[In the following essay, Phelan emphasizes the novel's progression in voice which allows Frederic's character to develop gradually into a manifestation of Hemingway's views of the universe.]

This chapter builds on the model of voice outlined in the essay on Vanity Fair by deploying it to reexamine Hemingway's famous style in A Farewell to Arms and to offer an account of how voice contributes to the novel's progression. Although I want to claim some originality for my specific analyses, the overarching goal of the first part of the chapter is quite traditional: to show how the technique is working in the service of the narrative's larger effects. Later, however, I expand my focus from voice to the autodiegetic narration more generally and investigate not just positive contributions of the technique but also some instructive problems and an interesting paradox in Hemingway's use of it. In looking at the problems, I am exploring the space where authorial agency and textual phenomena are in some tension, where intentionality seems to pull in one direction and the textual signs pull in another. In looking at the paradox, which concerns how the knowledge Frederic Henry arrives at through his experience does and does not inform his narration of that experience, I am trying to show how attending to narrative progression helps readers to understand a peculiarity of many autodiegetic narratives.

VOICE AND STYLE IN A FAREWELL TO ARMS

Taken collectively, critical discussions of A Farewell to Arms are striking in at least two respects: there is considerable consensus about the nature and effect of Hemingway's style, and there is considerable disagreement about the nature and effect of the narrative as a whole. Here I shall try to develop new grounds for consensus about its larger design by disrupting—or better, complicating—the consensus about the style. My contention is that A Farewell to Arms, though marred by Hemingway's characterization of Catherine, traces a coherent process of growth and change in Frederic Henry that culminates, tragically and ironically, in the moment of his greatest loss. Furthermore, I believe that Hemingway's representation of this process cannot be fully appreciated until we combine our attention to style, character, and structure with careful attention to voice. Thus, I will focus on Frederic's voice, with an occasional glance at the voices of other characters, in order to assess how Hemingway's modulation of voices helps to reveal—and contribute to—the novel's gradually unfolding design.

Larzer Ziff offers an apt and characteristic, albeit incomplete, description of Hemingway's style: a predominance of simple sentences; the frequent use of “blank” modifiers such as nice; the restricted use of figures of speech; the frequent use of proper nouns; the frequent use of indirect constructions (e.g., “took a look” rather than “looked”). In an essay subtitled “The Novel as Pure Poetry,” Daniel Schneider adds imagery as an element of style, notes the recurrence of images of rain, desolation, impurity, and corruption in A Farewell to Arms, and offers the strongest statement of its effect: the style creates “the perfect correlative … of the emotions of despair and bitterness. … Virtually every sentence says, ‘Death, despair, failure, emptiness.’ … The novel begins with this state of mind, and it is established so firmly, through the repetition of the central symbols, that any emotions other than despair and bitterness may thereafter intrude only with difficulty” (273-75). In general, discussions of the style assume not only that it is consistent within the narrative but also that it has consistent and predictable effects. One burden of my argument will be to show that similar stylistic features of Frederic's discourse actually create widely divergent effects because they are spoken by recognizably different voices.

The disagreement about the effect of the whole no doubt has multiple causes, but one of them surely is the problem of establishing with any confidence the relation between Hemingway as implied author and Frederic. Some of the different relations posited can be seen in even a brief sampling of critical commentary: Schneider argues that the novel is a lyric expression of despair, failure, and emptiness; just as the speaker in a lyric poem may be distinguishable from the author even as that speaker expresses the author's attitudes, so too Frederic is distinguishable from but a surrogate for Hemingway. Earl Rovit views the novel as an epistemological tale “though not a tragedy”; Frederic learns something as he goes along—in a sense, narrator moves closer to author—but he does not attain tragic stature. Scott Donaldson maintains that the narrative is Frederic's failed apologia; he has taken advantage of Catherine and is now unsuccessfully trying to avoid taking responsibility for his behavior; in Donaldson's reading, author and narrator are consistently distant from each other. Gerry Brenner contends that the narrative is Frederic's unsuccessful attempt to make sense of his experience before he takes his life; on his account, Hemingway and Frederic are miles apart. Given these divergent readings, I want to investigate what happens to our understanding of the author narrator relationship when we try not only to see it but to hear it.

There is just one feature of the long discussion of voice in chapter 2 that I want to repeat here because it bears directly on the author-narrator relationship. When we detect a discrepancy between an author's values and those expressed in a narrator's voice, we have the situation of a double-voiced discourse: the narrator's voice is contained within—and its communication thereby complicated by—the author's. In such situations, I will employ the term distance to refer to the relationship between the authorial voice and the narrative voice.¹

THE VOICES OF BOOK 1

Let us listen to Frederic Henry at the beginning of the narrative.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

(3)

This paragraph is often cited (and parodied) as a quintessential example of Hemingway's style, and in fact at least two critics have been moved to recast Frederic's prose into verse.² Critical disagreements about Frederic himself, however, begin right here. Commenting on this passage and the descriptions of it as emanating from the voice of a “tough guy” (Walker Gibson) or the voice of a “spiritually maimed” individual (John Edward Hardy), Gerry Brenner writes, “Both the ‘tough’ and the ‘maimed’ labels judge Frederic's style upon the basis of the perennial illusion that Hemingway, a crippled tough, a sentimentalist masquerading behind he-man brusqueness, wants his reader to endorse Frederic's values, to emulate his conduct, and to imitate his style” (34). Brenner wants to accept the label “maimed” but to see its consequences differently: Frederic is not maimed and tough, but maimed and “disoriented.” I will try to adjudicate these different conclusions by attending to both the stylistic and transstylistic features of the voice.

