Running head: FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN A FAREWELL TO ARMS 1

Frederic Henry’s Transformations in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

Rachel Dilts

Anderson University

Author Note

This paper was prepared for Honors 2110, Section 1, taught by Dr. Radaker.
FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 2

Frederic Henry’s Transformations in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway’s novel (1929) A Farewell to Arms offers its readers an ingenious title with an

ambiguous meaning, as the protagonist says farewell to battle arms and then to physical arms of his lover

as well. His first farewell is intentional with pressures on him which he can’t control, which press him to

action. The second is completely unwanted but also imposed upon him from outside forces that he cannot

change. The novel seems to perfectly display the common quote “all is fair in love and war”, no matter

how hard it may be to accept. The protagonist is Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver for the

Italian army in World War I, who falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, without any plan

to do so. Actually, it seems he never has any plans at all in any aspect of his life until that point, but as the

novel progresses he discovers that love does exist and what it is, and how it fulfills him, making him grow

as a man. Finding true love gives his purposeless, detached life meaning, and in this way brings him to

life and then hopeless death again; even a more confirmed death after having found treasure than losing it

forever.

At the beginning of the novel, Frederic is introduced as an immature young man thrown into war,

and into life as a whole, with no known purpose. He lives aimlessly, simply for his own pleasure, longing

for some meaning, perhaps without even consciously knowing this longing himself. He lives in some

detached daze of his own creation. Scholar Rovit (1963) observed:

Most of the time he does not care about anything at all. . . . In fact, the war and his involvement in

it are as unreal experiences to him as anything else in his thoroughly meaningless and

unconnected life . . . to put it in other terms, the character or self-ness of Frederick Henry which

we meet at the beginning of the novel is practically nonexistent. He is his manners and his

intermittent drive to satisfy his creature-instincts in drinking, sex, and the sporadic excitements of

the sensations which the violence of war provides. (pp. 99-100)

FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 3

Frederic is so detached from this war that he is even ignorant about it. Perhaps it is self-induced ignorance

in attempt to escape the present situation. Frederic thought, “Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in

this war. It did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in

the movies” (p. 39). The passage that introduces that Frederic might crave something more in life is when

he goes on leave and did not go to the priest’s beloved Abruzzi as he talked about. He had opted for going

to the cities for short-lived pleasures. He felt true remorse about not going and claimed he really had

wanted to go but still hadn’t (pp. 13-14). Frederic is living, if it can be called living, for each night so he

can try to find meaning in pleasures. He finds escape in the darkness, though it is scary and he fears God

in it; he just doesn’t know how to live in the positive goodness of light though he inwardly longs for its

clarity.

When he meets Catherine, he is still living in this detached, lost stage of life. When he first

describes her, he describes her as a lustful man would describe a woman he saw as attractive but only

skin-deep. They begin to talk and open up to each other quickly, but for Frederic it was clearly just

another way to pass the time; he actually describes it as a game:

I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like

bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you

were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody mentioned what the stakes were. It

was all right with me. (p. 32)

There are no “stakes” for him at this point, certainly still no attachment or commitment with anything,

especially so-called “love”. It is obvious especially when Catherine asked, in tears, if he will be good to

her, and he thought, “What the hell” (p. 27). He is a hard, selfish soul wandering aimlessly for his own

temporary desires.

Frederic’s lack of life is ironically disturbed by a near-death experience that wakes him from his

total indifference. He is in an explosion on the front line, and watches a comrade die in agony. He then
FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 4

realizes his own injury and is taken to the ambulance, where the man in the cot above him has a

hemorrhage and bleeds and dies over Frederic. Everything that happens in this time frame is so traumatic

and personal that Frederic is shocked to harsh reality. Rovit (1963) asserted:

. . . In this moment of extreme shock, Henry realized that he is dead and has been dead for a long

time; and that the mistake is in thinking that he has just died. Such a reading would substantiate

the thesis that Henry has lacked a self up to the time of the wound, because, in these terms, “not-

caringness” is equivalent to death. (p. 101)

