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.