Lieutenant Frederic Henry

Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered to serve with an Italian ambulance unit during World War I. Like his Italian companions, he enjoys drinking, trying to treat the war as a joke, and (it is implied) visiting brothels. Before the beginning of a big offensive, he meets Catherine Barkley, one of a group of British nurses assigned to staff a hospital unit. Henry begins the prelude to an affair with her but is interrupted by having to go to the front during the offensive; he is wounded, has an operation on his knee, and is sent to recuperate in Milan, where he again meets Miss Barkley, falls in love with her, and sleeps with her in his hospital room. When Henry returns to the front, he knows Catherine is pregnant. In the retreat from Caporetto, Henry is seized at a bridge across the Tagliamento River and realizes he is about to be executed for deserting his troops. He escapes by swimming the river. At Stresa, he rejoins Catherine and, before he can be arrested for desertion, the two lovers row across Lake Como to Switzerland. For a few months, they live happily at an inn near Montreux—hiking, reading, and discussing American sights (such as Niagara Falls, the stockyards, and the Golden Gate) that Catherine must see after the war. Catherine is to have her baby in a hospital. Her stillborn son is delivered by Caesarian section; that same night, Catherine dies. Lieutenant Henry walks back to his hotel through darkness and rain. As developed by Hemingway, Henry is a protagonist who is sensitive to the horrors and beauties of life and war. Many of his reactions are subtly left for the reader to supply. At the end of the novel, for example, Henry feels sorrow and pity for the dead baby strangled by the umbilical cord, but the full, unbearable weight of Catherine’s death falls upon the reader.

Catherine Barkley

Catherine Barkley, the nurse whom Frederic Henry nicknames “Cat.” She had been engaged to a childhood sweetheart killed at the Somme. When she falls in love with Henry, she gives herself freely to him. Although they both want to be married, she decides the ceremony would not be a proper one while she is pregnant; she feels they are already married. Catherine seems neither a deep thinker nor a very complex person, but she enjoys life, especially good food, drink, and love. She has a premonition that she will die in the rain; the premonition is tragically fulfilled at the hospital in Lausanne.

Lieutenant Rinaldi

Lieutenant Rinaldi (rih-NAHL-dee), Frederick Henry’s jokingly cynical friend. Over many bottles, they share their experiences and feelings. Although he denies it, Rinaldi is a master of the art of priest-baiting. He is very fond of girls, but he teases Henry about Catherine, calling her a “cool goddess.”

The Priest

The Priest, a young man who blushes easily but manages to survive the oaths and obscenities of the soldiers. He hates the war and its horrors.

Piani

Piani (PYAH-nee), a big Italian soldier who sticks by Henry in the retreat from Caporetto after the others in the unit have been killed or have deserted. With other Italian soldiers he can be tough, but with Henry he is gentle and tolerant of what men suffer in wartime.

Helen Ferguson

Helen Ferguson, a Scottish nurse who is Catherine Barkley’s companion when Frederic Henry arrives in Stresa. She is harsh with him because of his affair with Catherine.

Count Greffi

Count Greffi, ninety-four years old, a former diplomat with whom Frederic Henry plays billiards at Stresa. A gentle cynic, he says that men do not become wise as they grow old; they merely become more careful.

Ettore Moretti

Ettore Moretti (EHT-toh-ray moh-REHT-tee), an Italian from San Francisco serving in the Italian army. Much decorated, he is a professional hero whom Frederic Henry dislikes and finds boring.

The central characters are the star-crossed lovers, Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry. Critics sometimes accuse Catherine as being an impossibly romantic character, a creation utterly unconvincing as a human personality. Many readers, however, find her quite credible and convincing. In any case, she is the necessary priestess of love in the novel's scheme of things. She is also a nurse whose function is to nourish and to sustain the wounded. Most importantly, she is the lover, the character who embodies the exemplar-priest's vision: "When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." This is the primary lesson she imparts to the novel's apprentice-protagonist, Frederic.

Among Frederic's other exemplars may be numbered the gentle priest, with his vision of sacred love, his sense of dignity and decorum and uncorrupted traditional values as imparted through the symbolic landscape of his home-country, the Abruzzi, where Frederic wishes to go. Another exemplar is the venerable Count Greffi, a minor character somewhat reminiscent of the Count in The Sun Also Rises (1926, a polite and civilized man with excellent taste, a firm grasp on values, who, at age ninety-four, plays a very solid, precise game of billiards, and who, above all, helps Frederic to see that his love for Catherine is a "religious feeling."