He goes to the hospital where Catherine works to recover, and the first time he sees her he realizes that he

loves her (p. 100). This is a turning point in the novel, because now after his injury they both realize their

love for the other, and they get swept away by it as much as the world’s current circumstances will allow

them to. They are not able to legally get married, so they emotionally do. Being “married”, they are one,

and make wherever they can be together their “home”. As they become more one with each other, she

blatantly states that there is no Catherine, only him, because she is him. He is her life; her religion. As she

becomes more like him, he in turn becomes more like her also. She is submissive to him and loves him

with true love, not lust, the only thing he has known from prostitutes. The priest had once told him about

the difference and that true love is wishing to sacrifice for and serve (p. 77), and now he has found it in

Catherine. Though he doesn’t seem to act or think much yet about loving her in this selfless way (he says

that he is embarrassed by words like “sacrifice”), she has opened up his eyes to a completely new light on

life, a hope of something more that does exist. It is Frederic and Catherine against the world, not like

other couples, still not having a set place to belong but with each other, and that is what makes them

perfect for each other.

Frederic is sent back to the war front again and therefore away from Catherine; away from home.

The war and even the other characters have gotten much worse and the Italians go into a mass retreat, and

Frederic and his team of ambulance drivers get the cars stuck, under Frederic’s leadership. This is the
FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 5

straw that breaks the camel’s back, and Frederic seems to snap under the pressure when two sergeants are

thrown into the mix to help them and then leave them when the ambulances get stuck. Frederic pulls out

his pistol and starts firing, finally breaking down under the weight of the war and his position. He is

aggravated with himself and with the war and with life in general. He then has to try to escape on foot

with his men; one gets shot and one deserts them in fear, and Frederic is taken aside to probably be shot

by the battle police. In a climax of the retreat, the companions being separated in one way or another, and

the stress of his leadership and then his life being threatened, another turning point occurs- the first

farewell to arms. Frederic runs and dives into the water- deserts the army and deserts the war altogether,

“I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace” (p. 260). This separate peace was to be

achieved greatly, or completely, in Catherine and in true love. Www.novelguide.com (2012) contended:

Their relationship brings some order and value to his life. . . . When Frederic puts aside his

involvement in the war, he realizes that Catherine is the order and value in his life and that he

does not need anything else to give meaning to his life. (“A farewell to arms by Ernest

Hemingway,” 2012, para. 3)

On the way to her he hops a train and dreams about her all the way there, but in a different way than even

before. Waldorn (1972) argued, “. . . During this dream Frederic for the first time manifests a sincere

desire to serve his love rather than himself. The dream ranges from an initial eroticism . . . to a sleep-

spoken outburst of husbandly tenderness and concern. . .” (p. 127). He later has a conversation with the

count and reveals that what he values most is someone he loves (p. 279) and about maybe becoming

devout about Christianity someday. The count claims that love is a religious feeling (p. 281). Perhaps

finding love and light in Catherine has made hardened and skeptical Frederic more open to believing in a

divine love as well. He later even cries out to God in his own personal way. Frederic’s changes and now

hopeful attitude cannot change the inevitable, however, though it would be said that it is better to have

loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 6

As Frederic and Catherine become more one, being alone together, and being each other, there is

a feeling of anxiety about their baby being born and how it will affect their relationship, though they

would make it work. However, the unthinkable happens and it is a tragedy at the very end of the book that

the baby is still-born and Catherine dies, disrupting any possible plans, and likewise any hope. They had

once talked about the brave dying and Catherine being brave in how she lives her life despite hard times

that she has had; she has strength (p. 149). Frederic had pondered later that the world killed the good and

gentle and brave impartially (p. 267). It would appear that it indeed did.

Frederic started out being a silhouette figure aimlessly going through life towards whatever felt

good. He met Catherine and discovered love and more about himself, and finally found life and purpose

in true love with her, and could say farewell to the battle arms and be with her in commitment. He was

finally a living and feeling human and man when he is all too soon forced to say farewell to the arms of

his love and life. Being one with Catherine, when she died, he did as well. He tried going into the room

with her corpse for some closure, but there was nothing to do. The final sentence ends again in darkness,

like his dark, hopeless outlook on everything before he met her.

FREDERIC’S TRANSFORMATIONS IN FAREWELL TO ARMS 7

References

A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway. (2012). Literature. Retrieved from

http://www.novelguide.com/

Hemingway, E. (1929). A farewell to arms. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Rovit, E. (1963). Ernest Hemingway (pp. 98-106). New York, NY: Twayne.

Waldorn, A. (1972). A reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway (pp. 113-130, 240-243). New York,

NY: Farrar, Straus Giroux.