Farewell

Throughout the novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway developed a specific discipline and behavior for a true Hemingway “code hero”. Although there are many characters in the novel, each one of them possessed a similar or contrasting characteristic of a “code hero”. While Frederic Henry became a true “code hero” by the end of the novel, Catherine Barkley was a better example of a “code hero” throughout the course of the novel. Hemingway’s definition of a code hero stated that there were many qualities, some more important than others, needed in order to be classified as a true “code hero”. The most important characteristics required to be a true Hemingway “code hero” like Catherine Barkley are bravery, immorality, and discipline.

According to the Hemingway hero’s philosophy, a truly brave “code hero” was a stoic person, who accepted the fear of a situation and did not complain about it. “I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” This was all that Catherine said shortly before she died. However, Catherine died according to her view of what the brave should do in death as in life. A brave person should simply not mention their fear of the deaths that they have encountered. Death was the end of everything and life was devoted to exposing oneself to all types of physical pleasures, which were the rewards a would strive for in life.

Catherine dismissed the traditional concepts of morality and developed her own system of moral values. Because of her self-created values, she did not marry yet, she was pregnant and did not want the child to be baptized. In a way, Helen Ferguson was the living symbol of the traditional concepts of morality. She disliked Frederic since he and Catherine were not married but continued to pretend as if they were. Helen felt this was wrong and that they should have been married especially since Catherine was pregnant. This controversy with Helen only further illustrated the fact that Catherine was a non-conformist to the traditional moral values of the day.

The most important characteristic required of a Hemingway hero” was discipline. Self-discipline was a value, which grows out of one’s essential being. When Frederic had to return to the front, Catherine didn’t even cry or display any disappointment about his leaving. This was an excellent example of the discipline of refusing to be emotional about an event. If a “code hero” ever expressed any emotion, they would often be ashamed of having done so. Even though she was involved in the war since she was a nurse, Catherine never spoke of the ravages of war or expressed any feeling toward the war. Talking was considered to be emotionalism, which involved thinking. A Hemingway hero was not a thinker but a person of action.

Catherine Barkley exemplified the “code hero” by possessing a great sense of bravery, her own sense of immorality, and her own sense of discipline. A Hemingway hero must be brave in the face of danger, must push aside the traditional moral values, and must have discipline to block out true emotion. These characteristics were just a few of the many that a Hemingway “code hero” must possess. While each “code hero” may have shared similar qualities, when and how each detail was discovered varies greatly from character to character. Unlike Frederic Henry, Catherine possessed all of these qualities from the beginning of the novel, which led Hemingway to create Catherine Barkley as the true Hemingway “code hero”.

Written in 1929 by Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms has always been considered a classic piece of literature. A major source of the novel’s success is how its themes tied into real life experiences during the First World War. While soldiers of the war fought for their country, they searched for love to escape total chaos and destruction. The two main themes in A Farewell to Arms are the gruesome reality of war and the relationship between love and pain. The first main theme of A Farewell to Arms is the devastation that war brings.

Just as the title explains, A Farewell to Arms deals primarily with the process by which the protagonist, Frederic Henry, disconnects himself from the war and leaves it behind. While there are a few characters in the novel who actually support the effort, such as Ettore Moretti, a majority of the characters remain uncertain about the war, angry of the complete devastation it causes, and unconvinced of the splendor it supposedly brings. For example, while Henry and Passini discuss the war, Henry says, “I believe we should get the war over…

It would not finish if one side stopped fighting. It would only be worse if we stopped fighting” (Chapter 9, Page 49). The second main theme of the novel is the connection between love and pain. While the war takes place, Hemingway depicts the true, mysterious behavior of love. Although Catherine mourns for her dead fiance, she quickly begins to seduce Henry. Her intentions for courting Henry are obvious, that is she wants to separate herself from the pain of losing her fiance by finding a new love to fill the void.

Likewise, Henry attempts to distance himself from the war as much as possible. By doing so, Henry and Catherine find comfort within each other from the dilemmas that surround them. Just like they fell in love with each other, Henry’s feelings for Catherine pass just as quickly as he witnesses her death. As he gives farewell to Catherine’s body, Henry says, “But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to he hotel in the rain” (Chapter 41, Page 332). Although Henry and Catherine genuinely loved each other, Henry’s heart is now void without the companionship of Catherine. The tragedy of A Farewell to Arms is that their love, although authentic, can never be more than temporary. In my opinion, I enjoyed this novel for a few reasons. First, A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiography about Hemingway and his time fighting in the Italian campaigns during World War I. Secondly, the novel is able to give perspective of the troubles and triumphs of those soldiers that fought during the war.

