«A Farewell to Arms» by Ernest Hemingway

“ А Farewell to arms”

Ernest Hemingway

Chernovol VALERIA

Introduction

• «A Farewell to Arms» was published in 1929 by Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel Prize-winning American author. This novel is semi-autobiographical. Like the protagonist, Hemingway served in the Italian Army as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I, got wounded, and spent time in an American Army in Milan, where he met a nurse. But unlike Hemingway, the novel's protagonist starts a love affair with the nurse. Similar to characters in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway was deeply influenced by his experiences at war. In fact, Hemingway is considered to be part of the "The Lost Generation." The phrase was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to Modernist artists who felt "lost" after witnessing the horrors of World War I.

Introduction

• Mr. Henry narrates his story in the past tense; the story is a memory of the events being described. You might find yourself wondering where he is now, what he’s doing, how old he was during the events he recounts, and how old he is when he recounts them. The novel never reveals this information, nor offers any concrete details which might allow us to figure it out, so we can only imagine and speculate. We don’t even know how many years have passed since the events occurred.

First Person (Central Narrator)

• On the surface, Frederic Henry is the quintessential unreliable narrator. He’s always boozing, he’s going through severe trauma, and he admits to lying to other characters in the novel, while at the same time supposedly telling us how he really feels. Each reader is called upon to assess Frederic’s reliability, and each reader will respond differently.
• Everything is known at the beginning. The events in the story are being told after they’ve occurred, though how long after we can only guess. In a present-tense narrative, the narrator is describing the feelings and events as they occur. In Frederic’s narrative there is a time gap between the action and the telling of the action.

Genre

• Ernest Hemingway is a major contributor to Modernism, a genre literally born from the tragic events of World One. Hemingway and other Modernists are known as "The Lost Generation," in part because they were lost in a world blown to pieces by the war. For Hemingway, that something new was his storytelling style, which we talk about, coincidentally, in "Style," and which we can see in A Farewell to Arms.
• The novel is a War Drama, because it directly shows us the war. It’s also Historical Fiction since it recounts historic events. As you might have guessed, mortality rates are high in this novel, and the devastating fate of one main character means we’re definitely in Tragedy-land. The treatment of bad weather as a portentous mood-setter is a good indication of Gothic literature. One good way to see the deeper meaning of the tragedy is to look at the way the novel is structured. It’s told in the first person, in the past tense, like a memory. So, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator already knows how it will end.

Themes

• Love is dangerous in A Farewell to Arms. In the middle of a war zone, anyone can die at any moment, breaking the hearts of the loved ones left behind. Yet the characters in the novel risk it all, to be both good romantic lovers and good lovers of human kind. Like all humans, they make mistakes, and sometimes aren’t the lovers they want to be. But as long as they have breath in their bodies, they keep on trying. They keep on trying to love, even with tragedy exploding all around them.

Warfare

• Set mostly in Italy during World War I, A Farewell to Arms bemoans the horrors of war while giving a human face to those involved in it. The characters work ceaselessly to hold on to their hopes for happiness while doing right by their brothers and sisters in arms. Ernest Hemingway’s description of the war is precise and historically accurate. But his characters are intensely human and contain a variety of views and counterviews. Their colorful dialogues provoke us to join their debates, and in doing so further define our own views about war.
• A Farewell to Arms shows men fulfilling what are often consider traditional male roles, or even stereotypes – they drink hard, fight hard, play hard, and commit heroic acts of bravery. However, as we get to know them better, their masculinity is revealed as subtle, complicated, and individual to each man. All in all, the men in this novel are human – they love, they suffer, they hurt, they hope, and, sometimes, they even break.

The characters

• Frederic Henry runs the show, and the past, in A Farewell to Arms. And he does it from the future... An American who volunteers for the Italian ambulance corps before the United States joins the war. Henry is a classic Hemingway hero in that he is a stoic who does his duty without complaint. Yet Henry also undergoes tremendous development through the course of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he has never experienced true loss, believes that war is dreadful but necessary, has a lust for adventure, drinking, and women, and sees Catherine as just another diversion. As the stakes of the war intensify, however, he becomes deeply pessimistic about the war and realizes that his love for Catherine is the only thing he is willing to commit himself to.
• Catherine Barkley In the 1970s and 80s, critics Judith Fetterly and Millicent Bell argued that the character of. Catherine is almost insane with grief over the death of her fiancé in the war. She meets Frederic, and it’s love at first sight. Booker says the hero is "in some way incomplete" in this stage, and in need of "unusual gratification." Though she is dedicated to her nursing work, it shows her a ton of pain and death. Catherine is lonely, she wants to love, and she wants to meet someone to help stop the pain of her work and the pain of her lost love. Since her attraction to Frederic is instant, he’s the perfect "focus" for her excess "energies."

