A Farewell To Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ernest HemingwayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-06-01
ISBN: 0684801469
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Scribner
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Book Reviews of A Farewell To Arms
Book Review: A study in detachment
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm sure like a lot of people, "A Farewell to Arms" was required reading back in high school. I'm also sure there were enough students from this group who, like myself, walked away from the reading with little appreciation for this classic. Well, I recently re-read this Hemingway masterpiece and was astonished at how good it is. Ah, the cluelessness of youth.
Even though the book was written 80 years ago, it still comes across as decidedly modern. Part of this emanates from the prose itself, sparse and readable yet shocking with what it says without actually saying it. Granted, the modernity of this prose stems more from writers today adopting Hemingway's style than Hemingway being prescient about the ways of future writers, but it's still a sign of greatness. And the one trait which definitely illustrates how ahead of its time "A Farewell to Arms" is lies in the way in which Hemingway puts across his thesis on the absurdities of war. For post-Vietnam War American readers, tales of the horrors and the atrocities of war are nothing new. Today we're more apt to read a story (fiction or non-fiction, it doesn't matter) about a military defeat or brutal war crime as we are to read about a victory or a glorious action by a noble soldier. But imagine a person in 1929 reading the scene from "A Farewell to Arms" describing the rout of the Italian army. Or the scene where Lt. Henry is taken prisoner with other officers and threatened with execution by his fellow soldiers. At a time when the horrors of the Marne were a generation past and the terrors of Omaha Beach or Chosin or Khe Sanh were still generations away, what must have been those readers' reactions? And how different were they from those of someone from these jaded times?
But Hemingway's prose and antiwar sentiments are talked about by everyone who reads "A Farewell to Arms," and they are not the only themes involved. Another overwhelming aspect that I picked up on revolves around Lt. Henry's detachment from everything in his life. The man is clearly moving through the world with zero emotion whatsoever. The poignancy in this is revealed by the fact that most of the novel centers on his purported love for Catherine. Why the dichotomy? Is it simply a continuation of the "war is hell" theme, showing that men one step away from death are just mentally incapable of dealing with anything else? Or is it something autobiographical, with Hemingway drawing from his wartime experience to show a different side of the all-encompassing machismo inherent in most of this stories? Or maybe it simply adds another layer to the Frederic character, shining a light for the reader on some classic universal truths? It definitely makes you think. The thing is, Catherine is just as bad as him. In order to maintain the illusion that he is a suitable replacement for her dead fiancee, Catherine must engage in a level of detachment equal to, if not greater than, Frederic's. Only through such detachment can she ignore the glaring problems within the man she claims to love. In the end, it leaves you with the uneasy feeling that these two couldn't care less for one another, yet are perfectly suited for one another.
I'm sure there are other aspects to "A Farewell to Arms" that I missed on this re-reading. What was the point of the Rinaldi character? Or Count Greffi? And what about all the game playing? All of these elements point to some larger picture, but it's still too subtle for me to pick up. Sounds like a third reading is in the near future for me.
Summary of A Farewell To Arms
The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.
As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fianc? of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:
I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine.
Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings, and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber
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