Finally, the mysterious love that Henry and Catherine have for each other proved to be interesting and unusual. In conclusion, A Farewell to Arms proved to be a masterpiece in my opinion. While addressing the struggles and feats of those soldiers who fought during World War I, we are able to dive into the conscious of a unique fighter who parts himself from the war as much as possible while trying to find true love, even though the reasoning behind finding love was only to help escape from the war.

A Farewell to Arms is one of the greatest tragic love stories of the twentieth century. The novel which was written by Ernest Hemingway was published in 1929, and could possibly be one of the best novels that was been written about World War I. Throughout the novel Hemingway tries to bring light to the truths about war. He does not focus on the heroic picture that many picture of war, as shines a light on the hardships of war. The author makes use of symbolism throughout the novel in order to show the reader the struggles such as hardships with death, wounds inflicted from war, and the toll war can take on relationships.

The Use of Nature To be able to properly analyze the novel, the reader has to understand how the symbolic structure is formed by the author. In this case, Hemingway has used nature as a way to contrast with the emotions of the characters. Chapter 1 begins with the following: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains…the plain was rich with crops…and beyond the plains the mountains were brown and bare” (Hemingway 3). The author positioned the main character on a kind of lookout point which effectively conveys feelings of detachment (Bloom 31).

But for several scholars, this is just another example of Hemingway’s style: “lean, understated, evocative, spare and without emotion” (Bloom 31) The introductory line to the novel sets the mood for the rest of the chapter. This form of imagery was used in the first chapter, leaving it up to the imagination of the reader to interpret the characters emotions. The author does this so that he does not have to go into detail about the characters feelings. Bloom says that Hemingway’s use of nature as symbolism is no surprise as he is one author well-known for his “love of open water and other wild places in nature” (Bloom 31).

Hemingway portrays life in the first chapter as– brown, bare, hopeless when he uses the words bare and dusty to describe a road that the troops marched on. The narrator goes into detail describing the plains as follows: “The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare” (Hemingway 3). This description allows the reader to know that the people of the town were able to go on with their lives, with plenty of food on the table, living as comfortably as they could while the war went on in their backyards.

The author shows us that this place is considered a normal home for villagers. Yet, with all that is occurring on the side of the mountains, how can home be considered normal? Hemingway uses nature as symbolism in chapter 1 when he describes the following night. “In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not a feeling of a storm coming” (Hemingway 3). The villagers knew that fighting was going on all around them, but it was far enough away that it did not impact their daily lives. Towards the end of Chapter 1 a switch occurs.

While not much had occurred in the village, the fighting had become quite unsuccessful. When the troops had experienced this change in the fighting force, they also experienced a change in the weather- fall was arriving. The author uses this change in weather and foreshadows that something terrible is coming. The author tells the reader that things went very badly. Winter had arrived, and with winter came the permanent rain which accompanied cholera. The intestinal disease took out seven thousand soldiers that year from the Italian Army. In the novel, the rain was used as a symbol of death.

A year passed between Chapters 1 and 2, and the name of the main character, Frederick Henry, had yet to be introduced to the reader at this point. The protagonist isn’t much of a bold character. He tends to sit back and observe the crowd with no commentary; he is an observer. Henry is a Lieutenant serving in the ambulance corps in the Italian Army. As spring began to approach, Frederick finds himself stuck in a state of confusion about his life. The war is affecting him and others in such a way that he becomes uncertain with what he’s doing in his life, whether he is content or not.

As Henry goes through these changes within himself, spring is upon his and with spring comes a sign of hope. The Use of Light With the change of the season, change occurs immediately upon reading Chapter 4. “The battery in the next garden woke me in the morning and I saw the sun coming through the window and got out of the bed” (Hemingway 15). The light is symbolic towards Henry’s mood, even though the character himself doesn’t know it yet, everything is going to change for him. It was on this sunny day that he met Ms. Catherine Barkley. In the beginning of their romance, the reader is confused by the actions of both Ms.

