A Farewell to Arms is a war novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1929. The story takes place in the middle of World War I between 1916 and 1918 in Italy and Switzerland. It is about the romance between the American soldier Frederic Henry and the English nurse Catherine Barkley. The book is about World War I and the misfortune of an average couple inside the great tragedy of war. Below the surface, the novel is about Hemingway's own World War I experiences. He had a relationship with a woman named Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan which is analogical to Henry and Catherine's relationship. [1]
The story is about Frederic Henry, a young American soldier in World War I who falls in love for the first time in his life with an English nurse named Catherine Barkley. Henry and Catherine's relationship prospers throughout the novel but takes an unfortunate abrupt end when Catherine and the baby die at the end of the novel
The protagonist and narrator of the novel is Lieutenant Frederic Henry, often called "Tenente" (Italian for lieutenant). He is a young American man who volunteers as an ambulance driver in the Italian army in World War I which is the novel's antagonist. Henry's strongest attributes are masculinity and stoicism and the former is a strong motif throughout the whole novel. Another important characteristic of Henry, which is revealed through his conversations with the priest, is that he does not care about faith, honour, patriotism or any abstract concepts of such nature while concrete facts such as the names of the cities in which he has fought in the war mean something to him. Henry's relationship with the gorgeous English VAD nurse Catherine Barkley, introduced to him by his good friend the surgeon Rinaldi, sums up a very large and important part of the novel. Towards the end of the novel, Henry and Catherine agree that Henry should grow a beard to reinvigorate his life. Henry is not completely happy about this change however and he cannot look at himself in the mirror for long when shadowboxing at the gym because he a bearded boxer looks very strange to him. There is an arguable connection between the Henry in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Stephen Crane's protagonist character Henry Fleming from his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a work which Hemingway included in his 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. Henry Fleming is an energetic character to who fame and glory is of great importance. In the novel, Fleming's character matures into a quieter and dignified persona. It is logical to assume that the stoic Frederic Henry is an end result of Henry Fleming's maturity. [2] I think Henry is very mature for his age a very likable and goodhearted person. For example, he is perhaps the only person in the novel who respects the priest and that in spite of his not being religious.
Catherine Barkley is the English VAD nurse with who Henry ultimately falls in love with. Although Henry has been with many women before, that has always been strictly for sexual pleasure since a healthy sexual appetite is an important aspect of masculinity from Hemingway's (and therefore Henry's) point of view. Catherine marks a new stage in Henry's life and the title of the novel derives from Henry's farewell to the war and the beginning of a new life with Catherine. Catherine is described as an extraordinarily beautiful girl with perhaps the most passionately described golden hair in literature. Catherine is perceived by the reader as an intelligent woman but in spite of that she is at large a simple stereotype of the typical woman in a bygone era, a woman who maintains the home and children. She supports this with the following sentence: "I'm having a child and that makes me contented not to do anything". Catherine dies at the end of the story shortly after having given birth to her son. I like Catherine's character because she is a very intelligent and playful character. She immediately realises that Henry is playing a game of seduction with her when they first meet and plays along with him. She appears to be pretty foresighted with her predictions about that dreadful that things will happen to her and Henry. However, that may simply be an alarm about the war which looms over the world, or a denotation about her guilt for loving another man after her fiancé of eight years who she is mourning at the beginning died. It only bothers me slightly that she is so stoic about her having the baby and that she is ready to confront the difficulties of bringing up a baby during a war without a pause for a moment of consideration.
Rinaldi is a surgeon in the Italian army although his primary practice is rather the art of seducing beautiful women. He is Henry's best friend although his character is a lot different from Henry's. He is mischievous and as his practice denotes that he has an active sex drive. He embodies the masculinity that Hemingway's fiction honours and is the perfect example of the average Italian man. It is thanks to Rinaldi that Catherine arrives onto the scene. At the beginning of the novel he endeavours to seduce Catherine but soon claims to be relieved to not have to, like Henry, bear the heavy weight that the love of a woman entails. At the end of the novel we are hinted by Henry that Rinaldi may have caught Syphilis following his very frequent visits to the whorehouse. While this is an unfortunate change in Rinaldi's life, it is not a punishment for lifestyle but rather the consequence of behaving as a man should, i.e. living boldly. While it's not easy for me to put myself into a society where daily visits to a whorehouse by a skilled surgeon is an act that is well looked, I understand that it is what Hemingway wanted to portray as one of the virtues of the average good and masculine Italian man in this setting being true to his own self. I think Rinaldi is a very lively and interesting character and find his seducing skills fascinating. However, he is perhaps not someone I would like to be my best friend with who I spend several hours a day with like Henry does.
