A Farewell to Arms
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Places Discussed
Italy
Country in which Ernest Hemingway’s American protagonist, Frederic
Henry, serves as a volunteer ambulance driver during World War I—just
as Hemingway himself had served during that war. Moreover, Henry is
also like Hemingway in being severely wounded and invalided to
recuperate in an American hospital in Milan. There Henry experiences the
first serious love of his life, The foreign location makes it easier for Henry
to examine the meaning of his young life and allow him to mature as he
confronts danger, death, and love. Throughout the novel, Henry struggles
to grapple with the foreign language, Italian customs, and unfamiliar
geography. All these struggles heighten his perceptions in ways that help
bring about his maturation.
Gorizia
Small town in northeast Italy near which several major engagements
between Italian and Austrian forces were fought during the spring and
summer of 1916. Frederic Henry is stationed in a town near Gorizia with
the Italian ambulance corps. It is in this location and through his
interaction with the other troops stationed there that he begins his
maturation.
Plava
Town in northeast Italy on the Isonzo River, north of which Frederic Henry
is wounded. Henry’s world is first truly shattered in Plava when he is
suddenly forced to face death for the first time. The event, being hit by an
Austrian trench mortar, introduces the theme of death’s randomness and
its unexpected appearance as well as the need always to be prepared to
expect it. This presence of death haunts the rest of this novel as it did most
of Hemingway’s prose throughout his career.
Milan
Large northern Italian city to which Henry is sent to recuperate from his
wounds. The American hospital there with its American nurses offers a small
bit of home amid the foreign environment. Henry experiences a reprieve from
the war and has the time to reflect on his mortality in congenial and familiar
surroundings. Here, too, he falls in love, which connects the themes of love
and war. The love theme proves another experience in Henry’s maturation. It
also gives him a reason to reconsider his participation in the conflict and
heightens the sweetness of life. Later in the novel, his love for Catherine, the
American nurse, hastens his decision to leave the scene of death and
destruction for the peace and safety of Switzerland.
Caporetto
Battle site in Italy where the Italian forces experienced one of their most
devastating defeats during the war. Henry joins the retreating troops there in
one of the most memorable sections of the book. It is during the retreat that
Henry makes his “separate peace” with the war, which later results in his
desertion and flight with Catherine.
Taglamento River
River that the Italian forces cross during their retreat from Caporetto. During
the crossing, Henry dives into the river to avoid being shot by the military
police. This action can be seen as his “baptism” into a new life after he has
made his “separate peace.”
Stresa
Italian town northwest of Milan where Henry meets Catherine after his
desertion. In a small boat they row some twenty miles up Lake Maggiore to
Switzerland. Their escape over water reintroduces the baptism theme of
Henry’s immersion in the Taglamento River and suggests another rebirth.
Switzerland
Country to which Catherine and Frederic escape from Italy. They spend the
winter at Montreux at the east end of Lake Geneva. When Catherine dies in
childbirth, Henry again confronts the inexplicable presence of death. This
event provides the final, if unresolved, event in his initiation into manhood.
Historical Context
World War I
World War I was also known as the Great War because it was war on a scale
previously unimagined in modern history. The war broke out after the
assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand ignited an already tense
territorial feud between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. France Great Britain, and
Russia joined together as the Allied powers against the Central Power alliance
of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Eventually, America joined the war on the
side of the Allies after Russia had withdrawn and the Lusitania, a British
passenger ship carrying 128 American citizens, had been sunk. The conflict
lasted four years, cost $350 billion, and claimed the lives of twenty-two million.
Technologically, it was the most advanced war ever seen because of the number
of new inventions introduced: biological weapons, mortar, improved artillery,
machine guns, and barbed wire. Not until World War II when the airplane
played such a devastating role, would the destructive power of these new
weapons be surpassed.
In the novel A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry is serving in the Italian army.
The role of Italy in World War I was as decoy. Traditionally, Italy was an ally
of Germany and Austria. However, the allies promised Italy the land it had
requested from Austria—the region of South Tyrol, several islands in the
Adriatic, and assistance with expansion of its colonies in Africa—if it would
switch sides. The only role of Italy's ill-equipped army was to attempt to
divert the force of the Austrians from helping the Germans in France, a role
which caused the death of 500,000 Italians in 1916 alone. It is in that year
that Frederic Henry is wounded. Surprisingly, Italy was able to turn back the
Austrians and rightfully claim their share in the spoils of victory with the
Allied cause.
The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s were marked by what Joseph Wood Krutch labeled as The Modern
Temper. This was a “temper,” or zeitgeist (spirit of the age), which viewed
traditional beliefs of progress, perfectibility, and the success of democracy as
dead on the battlefield. Consequently, other philosophies of life were being
looked at, such as the growing popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis. This
new method of treating the self reinforced a belief in individualism in the
United States. For the same insistence on the self it was banned from
Communist Russia. The decade of the twenties is also often seen as a wild
decade of jazz, flappers, and the “speakeasy,” gathering places which served
banned alcohol. Jazz became popular music throughout America.
Women finally gained the vote on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment. Their new freedoms were epitomized by the more
unconventional girls who were known as “flappers,” identified by their
short, bobbed hair and daringly short (for the time) dresses. Prohibition
and the Eighteenth Amendment made alcohol illegal in 1920, but organized
crime invented the “speakeasy” (with the many bribes it involved) to
provide a place for Americans to find the outlawed drink. The economy,
both legal and black-market, was stable, and unemployment low. Things
were almost too good; after the Great War, Americans were ready to enjoy
themselves. Few could forecast or believe what loomed ahead for the United
States.
