Hemingway has wedded the themes of love and war in A Farewell to Arms
This article is also related to these questions
The artistic
unity of A Farewell to Arms is due to the complete subordination of the theme
of war and love to the intention of the novelist. Discuss.
OR
A Farewell to Arms is a novel of love and
war in which we might be overestimating the relative importance of war in the
plot, as a whole. Discuss.
OR
Discuss how in A Farewell to Arms is a
positive reaction against war considered as evil, in favour of conjugal love considered
as good.
OR
What views of war and of (conjugal_ love
does Hemingway convey through Farewell to Arms?
Introduction
A Farewell to
Arms, a tragedy, published in 1929, spread the fame of its author. This novel,
like other works of Hemingway, depicts the human predicament, despair and
disillusionment of man. Hemingway has heightened the tragic effects of the
novel with his irony and symbolism. When he prepared the first draft of the
novel, the events and incidents of his own life influenced the tone of the
creative work. His second son Patrick was delivered in Kansas City by
Caesarian section, and while “I was rewriting, my father killed himself in Oak Park , Illinois . The fact
that the book was a tragic one, did not make me unhappy, since I believed that
life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end.” Hemingway had the
experiences of happy and unhappy incidents in his own life. These experiences
went deeper into the production of his work which has tragic overtones, and has
been compared to Romeo and Juliet by Hemingway himself.
The Story
The story of the
novel depicts the intense love affair between Fredric Henry, an American
volunteer serving in the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse.
The novel created an atmosphere of war in which the hero Fredric Henry has been
injured, and admitted in the hospital in Milan , where he
develops intimacy with Barkley. The third part of the book portrays the defeat and
the retreat of the Italian forces at Caporetto. Fredric and Barkley have been
living as husband and wife. Henry is fed up with the war and suspected to be a
German spy. He deserts the army to escape the persecution of the Italian police.
Barkley has left nursing and is pregnant. Both of them have run away to Switzerland , a neutral country, to live in space, but the tragedy overwhelms
him with grief when Barkley dies in childbirth, and Henry is the sole spectator
of the tragedy. The subject-matter has been built upon ironical contract
between the sacred and the unsacred love.
War as a
Compelling Inspiration
Hemingway’s
compelling inspiration was war, both as personal and symbolic experience and as
a continuing condition of mankind. New treaders of the Second World War and
beyond still found inspiration in his symbolic ritualism dedicated to the
survival of selfhood in the midst of chaos……A Farewell to Arms based on his
Italian service, is a distinguished war novel, although lingering sentiment
breaks through the taut economy of the stylized language. Here he rejects the
classic tragic unity in the catastrophic defeat of the lovers, who have
hazardously, escaped to safe harbour, only to face the cruel futility of
Catherine’s fatal accident in childbirth. Dying, she murmers to Fredric Henry,
‘I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.’ The author’s naturalistic
reinterpretation of fate was consistent.
The Two Themes
Harmonised
Henry is left,
at the end with nothing. There are no ways for him. Philip Young writes about
how the novelist has harmonised the two themes as one: “In his affair with the
war Henry goes through six phases: from desultory participation to serious
action and a wound, and through his recuperation in Milan to retreat
which leads to his desertion. Carefully interwoven with all this is his
relationship with Catherine, which undergoes six precisely corresponding
stages; from a trifling sexual affair to actual love and her conception, and
then through her confinement in the Aps to a trip as the hospital which leads
to her death. By the time the last farewell is taken, the stories are as one in
the point, let there be any sentimental doubt about it, that life, both
personal and social, is a struggle in which the loser takes Nothing, either.”
Primarily a
Love-Affair
Norman Friedman
believes that through Hemingway has successfully tried to blend the two themes
of love and war into one story, it is primarily a love-affair. According to him
the story has been divided into five Books. Book I and a major portion of Book
III deal with the war, but the remaining portion of the Book deals with the
love-affair.
A Farewell to
Arms is the story of the experiences of Fredric Henry during the First World
War. Both the events in his story and his manner of narration illustrate the
weakening of the power of world during the war.
Fredric sees the
way in which words do not describe what happens in the war. His being wounded
suddenly becomes transformed into a heroic action for which he is awarded a
medal. He learns of the debasement of ideals of service to one’s own country
through Passini’s story of the arbitrary execution of every tenth man in a unit
that refused to fight. A Farewell to Arms is also Hemingway’s way of describing
the war without using the words that it has weakened. As a result of his own
traumatic experiences during the war, Hemingway came to see that the only way
to write truly was to write as simply as possible.
A Love Story
Against the Backdrop of War
Thus it can be
said that the novelist has told a tragic love story against the backdrop of
war. However, he does not let the sub-plot dominate the scene. The tenderness
of love is contrasted with the ruthlessness of war. This contrast is worth
noticing.
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