A

FAREWELL

TO ARMS
(Ernest Hemingway)

Submitted by: Kristine Lyka S. Cabote

(BSN-3B)
Submitted to: Mrs. Teofila A. Evangelista
(CONSULTANT)

SUMMARY OF THE NOVEL

 A Farewell to Arms is a story of the love affair between Frederick Henry and Catherine

Barkley. He was an American in the Italian Army, working as an ambulance driver. She was an

English lady working at a hospital close to the Italian front line. They meet near the front, as she

and some other nurses are moving from one hospital to another. Soon after, at the beginning of

an Italian offensive, he is injured by an Austrian shell and is sent away from the front. He goes to

a brand-new hospital in which he is the first patient. Catherine is there, and during his

recuperation, they begin an intense relationship. Before he returns to the front, Catherine reveals

to Frederick that she is pregnant. Soon after he returns to the front, the Italians begin a massive

retreat, and Frederick and his ambulance drivers are separated from the main group. With the

increased paranoia toward enemy infiltration, Frederick is arrested by a group of officers who

suspect him of being a spy because he speaks Italian with an accent, being an American. He runs

from the army, meets up with Catherine, and they escape from Italy to Switzerland. Several

months later, she is ready to deliver her baby. There are complications, and after a Caesarean

Section, the baby is born lifeless. Catherine becomes unconscious, and dies, unable to be saved

GENRE
Modernism, War Drama, Historical Fiction, Tragedy, Horror or Gothic Fiction, Romance,

Literary Fiction.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

I.SETTING

The novel is set in war-torn Italy, and for a short time in Switzerland. The front line in

World War I in Italy is a gruesome picture of all-out war. During Frederick's breaks from the

front, Italy seems to be a deserted place, with very few people in the towns because they are all

at the front lines fighting the war.

(time) 1916–1918, in the middle of World War I

(place) Italy and Switzerland

II.CHARACTERS

•Lieutenant Frederic Henry - The novel’s narrator and protagonist. A young American

ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I, Henry meets his military duties with

quiet stoicism. He displays courage in battle, but his selfless motivations undermine all sense of

glory and heroism, abstract terms for which Henry has little patience. His life lacks real passion

until he meets the beautiful Catherine Barkley.

•Catherine Barkley - An English nurse’s aide who falls in love with Henry. Catherine is

exceptionally beautiful and possesses, perhaps, the most sensuously described hair in all of

literature. When the novel opens, Catherine’s grief for her dead fiancé launches her headlong

into a playful, though reckless, game of seduction. Her feelings for Henry soon intensify and

become more complicated, however, and she eventually swears lifelong fidelity to him.
•Rinaldi - A surgeon in the Italian army. Mischievous, wry, and oversexed, Rinaldi is Henry’s

closest friend. Although Rinaldi is a skilled doctor, his primary practice is seducing beautiful

women. When Henry returns to Gorizia, Rinaldi tries to whip up a convivial atmosphere.

•The priest - A kind, sweet, young man who provides spiritual guidance to the few soldiers

interested in it. Often the butt of the officers’ jokes, the priest responds with good-natured

understanding. Through Henry’s conversations with him regarding the war, the novel challenges

abstract ideals like glory, honor, and sacredness.

•Helen Ferguson - A nurse’s aide who works at the American hospital and a dear friend of

Catherine. Though Helen is friendly and accepting of Henry and Rinaldi’s visits to Catherine

early in the novel, her hysterical outburst over Henry and Catherine’s “immoral” affair

establishes her as an unhappy woman who is paranoid about her friend’s safety and anxious

about her own loneliness.

•Miss Gage - An American nurse who helps Henry through his recovery at the hospital in Milan.

At ease and accepting, Miss Gage becomes a friend to Henry, someone with whom he can share

a drink and gossip.

•Miss Van Campen - The superintendent of nurses at the American hospital in which Catherine

works. Miss Van Campen is strict, cold, and unpleasant. She disapproves of Henry and remains

on cool terms with him throughout his stay.

•Dr. Valentini - An Italian surgeon who comes to the American hospital to contradict the

hospital’s opinion that Henry must wait six months before having an operation on his leg. In

agreeing to perform surgery the next morning, Dr. Valentini displays the kind of self-assurance

and confidence that Henry (and the novel) celebrates.

•Count Greffi - A spry, ninety-four-year-old nobleman. The count represents a more mature

version of Henry’s character and Hemingway’s masculine ideal. He lives life to the fullest and

thinks for himself. Though the count dismisses the label “wise,” Henry clearly values his

thoughts and sees him as a sort of father figure.