Barkley and Mr. Frederick. “He is impulsive and fatalistic about his choices [such as driving the ambulance for the Italians while he is an American], and she plays with the notion that everything has an explanation [“I was brought up to think there was”]” (Bloom 33). As one see’s how the relationship between Catherine and Henry develops, they can see how quickly the two have become intimate with one another due to the effects of the war. At first, Catherine seems to be using Henry for comfort due to her loss. Catherine then reveals to Henry about her previous engagement to a man whom she’d lost due to the war.

Although he did not believe so himself, Henry was falling in love with Catherine. At first Henry had wished it would simply be a relationship based on sexual pleasure. Hemingway represents the love that the two have for each other through Catherine’s hair. Henry says: “I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it… and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls” (Hemingway 114). “Henry and Catherine being inside her hair which forms a kind of tent over them, while they make love, may be taken as a womb symbol” (Rao 57).

Her hair also being seen as a womb is symbolic as for later in the novel when Catherine becomes pregnant by Henry. The Use of Symbols One can go into great detail trying to analyze the many ways that Hemingway uses symbolism in the novel A Farewell to Arms. Taking a look at the novel, the occurrence of rain is constant from the beginning to the end. The author has presented the rain in many different manners such as rivers, lakes, rain and snow. As was covered in Chapter 1, the reader is able to contrast that rain symbolizes death. “Catherine sometimes sees herself and Henry dead in the rain” (Rao 59).

This was the most direct ways that Hemingway used rain as a symbol of death. Although, when reading through the climax of the novel, the author gives the reader hope for it was through means of water that Henry escaped the war and returned to Ms. Barkley. The rain was a symbol of trouble and turmoil for Henry. “When Fredrick was wounded, he is taken to the field hospital and “a rain” of blood falls on him from the stretcher above him. This is used to associate rain with destruction and pain, struggles and sufferings” (Shams).

Catherine is seen to be afraid of the rain due to her fear of seeing herself dead. “As Frederick and Catherine try to escape to Switzerland across the lake in a boat, their journey is lashed by rains” (Shams 45). The events that occurred when Catherine went into labor are tragic, and could be foreshadowed upon when it rained the day that she told Henry of her pregnancy. To finish the novel, after Henry discovered that Catherine and the baby were gone, he left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (Hemingway 332). The author ended the novel with the word rain. The main character was left with nobody.

He had fled the Army, snuck off to be with Catherine and the baby, to be left with only rain. The river and the lake are used symbolically to divide the opposing sides from one another. The Austrian front is separated from the Caperatto retreat in Chapter 3 by a river. Fredric and his company were trapped in the enemy side of the river. This shows how the river is used to divide territories, creating a place where one can distinguish the sides between the opposing and the allies. Ishteyaque Shams takes note that it is important to see that the retreat of the Italian Army, which occurs at Gorizia, is accompanied by rain (45).

Fredric’s escape from capture and death by jumping into the river shows how the river is symbolic when dividing the enemy lines. The river was the divider between his life and his death. Snow represented the first time that the soldiers weren’t fighting. ““Snow” is seen as able to postpone the consequences of death but doesn’t really cure mortality; it is viewed as an aesthetic” (Shams). Whether it is the snow or the color white, it brings a sense of false hope into the novel, for death is only delayed for a little while longer. The snow is a form of safety, like when Catherine and Henry were in the Swiss Alps surrounded by snow.

Other means of representing the tragedy that occurs throughout the novel is with the mountains. The battle front is located upon mountains where the battle is fought, and where many dead lay. Fredrick was wounded at the end of a long mountain, and he is bothered by the violence that arises from the mountains. The snowing in the mountains of Switzerland encourages Catherine and Fredrick to go to the mountains. Irony is then implemented into the novel, because Catherine and Frederick escaped to the mountains of Switzerland so that they could escape from the war.

