hemingway doesn’t quite trust us to detect the rain/snow pattern
of symbolism and understand its meaning; therefore he underlines the
significance of precipitation in his book by having Catherine tell Henry
that she sees them dead in the rain. And so the weather symbolism in
A Farewell to Arms is perhaps unnecessarily obvious. Yet Hemingway’s
use of this literary device is hardly rote symbolism for its own sake. Rain
and snow both drive his plot and maintain our interest, as we hold
our breaths every time it rains in the novel, praying that Catherine will
not perish during that scene. (We know that Henry will survive the
rain, because he is the story’s narrator.) Thus, while writing a brutally
realistic saga of life during wartime, Ernest Hemingway also crafted a
novel as literary as the great-war stories that preceded A Farewell to Arms.
Arguably it is as powerful as any story ever told.