•Ettore Moretti - An American soldier from San Francisco. Ettore, like Henry, fights for the

Italian army. Unlike Henry, however, Ettore is an obnoxious braggart. Quick to instigate a fight

or display the medals that he claims to have worked so hard to win, he believes in and pursues

the glory and honor that Henry eschews.

•Gino - A young Italian whom Henry meets at a decimated village. Gino’s patriotic belief that

his fatherland is sacred and should be protected at all costs contrasts sharply to Henry’s attitude

toward war.

•Ralph Simmons - An opera student of dubious talent. Simmons is the first person that Henry

goes to see after fleeing from battle. Simmons proves to be a generous friend, giving Henry

civilian clothes so that he can travel to Switzerland without drawing suspicion.

•Emilio - A bartender in the town of Stresa. Emilio proves a good friend to Henry and

Catherine, helping them reunite, saving them from arrest, and ushering them off to safety.

•Bonello - An ambulance driver under Henry’s command. Bonello displays his ruthlessness

when he brutally unloads a pistol round into the head of an uncooperative engineer whom Henry

has already shot.

III.PLOT

A.)Exposition
 A Farewell to Arms is greatly informed by Hemingway's own wartime experience.

Rejected from the U.S. army for his poor eyesight (which he later falsely claimed was due to

boxing), Hemingway's determination to join the war effort landed him a post with the Red Cross

as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. He jumped at the chance to be a canteen-provider on

the front lines, handing out chocolate and cigarettes to the troops during battle, and on July 8,

1918 he was hit in the leg by an Austrian mortar shell. Despite the wound, he managed to carry

an Italian soldier to the nearby command post. However, machine-gun fire struck him in the knee

and foot, and he was eventually sent to a hospital in Milan, Italy. A similar injury befalls Henry

in the novel.

During his convalescence, the 19-year-old Hemingway had an affair with an American

Red Cross nurse seven years his senior, Agnes von Kurowsky. This experience inspired Henry's

romance with Catherine in the novel, though Hemingway most likely embellished it; most

scholars believe Agnes, a committed nurse, never let him move beyond kissing and did not

reciprocate his intense feelings. Though she did not die during the war, as Catherine does, Agnes

eventually rejected Hemingway via a letter.

The painful emotions of a broken body and heart no doubt embittered Hemingway. A

Farewell to Arms (1929), which some critics consider the finest novel to come out of the war and

Hemingway's personal best, reflected the widespread disillusionment with war - and with a

world that allows such barbarity - of Hemingway's young but weary post-WWI

B.)Initial incident

The initial incident in the plot was the first time that Catherine and Frederick meet. They

seem to have been made for each other, and hit it off instantly.
C.) Complication/conflicts

1. One example of conflict in the novel is the escape of Catherine and Frederick from Italy when

the police are trying to arrest Frederick for being a deserter. They snuck out of their hotel room

during the night and rowed their way to Switzerland. The Italian police never captured him.

2. Major conflict-while there is no single, clear-cut conflict, friction does arise when Henry’s

love for Catherine cannot quell his innate restlessness.

3. Pregnancy and an empty bear bottle.

That’s right: we said "bear," not beer. Catherine is pregnant and Frederic has to go back

to the front in three weeks. In the meantime, they plan a little vacation. Unfortunately, Miss Van

Campen thinks that a liquor bottle shaped like a bear is evidence that his jaundice is self-

inflicted. When he defends himself by talking about his "groin," he gets his butt sent immediately

back to the front, not knowing if he will ever see Catherine again.

4. Love and war are a dangerous combination.

When Catherine and Frederic meet, she falls in love instantly, but he thinks that love is

the last thing he needs. Anybody can die at any moment, but, in the middle of a war, death

weighs heavy on the scales of chance. So who wants to fall in love?

D.) Suspense

“Please, please, please, dear God, don’t let her die. God please make her not die. I’ll do

anything you say if you don’t let her die “

-Everything is so nice for them in Switzerland until Catherine goes into labor. Suspense over

whether the baby will die, and whether the baby is dead, just warm us up for the suspense

Frederic is feeling in the lines we quote above.

E.) Climax

Broadly speaking, the Italian retreat, but more specifically, Henry’s capture and near-

execution by the battle police

F.)Denouement

Trying to figure out how to say good-bye.

-The baby is dead. Catherine is dead. And that’s the only thing clear. Frederic tries, but he can’t

say good-by and have it feel like anything.