The second characters

• Lieutenant Rinaldi. Rinaldi , the surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, is important to the novel not only because he.
• The Priest. Why doesn’t the priest get a name? Is it because he’s supposed to be a generic.
• Count Greffi. A man who is ninety-four years old. He’s a friend of Frederic’s and only appears once.
• The Captain. The captain that eats with Frederic at the Red Cross Hospital, and who taunts the priest about.
• Aymo. Frederic’s friend and fellow ambulance driver during the retreat. He helps Frederic kill a.
• Helen Ferguson. Catherine’s friend. She’s a parental figure to Catherine and is very protective of her.
• Miss Walker. Miss Walker is the nurse on duty when Frederic arrives at the hospital in Milan.

Ordered Chaos

• You’ve probably heard about Ernest Hemingway’s "Iceberg Principle" or theory of omission. It’s the simple idea that the reader is to be trusted. All the reader needs is the surface information to understand the situations being discussed. Whether it’s a world at war or the battles raging within human minds, the situations in A Farewell to Arms are chaotic. By presenting a very ordered surface for the reader, the reader is able to examine the chaos and complexity with a fairly clear head. Here’s an example:
• I was asleep all the time, she said. You’ve been talking in your sleep.
• "There darling. Now you’re all clean inside and out» We know she’s just given him an enema, and that her words there imply that Catherine thinks Frederic has undergone a rite of purification.
• This is what Modernism is all about, creating a form, in this case a very ordered one to represent the chaos of the times.

Conflict

• Love and war are a dangerous combination.
• When Catherine and Frederic meet, she falls in love instantly, but he thinks that love is the last thing he needs. Anybody can die at any moment, but, in the middle of a war, death weighs heavy on the scales of chance.

Complication

• Pregnancy.
• Catherine is pregnant and Frederic has to go back to the front in three weeks. In the meantime, they plan a little vacation. Unfortunately, Miss Van Campen thinks that a liquor bottle shaped like a bear is evidence that his jaundice is self-inflicted. When he defends himself by talking about his "groin," he gets his butt sent immediately back to the front, not knowing if he will ever see Catherine again.

Climax

• "I feel like a criminal. I’ve deserted from the army»
• After you swim across the river to get to the woman you love, climax is ensured! At least in A Farewell to Arms. And Frederic was forced into deserting anyway. He held on as long as he could, but it was either swim or die, and he chose to swim.

Denouement

• Trying to figure out how to say good-bye.
• The baby is dead. Catherine is dead. And that’s the only thing clear. Frederic tries, but he can’t say good-by and have it feel like anything.

Conclusion

• Alone in the rain.
• Such a lonely conclusion. Frederic can evade death, but he can’t help Catherine do it. And, at the end, he is all alone in the rain.

Stylistic devices

• A striking morphological feature of the fragment is participles, gerunds and nouns that have the ending – ing. Verbal predicates used in the past indefinite tense, which are used by the author as neutral stylistic means that emphasize the simultaneous impact of war on characters and natural changes in nature associated with the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.
• Nouns that participate in descriptions belong to semantic fields such as « war» and «natural landscape". In this regard, the language of the analyzed text is characterized by strict reference, and the absence of phonological or lexical-poetic associations.
• The narrator uses deictic pointers such as another mountain and this side of the river, implying that the reader is currently seeing the same landscape.

My review

• This is the first book by Hemingway that I loved with all my heart.
• It was painful to read about the First world war, how it broke human destinies. Especially when the Italian field gendarmerie began to shoot not only strangers, but also their ownS, on ridiculous charges, guided by their fear, not reason...
• I enjoyed watching Frederick gradually changeD his mind about the war. It was sad when he had to say goodbye to his comrades. And on an equal footing with the military line, I liked the development of the love line. I didn't expect it. At first, it looked like another military affair with a nurse, not promising to turn into something more EXTENSIVE AND REMARKABLE. But I'm glad it turned into love.
• Death... End of life... It broke my heart.

2020