The Stock Market Crash
The year 1929 destroyed the momentum of the twenties. The roaring Jazz
Age ground to a virtual halt in October when the New York Stock Exchange
began to nosedive. After the First World War, America enjoyed a healthy
economy in the 1920s, and many investors saw opportunities to make money
on the stock exchange. Investors often purchased stock on credit, expecting
to pay off any loan with the profits they reaped as stock prices climbed.
However, after several days of falling stock prices in late October, panicky
investors began to sell whatever stock they held at any price. As the market
flooded with stock for sale, prices plummeted and many investors could not
sell their stock at high enough prices to pay off their creditors. Investors went
bankrupt, businesses lost capital, and banks failed. Unlike in previous years
when the stock market fell but quickly recovered, the early 1930s became
increasingly worse for Americans with millions of men and women out of
work and struggling to survive.
Europe also suffered a severe economic downturn. Never fully recovered
from World War I, European countries struggled with high rates of
joblessness and inflation. In Britain unemployment rates exceeded twelve
percent; in Germany over six million people were unemployed by 1932. Due
to the sudden collapse of the American economy, aid to Germany was halted.
Consequently, with no jobs, little food, and no money, the German people lost
confidence in their postwar government, the Weimar Republic. Faced with a
disintegrating economy, Germans began to take interest in the ideas of a
rising young fascist, Adolph Hitler. Promising a return to prosperity, Hitler
and the Nazi party were voted into power in 1933.
Literary Style
In Media Res
A Farewell to Arms opens in media res—literally, in the middle of the thing.
For the novel, this “thing,” constantly referred to as “it,” is the war.
Hemingway is certainly not the first to use this technique to bring the
reader immediately into the story. In fact, one of the greatest Western war
stories of all time—Homer’s Iliad—opens in the middle of the Trojan war.
Hemingway’s use of the technique sets the tone of the novel as one of
disjointure and alienation. The reader steps immediately into a world
described by someone remembering. However, we are given no clues about
time, place, or even the characters. In fact, it takes a good deal of reading
before even the name of the narrator is learned.
Persona
Originally referring to the mask worn by stage actors in ancient Greece, the
persona is the image of the character as it is expressed in reaction to its
environment. Hemingway reveals the persona of his main character by the
way he reacts to the statements of others. This is demonstrated early in the
novel by Frederic’s non-reaction to Catherine’s story. She describes how her
fiance was “blown to bits,” and Frederic’s response is to say nothing. Rinaldi,
on the other hand, is full of chivalry and charm because his persona is one of
Italian machismo. The story is told from Frederic’s point of view and thus it
has his voice. However, as a further development of his persona, his voicing of
the story rarely devolves to a personal—“I did this.” Instead, he speaks in
terms of “we” until finally he is all alone and, by default, an “I.”
Black humor
Black humor is a nervous humor which famous psychologist Sigmund Freud
described as a way of repressing fear through laughter. Also known as
graveyard humor, it is used throughout the novel to mask the very real fear
of death. The starkest use of this type of humor is by Catherine Barkley
when she is dying from internal bleeding suffered from a stillbirth. Though
in great pain she manages to utter “black humor” when the doctor says she
must not be silly because she is not going to die. To this she repeats, a
phrase she used earlier in the book when Frederic was in the hospital, “All
right . . . I'll come and stay with you nights. . . .” The inevitability of death and
the impossibility of the decision make the comment painfully ironic.
Dialogue
Hemingway employs dialogue at the expense of narrative whenever he can.
He does this in order to avoid long passages of “unnecessary prose.” Thus, he
reveals information about the plot through a dialogue marked by terse,
direct language which could be called common speech. This effort at realism
also disables any attempt to define Hemingway’s actual position on any of
the themes in the novel. Since the story tells itself through the characters
who are involved, the reader is left with his or her own thoughts on the
subject—thoughts which are influenced by the speech of the characters, not
Hemingway.
According to the critic Henry Hazlitt, dialogue is best when it is of a narrow
range. He continues, “one may think of this either as cause or result of the
narrow range of the characters.” This is a good thing, he says, for
Hemingway’s characters “are never complicated people, either emotionally
or intellectually, for if they were, the casual hard-boiled Hemingway manner
would be incapable of dealing with them.”
Social Concerns
In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway is concerned with the effects of war on its
participants and victims. However, since the focus here is not the aftershock
of the war, as it is in The Sun Also Rises, but the war itself, the intensity and
concreteness of the war's impact on individuals is far more vivid. At the same
time, the general effects of dislocation on an entire nation — Italy — are
rendered as the novel's backdrop. Finally, though, it is as a great romantic
tragedy — Hemingway called it his Romeo and Juliet — that A Farewell to
Arms is generally read and remembered, a powerful lyrical tale of love and
death and inexorable doom.
While some readers seem to find only despair in the novel, a sufficient
appreciation of Hemingway's tragic sense of life takes most readers far
beyond the categories of mere despair. In fact, while Hemingway probes
the structures of rhetoric, duty, and obligation, inherent to war, and
implicitly criticizes the hypocrisy, bad faith and moral bankruptcy of a
society which unleashes such terrible chaos and violence, he also affirms
traditional values such as honor and dignity; above all, he celebrates the
transforming power of love.