The book in hand is called a fare Well To Arms. A novel written by Ernest hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American
author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong
influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public
image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between
the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
You might think that the story about a
wounded soldier falling in love with the nurse who cares for him is nothing
special. You may even consider it a cliché, and for good reason. It's such a
common phenomenon, it's actually received a name: 'Florence Nightingale
syndrome', though the name actually refers to the nurse falling in love with
the patient, and not the reverse as many people tend to believe.
So while this plot line may seem played
out now, please remember that when Ernest Hemingway published A Farewell to
Arms back in 1929, none of these TV shows existed, and while the novel's
main character, Frederic Henry, was certainly not the first patient to develop
a romantic relationship with his nurse, this plot line was more innovative then
than it is today.
A Farewell to Arms begins in the Alps
around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia. Allied with
Britain, France, and Russia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany,
Italy is responsible for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting
the Germans on the war's western front, and Russia in the east. The novel's
narrator and protagonist is eventually identified as Lieutenant Frederic Henry,
an American who has volunteered for the Italian army because the United States
has not yet entered the war. Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance
drivers.
After a wintertime leave
spent touring the country, Lieutenant Henry returns to the captured town at the
front where his unit lives. One evening his roommate, a surgeon and lieutenant
in the Italian army named Rinaldi, introduces Henry to two British nurses:
Catherine Barkley and her friend Helen Ferguson. Catherine and Henry talk of
the war and of her fiancé, killed in combat the year before; clearly she has
been traumatized by the experience. On his second visit to the British
hospital, they kiss. When Henry again visits Catherine, she tells him that she
loves him and asks whether he loves her. He responds that he does.
The war, with its devastating effect on the
individual’s life, the tragic disillusionment it fosters, and the despair that
is its consequence, is the antagonist in the novel. On a secondary level,
biology, that claims Catherine’s life, is the second antagonist.
The climax occurs in Caporetto where a
retreat is forced on the Italian army. Henry tries to put up a brave and dogged
fight but in the ensuing chaos, he is forced to desert his post. From now on,
he becomes the hunted rather the hunter and has to live incognito. The action
too undergoes a marked change after the climax. Before the retreat, it seems
slow-paced but after it becomes faster and the events unfold so quickly that
they leave the reader breathless. Here the setting shifts from Italy to
Switzerland.
The conflict ends in a tragedy that is
double-edged or twin-peaked. Henry cannot pursue a military career because he
has abandoned his post. There are no more choices for him as far as professions
go because he had given up architecture to join the army and now he has given
up the army too. He intends to lead a life of married bliss with Catherine and
his son but things didn’t go as he wised
them to be .
The main theme of the novel is that war creates or makes a
tragedy of everything. Therein, a person has to bid farewell to everything she
cherishes in life. It revolves round the yawning, aching loneliness that exists
in the midst of war, which ensures that one cannot even find solace in love.
She has to pay a very high price for wanting love, let alone achieving it, and
most often death forms the most natural and suitable price one could pay.
Though one has struggled hard, at the end of the reckoning, she is left with
nothing.
The minor theme of the novel is the passage of Henry from a
cheap life to a noble one. When he enters the army, he has not many feelings:
he is disinterested and disillusioned with the war, eats and drinks heavily,
and regularly visits sordid brothels. He progresses from there to a sense of
participation in the war and to an elevated, dignified love life. His
initiation into the vicissitudes of war, molds him into a well-adjusted
individual, who is competent enough to make a “separate peace” with himself.
His initiation into the pleasures of dignified love convert him from a
drinking, debauched soldier to a loving, caring husband. However, as the novel
ends, the initiation, on both levels, becomes inconclusive and inconsequential.
For, Henry cannot make use of it in his future.
The mood of the novel is pessimistic. Tragedy lurks behind
every action and, as such, robs it of meaning. Men and women, caught in the
war, despair and move to bitterness and cynicism. Throughout the novel, a mood
of continuous boredom, disappointment, and apathy, generated from a sense of
inevitability of fate, dominates. The somber mood in the novel, describing the
horrors of war, turns tragic, as it details the problems of undergoing a
Caesarian section. The mood throughout the novel is one of disappointment,
dullness, and pain.
However, Hemingway’s illustrated figures and very detailed
descriptions to the surroundings and the war mood makes the reader moves to
another world or, in other words, moves to where Frederick and Catherine are. I
recommend it for a thoughtful reading.
