A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms - Estimated Read Time = 6 hours
This Article - Estimated Read Time = 10 minutes
Time This Article Saves You = 5 hours and 50 minutes
*Most books need to be read twice before they can really be understood. This article saves you time & effort by helping you reach a solid understanding with just one read.
A Farewell to Arms - Podcast Episode
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms is a bold and beautiful novel that cemented Hemingway’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest authors. When first cracking its covers, I of course patted myself on the back for foraging into the work of such a literary giant. This selection alone, I considered, must confirm the validity of my tastes. Then, I actually read the book.
Upon finally closing those same covers, I reflected on how much the considerable amount of time spent between them felt bleak, tedious, confusing, and at the end of the day, just plain unsatisfying. Plus, for all the effort, I hardly understood the book at all.
In that first venture into Hemingway, I stumbled over obstacles that, I believe, deter many from a more satisfying interaction with his works. Years later, once I had earned the courage to return, I read the novel again. That second reading truly was gold.
At the conclusion, I relished in the satisfaction that came from not only enjoying such a significant literary work, but also from understanding it. My hope here is to help you, should you so desire, to feel that same warm glow of satisfaction.
Story Recap - spoiler alert!
The story centers on a developing romance between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley throughout his involvement in WWI. He is a young American serving as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross with the Italian Army. Early on, he’s injured by a mortar shell during an attack, and spends the next several months recovering in a hospital, under the care of his nurse, Catherine Barkley. Throughout his convalescence, their budding, yet messy, romance blooms.
However, following his recovery, Henry is returned to the front. A massive retreat of the Italian Army follows, which Henry barely survives. This experience leads him to desert the war altogether, as he and Catherine escape to Switzerland, where after a short time, the novel ends in tragedy and loss. That, in broad strokes, is the story.
The final scene of the book is perhaps also the most memorable. Throughout their escape to Switzerland, Catherine is pregnant. A few months after arriving, Catherine goes into labor, but the child dies. Then, Catherine herself undergoes complications, and she too tragically dies. In the final scene, Lieutenant Henry leaves the hospital and walks back to their hotel room alone, in the rain.
Hemingway wrote and rewrote this ending 47 times before finally reaching the form that satisfied him. This is not only the most tragic and emotional scene, but is also, I believe, the tip of the spear concerning the actual meaning of the book.
Fire & Rain - An Interpretation
One detail referred to constantly throughout every portion of the novel is the presence of rain. It’s always raining, which at first seems so small as to be insignificant. However, the rain is a key motif, and is symbolic of something far greater.
Being a war novel, part of what Hemingway details is Lieutenant Henry’s various attempts to cope with the realities of war. Along with the other soldiers, he frequents a brothel. He drinks enormous amounts of alcohol. Even the development of his relationship with Catherine Barkley may be understood in this light, as well as his relationship toward God.
Henry has several conversations with a priest, which reveal Henry’s ambivalence with God. The priest notices that he has some openness, which is where his fondness for Henry comes from. Yet Henry’s other indulgences would be considered anything but devout. On several occasions, the priest attempts to convince Henry of the importance of God. He listens, but never moves beyond just listening.
Each of these avenues—sex, drink, love, and God—is an attempt to find solace from the ravages of war, and ultimately of life. Lieutenant Henry’s favored routes are surely drink and love. The latter route even seems ready to yield a lasting success and escape from the war, a final farewell to arms, when he escapes to Switzerland with the pregnant Catherine Barkley.
Then, during labor and delivery, the child dies. After learning this news, Lieutenant Henry sits in the hospital hallway, contemplating death from a strangely detached perspective, and he recounts a simple memory from earlier in the war. This memory serves as the interpretive key for the novel.
“Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.”
Shortly after this, a nurse delivers the news to him that complications have arisen with Catherine as well. Immediately, his emotional detachment is destroyed. Since he isn’t allowed in her room, he sits in the hallway, knowing she is struggling to survive, and experiences a traumatic moment of panic and extreme distress. For the first time in the novel, he turns fully to God, pleading for help, offering up an anguished prayer.
Then Catherine dies.
He hangs about the hospital and attempts to say goodbye, but nothing about it feels right. She’s gone. So he leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel room, in the rain. The memory he recounts of fire and ants is a metaphor that reveals the meaning of this tragic closing scene.
