Hemingway - The Novels to Read

Taboo Monkey on Three Novels:
1. The Sun Also Rises
2. A Farewell to Arms
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Suggested Reading Index

2. A FAREWELL TO ARMS:

Unlike the hopeless love story that narrator Jake Barnes tells in The Sun Also Rises, the narrator of this novel, Lieutenant Frederic Henry (Signor Tenente), describes the discovery of hope in his loving of an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American who was living in Italy when the war began, and enlisted as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. His friend from the army, Rinaldi, introduces Frederic to Catherine, and Frederic responds by waging a steady but aggressive campaign to bed the nurse. She demonstrates that she can "play" as well; therefore, initially, Frederic sees their courtship as a game, but an injury and a growing uncertainty about the purpose of war inspires new, unnamed urgency inside him, and he places all of his hopes for wholeness on his relationship with Catherine.

After his recovery, the Lieutenant realizes that he has become dependent upon this shared fantasy the two of them are developing; but he is abruptly called back to the front, and he finds himself mired in the results of the Battle of Caporetto (Follow link to an Answers.com analysis).

Italian losses were disastrous in the Battle of Caporetto: the Austro-Hungarian military, organized and supported by German forces, crashed through the Italian front and took approximately 275,000 prisoners, killed 40,000, and wounded many more. The Italian army was completely routed, and when the soldiers fell into a chaotic retreat, the Italian commanders attempted to restore order by way of severe punitive measures. Because the bulk of the Italian infantry was comprised of untrained farmers who understood very little in the way of military protocol, these punitive measures resulted in numerous executions of both grunt soldiers and officers.

The remainder of A Farewell to Arms deals with Lieutenant Henry's reaction to the Battle on all levels: his active, physical reaction; his intellectual reaction; his emotional reaction as he reconsiders his relationship with Catherine; and, finally, his spiritual reaction.

A Farewell to Arms fulfills all of the depth and complexity promised by the paradoxes established in the first chapter: the unchecked horror of the war within the pastoral beauty of the Italian countryside; the necessity of order in any military system conflicting with the spiraling chaos of violence; the unquenchable need for love trying to surface from a bottomless need for numbness and emotional oblivion.

Readers can find hints of the many thematic elements that were later to become Ernest Hemingway trademarks within The Sun Also Rises, but here, in A Farewell to Arms at the age of thirty, Hemingway demonstrates a marked maturity and depth of thinking through the extension of thematic conflict and inevitability.

One such motif is Hemingway's notion of masculinity, and the respect Hemingway pays to characters who fulfill certain masculine obligations: virility, assumption of command, competence, acceptance of violence's necessity, and a certain level of justice that accompanies the dictates of loyalty.

In A Farewell to Arms, loyalty takes center stage as Lieutenant Henry descends into a world of spiraling horror and chaos, and loyalty as a force of justice is confronted, then overwhelmed by the opposing force of abandonment and isolation. If, as a young, inexperienced soldier, his sense of morality fell in line with his acceptance of the "masculine code," then, later, as a tired, desperate man, he discovers that such sensibilities are only euphemisms for instinctual, universal cruelty--results of the universal condition of abandonment.

With this idea, Hemingway brings us back to the necessity of love. Throughout their courtship, both Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley acknowledge that their relationship is like a game, a diversion from reality--and this idea is the matured, complex development of a similar concept found in The Sun Also Rises. At the end of the first, Brett Ashley tells Jake that they "could have had such a damned good time together," to which Jake responds, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" There, the reader touches the conflict between loveless reality and the human compulsion to love.

Consider the larger, encompassing scope of the exact same conflict, as the story develops in A Farewell to Arms. Frederic Henry's compulsion to love escalates into a dire need for Catherine Barkley. As his compulsion escalates, his initial impressions of the nurse--she's unstable, a woman psychologically lost in the trivialities of mental games and diversions--experience a radical change. As his perspective changes, the reader begins to see the unique, conflicted wholeness of Catherine Barkley's character. Critics often compare the fullness of her character to that of another of Hemingway's female characters, Maria (I examine this crucial comparison from Maria's angle in the discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Unfriendly critics argue that Catherine Barkley represents one of the two female portraits created by Hemingway throughout the sum of his fiction. The first portrait includes characters such as Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises: these are aggressive, disconnected women. The second portrait includes characters such as Maria, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Catherine Barkley: these are simple, submissive stereotypes of women who can only be completed by men.

Without a doubt, there is a strong structural similarity between Maria and Catherine: both represent women who suffer as a consequence of men who intrude upon their lives. Both are Hemingway vehicles for developing lines of thematic tension. However, there is nothing flat or subversive about the way Hemingway portrays Catherine Barkley. She does develop a fantasy of wholeness, of completion, that requires Frederic's presence; but this fantasy is not a pathetic, subconscious diversion for Catherine. She foregrounds the diversion herself, and is thoroughly complicit in creating the illusion of submission. Her motivation is to create the diversion.

In fact, by showing how Catherine's wholeness is driven by her need for diversion, Hemingway completes the wholeness of A Farewell to Arms. If the dream of love within the reality of abandonment inspires the hopeless, dreamless world of The Sun Also Rises, then in A Farewell to Arms that dream, still a fantasy, becomes a requirement of survival, an obligatory diversion.

In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway expands the game metaphor exponentially to incorporate all of humanity's futile motions--such as war and love (you might find this to be an appropriate time for reflecting on how both motions are intertwined in the novel's title). The Lieutenant Frederic Henry, who introduces himself to the reader in the first chapter as the experienced, disillusioned, distant narrator of our story, is a man who devoted himself to the fantasies forced upon him by the simple fact of his existence. He is a man who was forced to confront the fleeting, temporary, but equally necessary nature of masculinity, loyalty, war, and love. These motions, he now believes, are only temporary diversions; but they are a requirement of survival.

Book Search for Farewell to Arms

Taboo Monkey on Three Novels:
1. The Sun Also Rises
2. A Farewell to Arms
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Old Man Discussions:
1. The Story Before the Story
2. The Simple Story
3. Critics, Symbolism, Shit

Read Five Hemingway Stories
Full Text Stories

Suggested Reading Index