A fare Well To Arms

 The book in hand is called a fare Well To Arms.  A novel written by Ernest hemingwayErnest 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.