The ants represent humanity. The fire stands for the suffering of this life, specifically in the experiences of war, injury, and the loss of Catherine and their child. Lieutenant Henry is in the place of God, with his position toward the suffering ants being similar to that of God’s toward humanity.
In the memory, he looks down on the plight of the ants, that he himself placed them in, and considers saving them, considers removing them from their suffering, something he could do with ease. Instead, he only tosses the water from his tin cup on the log, not to help them, but simply to empty his cup so he could fill it with whiskey. The act was not one of compassion, but indifference. This piece of the metaphor connects and gives meaning to the rain motif, so dominant throughout the story. Rain represents God’s indifference.
In the same way that Henry cared nothing for the ants in their pain, God cares nothing for us in ours. Therefore, the mournful scene of Lieutenant Henry walking alone, in the immediate aftermath of the loss of Catherine and their child, at once evokes our compassion for him, and also reveals the absence of God’s. Because he suffers and walks, as he has through the entire novel, in the rain.
Muddled Dialogue . Counterpoint Rhythms
There are other aspects of the book, apart from its meaning, that are also part of its enjoyment. One example being Hemingway’s innovations in dialogue.
His use of dialogue is always masterful, even when written according to the typical rules of style and formatting, which is true for most of the book. But occasionally, he muddles chunks of dialogue into bulky, messy paragraphs, tangled and spilling over. This device evokes a particular feel and understanding of the characters’ interactions—one that the words of the conversation alone could not convey.
Hemingway’s inventive artistry along these lines is part of what makes the book so enjoyable.
Beyond dialogue, the book is also famous for its constant and repetitive use of the conjunction “and” in order to create a rhythmic effect for the reader, an idea Hemingway adapted from the counterpoint compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. From the opening page, this feature characterizes the novel.
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”
Fourteen times, in a single paragraph, he uses the conjunction to compose this rhythm. This rhythmic innovation is one of the uniquely enjoyable and beautiful aspects of the novel.
Closing Thoughts - A Beautiful Complaint
A final reason why A Farewell to Arms is a worthwhile read is that it offers an account of WWI from someone who was physically there. Just like Lieutenant Henry, Hemingway himself was an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross, serving on the Italian front. He too was injured by a mortar shell, and fell into a romance with his nurse while healing. For these reasons, the novel has long been regarded as depicting a realistic sense of what WWI was truly like.
It’s not a stretch to say that Hemingway was scarred in ways beyond the physical from these war experiences, which rings clear even from the jaded point the book makes. That makes sense though, because the complaint of God’s indifference to our suffering isn’t often made in a remote or emotionally distant fashion, but from anger.
Yet what I find fascinating is that Hemingway chose to express this anger through beauty.
In that regard, the novel reminds me of the 88th psalm, which itself is an anguished complaint against God, made not in the form of a legal argument or a theological treatise, but in Hebrew poetry. A form that, much like the American novel, is associated with beauty. Yet from start to finish, it only communicates pain.
These are the closing lines:
14 O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in on me together.
18 You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness.
-Psalm 88:14-18 (English Standard Version)
Both works, the novel and the poem, express anguish and anger towards God, without any final turn towards consolation. They reverberate like distant echoes of each other.
However, they do differ in one significant way. The psalmist’s complaint is directed at God in a manner that confesses belief. He is angry with God because he believes in God, and therefore expects certain things from him.
I’m not sure Hemingway sought to vent his anger in the same manner, as a confession of belief. I doubt that was case. Maybe instead, he intended to craft an argument against the existence of God altogether. Or perhaps it was neither, and he was merely demonstrating the fruitlessness of religion in the suffering of modern war and life.
Regardless of what he intended, the novel leads us all to wrestle with the location of God in our suffering. Is God with us, or against us? Indifferent? Or even there at all.
It’s a question easily dispensed with when life is good. But when suffering finds us, our thoughts often turn upward. Perhaps A Farewell to Arms is an opportunity to consider the matter before we’re forced to. To study the rain before we’re found in the fire. To find God before our suffering so narrows our view that we refuse the search altogether.
If nothing else, it may lead us to find that despite all of the agony and loss that mark this life, there is still beauty.
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Bookshop Link: A Farewell to Arms
"To study the rain before we’re found in the fire. To find God before our suffering so narrows our view that we refuse the search altogether."
Loved the overview of this book! Hemingway seems to be equal parts fatalistic and authentic. Looking forward to next month's article.