Camillas Hemsida
Camilla Svensson
ENA 202A Farewell to Arms
- a war novel or an anti-war novel?
There are indications in each of the novel’s five books that Ernest Hemingway meant A Farewell to Arms (1929) to be of anti-war character. World War One was a cruel war with no winners; ”War is not won by victory” (47). Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the book’s hero and narrator, experiences the desillusionment, the hopelessness and the disaster of the war. But Henry also experiences a passionate love; a discrepancy that ironically further describes the meaninglessness and the frustration felt by the the soldiers and the citizens.
In Book I, the army is still waiting for action, and the world is one of boredom with men drinking to make time go by and whoring to get women. War itself is a male game; ”no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies” (34). Love is also a game. When Henry meets and makes his sexual approach to Catherine Barkley he is only trying to relieve war’s boredom; ”I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley or had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards” (28).
Book II describes a slight transformation when Henry, wounded, spends time in hospital. He is suddenly more involved with the war, but, as a release from the war, he now acknowledges his great love for Catherine. The war is never far away, though. Protest riots take place in Rome and Turin and there are intimations that the war is becoming a stalemate, the army disillusioned; ”there was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness” (127), the prospects of victory evaporating; ”the war could not be much worse” (129).
In Book III Henry says (175): ”I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them (…) and read them (…) now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat excpt to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstact words such as glory, honour, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates.” This quotation illustrates the great turning point in Henry’s idea about heroism and the meaning of war. Further desillusionment and chaos arise in consequence of the army’s withdrawal as the Austrian and German troops break through the Italian lines. Henry shoots one of his own men, and he himself is mistakenly seized as a German foreigner. Henry manages to escape execution, and now his ’separate peace’ begins: ”Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. (…) I was not against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. (…) But it was not my show any more” (224).
In Book IV Henry, in danger as a deserter and a fugitive, together with Catherine, rows by night thirty-five kilmetres into the neutrality of Switzerland. The journey is long and painful for Henry, but all the time there is hope and longing for the new peaceful life to begin. Catherine is pregnant and the family plan to lead a quiet life away from the war.
The last book, Book V, describes a happy winter for Henry and Catherine in the snowy mountains of Switzerland, ”The war seemed far away” (278). ”We had a fine life” (292). But love finally ends exactly where it had begun, in a hospital. First the baby boy dies strangled by its umbilical cord after being delivered by Caesarian section. Then Catherine dies from the haemorrhage after having gone through an enormous suffering during her labour pains. Henry is devastated and sees no hope for the future. He wishes he too had been choked so that he would not have to go through all this dying. Even before he got the message, he knew Catherine was going to die: ”That was what you did. You died. You did not know what is was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you” (314). Henry sees clearly the tight connection between love and war, as shown when he compares the dying of his beloved with the dying of his combat friends: ”Or they killed you gratiously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you” (aa).
A Farewell to Arms is clearly an anti-war novel; the story swifts from naive game playing, through the stages of love and hope, to pure despair and an understanding that a war can lead to no winners. The passionate love story of the novel strengthens the message still more by showing the ironic similarity, but also its discrepancy, with the war. The discrepancy is to be taken into serious account, this discrepancy is the important message of this novel; make love not war.
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