Literature essay analysis and interpretation

¶ … Farewell to Arms -- a study in loss, a study in fate, and a farewell to false hopes and cultural constructions of honor

Farewell to Arms is not a study of doom in the sense that it is a depressing book. It is not so much a study of what is gloomy about life so much as it is instead a study of fate. The book depicts individuals who find it difficult to live in society and according to strict societal mores. But Frederick Henry and Catherine, despite their inclinations are still forced to live by the moral and religious creeds of a morally alien world, and thus their fates seem doomed and dark.

Ultimately, a Farewell to Arms is a study of a loss of faith. It puts its central, alienated protagonist Frederick Henry under the moral microscope of its author and thus its reader's moral lens and analysis and shows how this specimen of modern manhood is subjected to a military society that simply wishes to use up his talent and life, for no good reason. Henry is not simply a stand-in for the author Hemingway's life experience during the Great War. Rather, he is a kind of template of all solder's suffering during that conflict. But because he questions authority, unlike some of his fellow soldiers, Henry provokes the reader to ask questions about the true nature of honor.

Even though he does not strictly obey the military code or moral honor, Henry is judged as a just solider, because he is thrust into an unjust war, and values individual rights and liberties and life over an abstract cause. Again, the book feels filled with a sense of doom because the protagonists cannot mesh their lives with preexisting societal norms and codes of conduct -- rather they are forever striving in a futile quest to create their own morals, on their own terms. It would be easy for Henry, in some sense, to simply go along with what society tells him is right, to fight and die. But he refuses to do so, and thus he suffers, internally if not always externally, in his failure to swallow the creed of the military.

For instance, Henry believes that to save his life, there would be no shame in deserting the American army. But Henry is not a coward. Henry risks his life and ultimately deserts to save Catherine, the novel's main female protagonist, because he grows to love her despite his initial reservations and believes her life is individually valuable, unlike the cause he is forced to go to war for, on behalf of a nation rather than a person. Catherine also despises the war and loves individuals, as souls rather than as causes or aspects of ideology. Her childhood fiance was killed in the conflict, and she still loves him, even after death. Her cause, she states, is love, and her religion is love. Catherine is also idealistic, perhaps even foolishly so, like Henry. Catherine loves a man who cannot love her back, because he is dead who is, in her recollection perfect -- thus no man can live up to this memory, and certainly no real religion or real fighting cause.

Thus there is an irony in both protagonists' unrequited passions. Henry begins to love a woman who cannot love him back -- because she is in love with a dead man. Like a religious talisman, Catherine even carries her finance's riding crop in his remembrance. Catherine, like Henry, seems to have what one could call a religious temperament, in her idealism and her love of the abstract, and her tendency to let her emotions rule her life. Even her death is fated, it seems. For instance, in the first chapter, the regions torrential rains bring cholera. The outbreak is so bad that seven thousand people die. Catherine says she is afraid of the rain because fears she will die in rain -- and she does.

Catherine's doom as it is foreshadowed, however, is not a prediction of the dark and doomed implications of rain. Rather it reflects how the ordinary aspects of the world can cause great destruction for sensitive people -- rain can lead to an outbreak of illness conflicts of honor can lead to death and destruction in wartime, and eventually desertion. And Catherine's pains during labor and her death, all show how misfortune, distress, and death particularly plague and affect these protagonists. They are fated to die and suffer because they cannot feel at home in military, in religion, or even in any particular state. Catherine cannot get over the death of her fiancee, just as Henry cannot get over the inability of Catherine to purely and totally give herself over to him.

Both Henry and Catherine are outsiders because they are always 'once removed' from society. Catherine is too much in love with the dead to be truly wed to Henry and truly part of his life. Henry cannot, despite his affection for some of his comrades, feel truly in touch with the army, because he always views his status as a national and as a soldier with a certain degree of distance and irony.

This is also true of both protagonists' feelings about religion. For instance unlike her closest and most conventionally devout friend, Miss Ferguson, Catherine does not ascribe her beliefs to any religious creed or cause, just as Henry does not use his bravery for war and country's sake. For Catherine, love alone is religion, even if the moral creeds of this faith are not well defined. Catherine is utterly devoted to the man she loves, to the point that that she will die for his love and die for him, but this willingness to die is not part of any larger system, unlike more conventional religious structures.

Frederick Henry recollections of "the ants on the burning log" recall Moses' revelations of God in the Burning Bush, although Henry's visions are not revelatory in the sense that he is a prophet. Henry is simply an ordinary man who has great difficulty fitting his worldview into war and wartime society. The book takes a partially deflating tone of religious people, such as when the unit's captain makes fun of the military priest, showing disrespect for them man of the cloth. But ultimately, the priest, although "young" and a man who "blushes easily" distinguishes himself against this onslaught of the other men, with his sense of good humor. (5) None of the religious figures of the novel are hypocrites or prudes; rather they simply offer alternative, more comfortable ways of morally living in the world, ways that both Henry and Catherine find untenable. In fact, the completely atheist men of the company are shown in an unfavorable light, in the way they treat the priest. Henry is even far friendlier to the priest than most of his comrades, even if he does go to one of the town's two "bawdy houses," as he calls them, that very night, in flagrant defiance of religious modes of ethics. (4)