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A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

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Which characters die in A Farewell To Arms, and how do they die? 

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Passini dies in a blast. Frederic, the narrator sees "the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and [hears] the bombs." When he gets loose and comes to his senses he sees Passini with both legs smashed. One is completely gone and the other is barely attached with some tendons. The narrator tries to get a tourniquet on him but Passini dies before he can.

An unnamed man with a hemorrhage dies on a stretcher above Frederic in the ambulance after the blast. He alerts the driver that the man is bleeding more quickly; the blood is dripping down onto him. He says that at the post, they removed the stretcher, added another one, and drove on.

Aymo dies as he's crossing tracks. Two shots ring out and he falls face down. The narrator and Piani try to help him, pulling him over with his head uphill. Unfortunately, he dies while they're trying to perform field medicine. They believe that Italian soldiers shot him.

An unnamed lieutenant-colonel is shot by a riverbank for abandoning his troops. Another officer is shot for the same thing soon after.

Catherine and Frederic's baby dies. He's strangled with his own umbilical cord. Frederic tells Catherine that he's fine.

Catherine dies soon after giving birth. She has a hemorrhage and they can't save her. The narrator prays for her not to die but she still does. He says goodbye to her and walks back to his hotel in the rain after she's gone.

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As A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is set during World War I, death and dying are omnipresent in the novel. 

Catherine Barkly's fiance has died in combat, leaving Catherine single and vulnerable, opening up the possibility for the romance that develops between her and the protagonist Frederic Henry.

Next, an Italian  sergeant wounded by Frederic is killed by an Italian corpsman. During the ensuing escape, several people are captured by the Germans and executed.

When Frederic and Catherine finally reach neutral Switzerland, they seem to have found an idyllic paradise, free from the deaths and dangers of the war. Unfortunately, Catherine has a difficult pregnancy, and her son is stillborn, strangled in the womb by the umbilical cord. Catherine herself ends up dying in labor as well; thus escape from the war has not provided ultimate safety from mortality.

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