G.) Ending

Alone in the rain.

-Such a lonely ending. Frederic can evade death, but he can’t help Catherine do it. And, at the

end, he is all alone in the rain.

IV.POINT OF VIEW

A Farewell to Arms was written in the 1st person point of view. Hemingway creates

characters who seem to be pretty shallow, but are driven by much deeper forces. For example,

Catherine Barkley seems like an English lady nurse who likes to be around Frederick. When one

looks at her more deeply, one can see her deep desire to please him is driven by the loss of her

first love, and she thinks that if she does everything that Frederick wants her to, maybe somehow
he will be saved from the fate of her first love who died in the war.Henry narrates the story in the

first person but sometimes switches to the second person during his more philosophical

reflections. Henry relates only what he sees and does and only what he could have learned of

other characters from his experience with them.

V.THEME

•The main theme in A Farewell to Arms is that war kills us in more ways than one. It can wound

us in battle, but it can scar us in sometimes deeper ways. It causes betrayal, like the paranoid

Italians turning on Frederick because he spoke with a foreign accent. It can even trouble us from

afar, as in the case of Catherine, how she was haunted by her long-time love's death in the war,

several years after he was gone. War can touch us in many more ways than any other thing of

human making.

VI.FIGURE OF SPEECH

IRONY

An example of irony in the story is the ending. It is dramatic irony, because the reader

knows that something will go wrong during the birth, because their life is too perfect in

Switzerland, and this is Hemingway- nothing can end as well as things were going in a

Hemingway novel. Frederick is broken by the death of Catherine

VII.SYMBOL

•Rain

Rain serves in the novel as a potent symbol of the inevitable disintegration of happiness

in life. Catherine infuses the weather with meaning as she and Henry lie in bed listening to the
storm outside. As the rain falls on the roof, Catherine admits that the rain scares her and says that

it has a tendency to ruin things for lovers. Of course, no meteorological phenomenon has such

power; symbolically, however, Catherine’s fear proves to be prophetic, for doom does eventually

come to the lovers. After Catherine’s death, Henry leaves the hospital and walks home in the

rain. Here, the falling rain validates Catherine’s anxiety and confirms one of the novel’s main

contentions: great love, like anything else in the world—good or bad, innocent or deserving—

cannot last.

•Catherine’s Hair

Although it is not a recurring symbol, Catherine’s hair is an important one. In the early,

easy days of their relationship, as Henry and Catherine lie in bed, Catherine takes down her hair

and lets it cascade around Henry’s head. The tumble of hair reminds Henry of being enclosed

inside a tent or behind a waterfall. This lovely description stands as a symbol of the couple’s

isolation from the world. With a war raging around them, they manage to secure a blissful

seclusion, believing themselves protected by something as delicate as hair. Later, however, when

they are truly isolated from the ravages of war and living in peaceful Switzerland, they learn the

harsh lesson that love, in the face of life’s cruel reality, is as fragile and ephemeral as hair.

VIII. COMMENTS, SUGGESTIONS ANSD RECOMMENDATIONS

I would add that the narrator, Frederick Henry, lives entirely in the present; he seems to

have no significant past, though he is presumably close to 30 years of age (his buddy Rinaldi is a

surgeon and the same age as himself), and, since he is an officer, probably has a college

education. His family continues to support him though they are estranged for reasons never said.

It is difficult to imagine a future for him and he never seems to imagine one for himself beyond
enjoying the present moment. It is clear than his alcoholism will lead to worse things than

jaundice. (Hemingway was 30 when this novel was published, though of course he was much

younger during the war. Probably no coincidence.)

Another observation. Henry is a-moral. Though he would never commit murder, he shot

and killed a sergeant who was running away to rejoin his own unit rather than obey Henry's order

to help get a car out of the mud. This killing faded from his mind as soon as it was done. This is

rather a close parallel to his own situation when the military police tried to shoot him as a

deserter, so who is he to complain about the senselessness of war?

The narrator is strong and resourceful and nobody's fool. So what is he doing in the

Italian army in the first place? It's not his country and not his war (he doesn't seem moved by the

entry of the US into the war later in the story).

In any case, I enjoyed the novel and your review and I hope that BBC woman has seen the light.

IX. FILM PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR

Producer- Edward A. Blatt

Director- Frank Borzage

X. REFERENCE

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/farewell/facts.html

http://literapedia.wikispaces.com/A Farewell to Arms

http://www.ernesthemingway.org.uk/