The story begins with the onset of winter and the war is calming down and Henry takes his leave and tours Italy. When he returns to the front in springtime he meets Catherine who is at that time Rinaldi's love interest but he quickly fades away as Henry and Catherine start their complicated seduction game. Catherine had recently lost her fiancé of 8 years and the illusory love between her and Henry at the beginning of the story helps sooth her emotional pain. Henry is later wounded on the battlefield and brought to hospital in Milan. He is advised by several doctors to remain in bed for the next six months and then undergo the necessary surgery on his knee. Henry finds a surgeon named Dr Valentini who is willing to operate on him immediately which Henry accepts for that he cannot imagine staying in bed for the extended period suggested by the other doctors. Catherine is transferred to Milan and cares for Henry during his period of recuperation. Henry and Catherine's relationship now begins to develop more seriously and they develop genuine feelings for each other. Henry's leg heals and he is granted three weeks leave before he must return to the battlefront. Catherine reveals that she is pregnant to which Henry responds positively. Henry is diagnosed with jaundice the next day but the superintendent of the hospital, Miss Van Campen, believes Henry's illness is caused by his excessive drinking at the hospital. She has Henry's leave revoked and he is sent directly to the front after he has recovered. The couple vows their affection for each other as they separate. Henry returns to the front where the Italian forces are not doing well. A bombardment begins soon after Henry has arrived and the Germans start breaking through the Italian lines. The Allied forces prepare to retreat and Henry leads a group of men into the column of evacuating soldiers. During the retreat, Henry shoots an engineer who in panic refused to help freeing their vehicle which had got stuck in the mud. Later, Henry and another driver who is the only man still with him at this point, seek refuge at a farmhouse for the night. The next day they rejoin the retreat but realise that a chaos has broken out among the soldiers. They are angry because of the Italian defeat and are executing commanding officers like Henry on sight. The story reaches climax here where Henry is seized by the military police but manages to break away and dive into the river. After having swum a safe distance from the soldiers he boards a train to Milan and considers his obligations to the war over. Henry and Catherine reunite in Stresa, a small town in northern Italy. They escape to Switzerland and settle in the alpine town Montreux. They decide to permanently withdraw from anything related to the war and live a peaceful life. The couple moves to Lausanne when the spring comes so that they can be closer to the hospital when the baby arrives. Catherine goes into labour one morning and delivers a stillborn baby boy after a nightmarish delivery. She dies later that night of haemorrhage and Henry does not even get a chance to say goodbye to her even though he stays with her until she is gone. It is raining as he walks back to the hotel.
The two domineering themes in the story are the grim reality of war and the relationship between love and pain. While the novel does not condemn war, the protagonist does not think highly of it and the few characters that do are portrayed as dull, braggart and naive. Hemingway's message is that war is an inevitable result of our cruel world. After Catherine has told Henry about the death of her fiancé she immediately begins a game of seduction with Henry to distance herself from the pain of her loss. Similarly, Henry wants to get as far away from the war as possible and therefore plays along with Catherine. They eventually truly fall in love with each other and the tragedy of the novel is that even when they have got away from the war and are genuinely in love with each other, their love can only be temporary in this world.
The story is narrated mostly in the first person by Henry but he switches to the second person during his more philosophical deliberations. The tone of the narration is autobiographical which suggests that Hemingway shares the narrator's views and attitude.
An example of irony in the novel is when Henry says: "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one." This echoes the words of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play and Henry's failure to recognise that Caesar dies a few scenes after his bold words foreshadows disaster for Henry. This may be considered as dramatic irony if the reader is familiar with Shakespeare's play.
I found Henry's character very charming and likeable in its stoicism and general goodness. His narrating made the story very interesting to me. I got a taste of the chaos and the senselessness of war through moments such as when Henry shot the engineer dead. I found his shooting the engineer very shocking since such a violent outburst is very odd for Henry's character and shows that even a stoic, intelligent and goodhearted person such as Henry can panic with such terrible consequences when located in the disorder of the war. I like the first person narration and autobiographical tone because they give the story an authentic feel. I was touched by Henry and Catherine's blissful relationship and Henry's description of Catherine's hair was one of the most splendid paragraphs I have ever read.
