Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway Was Indelibly

Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway was indelibly impacted by his experiences both with war and romantic love, which is why love and war feature together prominently in novels like A Farewell to Arms. The double meaning of the title of this novel refers to the protagonist Lieutenant Henry's saying goodbye both to the arms of war and also to the arms of his love. In Henry's experience, both war and love are linked to death. War and love make strange bedfellows, but each does bring out a mixture of hope and devastation. The confluence of love and war remains the prevailing theme in A Farewell to Arms. This theme creates opportunities for the main characters to grow and change, or to stagnate and die. In the case of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, war and death cause him to grow and change even though in the end he is left feeling bitter and cynical due to the nihilistic nature of war and the uselessness of romantic love. Henry is mysterious in many ways, especially when he decides to kill the engineer However, Catherine Barley is an even more mysterious character in the sense that the reader never really gets inside her head or understands her motivations. Her death in the end symbolizes the death of hope; and it is almost as if Hemingway uses Catherine more as a symbol than as a three-dimensional character. Yet both Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley prove to be complex characters and both enjoy their romance with the understanding that it can fall apart at any minute. Their cynicism may be why the two were drawn together in the first place. Thesis: Both Catherine and Henry respond to pain, suffering, and war by clinging to each other out of hope and desperation, which allows them to undergo meaningful personal transformation.

Both Nurse Catherine and Lieutenant Henry come across as selfish characters. Their love for each other is driven more by desperation and a need for spiritual salvation than it is by genuine interest in the well being of the other person. Catherine, for example, is depicted as being fickle. She is first shown to be the girlfriend of Rinaldi, but it soon emerges that the relationship between Rinaldi and Catherine is shallow. Catherine then divulges that she is still grieving for her dead fiance. Thus, she is seeking love and comfort in other men, before she has gotten over her fiance. Catherine comes across immediately as someone who is emotionally needy and who might not know what real love is. Henry is also emotionally needy, and uses love as a means to avoid the harder task of coming to terms with himself. When he meets Catherine, he mainly wants to seduce her. He is not interested in Catherine as a human being but only in what Catherine can do for him. Her role as a nurse underscores the imbalance in their relationship, which is predicated on traditional patriarchal gender roles. Catherine's role is a caregiver, and Henry sees her as someone who is going to take care of him, whether or not he takes care of her. Benson points out that especially at the beginning of the novel, Henry is "selfish and ego-centered," while his "perceptions of his surroundings are vague, limited, and detached," (83).

However, Catherine has already lost someone she loves and she therefore is in touch with the devastation of war in ways that Henry has yet to experience. Henry needs to go through more pain and suffering before he realizes the extent of Catherine's own pain. Henry has great naivete when he says, "I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war," (Hemingway 37). As the novel progresses, both Catherine and Henry come to terms with "the absurdity of war itself," as Benson puts it (84). As their relationship progresses and the war intensifies, both Catherine and Henry grow. They grow together and they grow also in their own ways. Catherine grows off-screen, so to speak, as it is she who is pregnant while Henry is on the front lines. Henry is the narrator, which makes it impossible for the reader to know what Catherine is going through as she waits for Henry -- not knowing if he will live or die like her fiance did. Because the story is told in first person, the reader is never privy to what Catherine thinks or feels. This retains a high degree of authenticity, for Hemingway himself had trouble with many of his own romantic liaisons during the war. Meyers notes, thtat Catherine is based on a real life love of Hemingway's during the war, Agnes. In Farewell to Arms, "the submissive Catherine becomes the hero's mistress and is 'punished' by death in childbirth," (41). Hemingway did not understand Agnes's betrayal, and so he created a character who he also does not understand. Hemingway shows the reader he does not understand Catherine by speaking in first person and preventing her from having a "voice" of her own. The reader only knows what is going on in Catherine's life through Henry, and in Henry's eyes. The reader receives a biased version of Catherine's life story, hearing it second hand through Henry and filtered through Hemingway's own biases about women.

The growth of Catherine and Henry takes two different directions, due to the fact that Henry's experiences are in combat; whereas Catherine's experiences are nursing the wounds of combat. Both see the devastation of war, but in different ways. Gender differences are poignant in A Farewell to Arms, and are among the reasons why Henry is allowed more room to grow than Catherine. As Benson puts it, "A Farewell to Arms is not a war story or a love story so much as it is a modern morality drama, the story of a developing consciousness of a young American within the characteristic twentieth-century context of war," (83). The consciousness of Catherine is shown to be relatively stagnant from the opening of the novel to the close, although it would be impossible for a woman's consciousness not to grow during pregnancy. The hopes and dreams that Catherine and Henry share during their life in Switzerland are their mutual ways of mitigating the fears and horrors of war. It is as if they know that they are surrounded by death.

Catherine dies, and is therefore not allowed to grow any further, but Henry is the hero, protagonist, and narrator. He does emerge with a more cynical and jaded outlook on life than he had at the beginning of the novel. Henry changes, but whether he grows or not is another story. Young suggests that Henry did become stronger from the pain: "It was in Hemingway's novels that his hero became strong a the places where he had broken," (79). Yet Meyers also points out that both Catherine and Henry experience the "bitter disillusionment of war," (33). Their mutual appreciation of the futility of war leads them to cling to each other in love.