The plains in the novel are similar to the symbols used for the rain and the mountains. Things such as diseases, suffering, death, non-religious, and war were presented to the novel when the priest says suggested that Henry take leave and go to Abruzzi, the Priest’s hometown. That is has kind and polite people and with hospitality and a sense of natural beauty. “The plains are some sort of sharp contrast to this, it is characterized with drunkenness, prostitutes, destruction, cheap cafes and some other signs of low level life style” (Shams). Conclusion

Symbolism was implemented in many different ways throughout the entire novel. Ernest Hemingway is able to link two things together in a manner allowing the novel to be easily understood by the reader. He manages draws the readers in by using symbols to represent something more than just what it is, such as rain to represent death, weather to represent mood, etc…“It is something really important and interesting to see that in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway makes a very intricate but meaningful combination of images and symbols in order to be able to express whatever he has to convey to his readers” (Shams 44).

The book, A Farewell to Arms was written by Ernest Hemingway. Throughout the book, Hemingway creates two main characters, that endure multiple hardships, love, and pain. Lieutenant Frederic Henry and Catherine Berkley meet in the most crucial times in their lives. In the book, many of the symbols give the reader an emotional connection to the book.

Hemingway was a master in capturing the essence of the story. The symbols and words provide a basis for the structure of the novel, and for the loss of technical language. This form of writing style leaves the imagination of the reader to interpret the characters emotions. The author uses symbols to foreshadow events that take place, and underscores the theme of love and pain.

The most recognizable symbol in the book would be rain. Rain is a symbol of death, grief, and pain. Hemingway uses the symbol so that the feelings associated with it seems existent to the reader. It illustrates many of the negative feelings that we feel in real life. One example of the rain symbolizing death would be foreshadowing Catherine’s death. On page 131, Catherine says to Henry, “All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”

From this quote, we can understand that it is foreshadowing the death of Catherine, and it adds more depth to death being a real thing. Another conversation between Catherine and Henry on page 131, Henry asks Catherine, “You’re not really afraid of the rain are you?” Catherine proceeds to say, ” Not when I’m with you.”

This quote emphasizes the importance of Catherine not having any fear of dying when she’s in the presence of Henry. The rain in this situation demonstrates that Catherine will die while it’s raining uncontrollably outside, but she has no fear of it since she has Henry by her side,

In addition, the term “permanent rain” is indeed death itself. It’s the whole threat that looms over the entire book. Rain is out of human control, so when it’s raining it’s a reference to when humans aren’t able to control a situation. For example, on page 4, it says, “But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” This quote references cholera. During the time of war, cholera was a deadly disease that took the lives of many men.

Cholera effortlessly wipes out vast amounts of soldiers. Since cholera is a symbolized by rain, it’s like the rain washes the men away as easily as it erodes the dirt on the ground. The rain steadily falling is a constant reminder to the reader of the violence of the war and the inevitability of death. The permanent rain shows that the soldiers can do little to protect themselves, which implies cholera again. They’re weak, helpless, and weighed down by their equipment.

The symbol of rain is not just symbolizing death and grief, but it also illustrates disaster. When Henry gets arrested in chapter 30, the troops had him and a lieutenant-colonel standing in the rain about to be executed. On page 312, Henry says, “He walked in the rain, an old man with his hat off, a carabiniere on either side.

I did not watch them shot him, but I heard the shots.” This pivotal time could have changed the book around in a matter of seconds. The rain is significant during this time because it helps the reader understand the underlying theme of pain. The pain during this event lead Henry to believe he was going to be executed like the other men.

Another symbol that was presented throughout the book was seasons. At the beginning of the book on page 3, it is, “dry and white in the sun.” The dryness outside is identified as summer. From the beginning of the book to when Catherine tells Henry that she’s pregnant in chapter 11, the season is summer. The sunny hospital in Milan gives a temporary respite from the war. During the warm, hospital weather, Henry is able to forget the war as he falls deeper in love with Catherine.

According to Michael Reynolds, the author of establishes the rhythmical flow of the seasons that counterpoints the violent pattern of the war. Reynolds also says, ” Throughout the book there will be these two cycles in operation: the seasonal cycle of the land and the seasonal cycle of the war. The destructiveness of the war cycle is dependent upon the same seasonal weather changes that regenerate the land.” Both of the quotes demonstrate how the changing of the seasons are associated with the changing of the war.

Throughout the book, snow is a prominent weather pattern. Although snow is not as important as rain in the story, snow does play a factor in symbolizing the feeling of safety, hope, and contradicts the rain. Snow stands for safety, which is very ironic due to the actual meaning inferring the opposite. Hendry describes the priest’s home region of Abruzzi as a “place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear and cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery. . .” (Hemingway 13).