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A Farewell to Arms | Introduction

Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms, is often regarded as his best artistic achievement. It was certainly his greatest commercial success to date with 80,000 copies sold within the first four months. The money earned for the novel, though, came too late to prevent his father from committing suicide due to financial stress and a losing struggle with diabetes. The novel established Ernest Hemingway as the literary master of a style that was characterized by brisk assertive staccato, or crisp precise prose. The novel also gave rise to the infamous myth of Hemingway as the epitome of American machismo. This owed as much to the popularity of his novel and his friendship with Gary Cooper—who played Frederic Henry in the film version of the novel—as it did to Hemingway's own heroism.

The book is the story of a young American named Frederic Henry who volunteers for service with the Italian army in World War I and falls in love with his English nurse, with whom he deserts from the retreating Italian front. Having escaped to Switzerland, they live in harmony until the tragic end of her pregnancy, during which both she and the child die. Much has been said about the prose style Hemingway used and a great debate has been waged over whether the novel is about machismo and the sex object, Catherine Barkley. However, A Farewell to Arms is not a novel glorifying war. Instead, it is a tragic love story whose farewell is from Frederic to the woman whose arms held sanity in the crazy world of the Great War.

A Farewell to Arms Summary

Hemingway once referred to A Farewell to Arms as his version of Romeo and Juliet. Like Shakespeare’s play, the novel is a tale of tragic romance between an American Lieutenant, Frederic Henry, and a British army nurse, Catherine Barkley, that unfolds along the Italian front during World War I. Although The Sun Also Rises is comprised of three “books” of unequal length, the division serves very little dramatic purpose. By contrast, Hemingway’s second masterpiece is divided into five books that are analogous to the five acts of Shakespearean tragedy.

A Farewell to Arms is told in retrospect by its main male character, Second Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American attached to an Italian ambulance unit stationed in the town of Gorizia near the battlefront with the Austrians. Frederic is a “normally” dissolute soldier; off duty, he drinks in the local taverns and frequents the town's brothels with his friend Lieutenant Rinaldi, a good-looking Italian surgeon, both of whom are chastised by a Catholic priest. When Henry returns to the front from one of these binges, he is told by Rinaldi that a unit of British nurses has been stationed at a field hospital nearby and that one of them, Catherine Barkley, has captured his fancy.

Rinaldi introduces Frederic to Catherine. She finds it odd that he is an American who is effectively in the Italian army. He learns that Catherine’s fiancée has already been killed in the war. At this stage in their relationship, while he certainly finds Catherine to be attractive, Frederic is engaged in a casual romantic game: when he tries to kiss her for the first time and she slaps him, this is merely an expected countermove in his mind. Taking the wounded from the frontlines to the rear, Frederic sees Catherine on occasion. She gives him a St. Anthony’s medal. Frederic is badly wounded in his legs during an Austrian artillery attack and sent to a field hospital where he is visited by Rinaldi and the Priest.

In Book Two, Frederic is transferred to a hospital in Milan where he is visited by Catherine, and she manages to have herself reassigned there to be by his side. Frederic is first told that he will have to wait six months before an operation can be performed on his legs, but when he asks for a second opinion, he is immediately... » Complete A Farewell to Arms Summary