A Farewell to Arms

The novel tells the story of Lt. Frederic Henry and his adventures in Italy during WWI, from the tribulations of war to his romance with the widowed nurse Catherine Barkley. The novel is easy to read, with a plaintively straightforward plotline that is interspersed with generous doses of lovey-dovey romantic idyll. On war, Hemingway paints a modernist impression of war, marked by its banality and lack of heroism and suffering for no good cause, a similar message as he would later write in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel’s breadth of emotion, from the dark pits of bitterness to its sweet moments of tenderness made it especially impressionable and memorable.

The most enduring and salient theme of so many of Hemingway’s works is the inextricable tie between love/sex and violence/death. The theme is present even in the title: it may be read as saying goodbye to war in Frederic’s desertion of the Italian army, yet its second meaning is saying goodbye to a loved one’s arms and embrace, an ominous foreshadowing of the novel’s tragic end. In the story, war enables, hastens, and leads to love. We learn that Catherine at first wanted Frederic to fill the void left in her heart after her fiancé had died from the war; and the two are only able to come together and become lovers due to Frederic’s war wound placing him in the same hospital as Catherine. Violence and love are two complementary sides of one thing: the human drive to life. Both are ideas so primordial that they are like the sun: we are aware of these ideas and feel them around us always and at all times, but so rarely dare to directly examine them. We love violence, but society denounces its reality and we only dare to act out atrocity in the fictional worlds of video games. We love sex, and despite libertinism being celebrated more by the media we still mostly dare to express our sexuality in private and still habitually hide our darker yet natural desires. In this way, Hemingway is a brave modernist who looks directly at the sun, and the works give me an impression that is uncomfortable, refreshing, shocking, spellbinding, and cathartic, all at the same time.