As has often been noted, the use of the definite article (“the late summer”) and the demonstrative adjective (“that year”) indicate that there are to be no preliminaries here: we are asked to recognize that the narratee already knows the narrator and the year referred to—or we are asked to conclude that the speaker is disoriented.³ The style of the rest of the passage does not give other evidence of disorientation. Instead, it locates the voice in space (at the window of the house in the village) and gives an orderly description of what can be seen from that window, a description that continues beyond this paragraph as the narrator's gaze moves from the river and the road to the plain and then the mountains. We can conclude, at least tentatively, that the voice addresses an audience that already has some knowledge of the context of the utterance.

Strikingly, however, this shared knowledge between voice and audience does not form the basis for emotional intimacy. As many others have already noted, the voice does not share feelings or evaluations but focuses on the sensual surface of things. The voice, in effect, becomes a camcorder: this is where I was; these are some things I could see; this is what happened as I kept my eye on the passing scene. The clear, controlled style and the evenness that comes with the paratactic syntax—we saw this and this and this—give Frederic's apparent objectivity and neutrality a self-assured, authoritative quality. Nevertheless, the lack of evaluation is conspicuous. This voice could be “tough” or “maimed” or many other things we might project onto it.

Once, however, we consider the trans-stylistic features of the voice and the way that its discourse is actually double-voiced, we can better assess its quality. Behind the paratactic sentence structures we sense another consciousness and thus another voice—Hemingway's—conveying information that the narrator's voice is not aware of. As we move in the authorial audience from the description of the river (“In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels”) to the description of the troops, whose marching disrupts the natural order of things (“and the leaves fell early that year”), we make inferences about the war's negative effect on nature, even in its apparently nonviolent activities such as the marching of troops. These inferences, as I will argue at some length below, are controlled by the authorial voice but not the narrating voice.

Furthermore, what is true about the distance between Frederic and Hemingway in this opening passage remains true for most of the narration in book 1 of the novel. In making this statement, I am parting company with most other critics of the novel, who see Frederic's later experiences coloring his retrospective account of his life.⁴ In terms of Gérard Genette's distinction between who sees and who speaks, between, that is, vision and voice, I find that Hemingway typically restricts us to Frederic's vision and voice at the time of the action, even though he is narrating after the fact. This technique highlights the limits of Frederic's understanding early in the narrative—and nowhere more so than in the passage at the end of the first chapter: “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army”(4).

The air of authority and the paratactic structure are again joined here. But the discrepancy between Frederic and Hemingway arises not through any particular linguistic signal but rather through our awareness of the difference in values between them. Frederic is voicing an official party line here, mouthing the military's position on the damage done by the cholera; his personal voice is inhabited by the social voice of the military command. Hemingway asks his audience to recognize the severe limits of the values expressed in that voice: seven thousand lives can be dismissed with the adverb “only” and the lives of those outside of uniform simply do not count. For all the authority of his voice at the beginning of the narrative, Frederic Henry is strikingly ignorant; the implied presence of Hemingway's voice, which gives the sentence its pointed irony, makes Frederic's voice naive. This gap between Frederic and Hemingway is arguably the most important revelation of the first chapter. It establishes a tension between author and narrator that is one major source of our continued interest in the narrative, and it helps define the major initial instability of the narrative: Frederic's situation in a war whose effects and potential consequences he is ignorant of.

Since, as I noted above, this way of hearing the voice is not the one adopted by previous critics and since it has significant consequences for my claims about the larger dynamics of the narrative, I would like to consider the basis of my case more fully. Since Frederic is telling the tale after the fact, we should consider the hypothesis that he, not Hemingway, is the source of the irony in that last sentence of the first chapter: the knowledge he has gained from his experience would inform his discourse, and we would be asked to know that he knows. The problem with this hypothesis is that we have no evidence that his knowledge is informing his narration. The past tense in fictive narration may function as narrative present⁵—and in the absence of clear signs to the contrary, that is the way it typically functions. Since there is nothing in the chapter—no switch to the present tense, no clue of self-conscious narration—signaling that his vision is that of the man who has lived through these events and now sees them differently, it makes sense to conclude that both Frederic's vision and his voice are those of the time of the action. Indeed, the definite articles of the chapter's first sentence seem designed in part to indicate right from the outset that Frederic is offering his vision at the time of the action: we are back there with him in “the house in the village that looked across the river and trees to the mountains.”

Consider his later statement, also in the past tense, where the relationship between narrator's and author's voices, though perhaps more readily apprehended, works the same way: the war, Frederic says, “seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies” (37). Again we have the vision and the voice of Frederic at the time of the action, and again the discourse is double-voiced by Hemingway, who has already shown us that the war is dangerous to everybody. An even more extreme statement along these lines that Hemingway at one point placed just after Catherine's arrival in Milan was deleted from the final version of the novel:

The world had always been a fine place for me. I saw the things there were to see and felt the things that happened and did not worry about the rest. There were always plenty of things to see and something always happened. You needed a certain amount of money and you did not need the gonorrhea but if you had no money and had the gonorrhea life was still quite passable. I liked to drink and liked to eat and liked nearly everything. The war was bad but not bad for me because it was not my war but I could see how bad it could become.

(Ms. pp. 206-7)

Hemingway does not need this passage because he has already presented its content in more dramatic fashion, but its unironic presentation of Frederic's clearly limited view is consistent with the effect of the narrative discourse as I have been analyzing it: Frederic's voice conveys his beliefs at the time of the action, while our awareness of Hemingway's voice conveys the distance between narrator and implied author.

The more general issue raised by the question of whether Frederic or Hemingway is responsible for the ironic effects of the discourse is one about Frederic's degree of self-consciousness. To read Frederic's voice in book 1 as if it is infused with the vision he has at the time of the narration is to entail the conclusion that Frederic is a self-conscious narrator, aware that he is presenting double-voiced discourse, aware of the ironic effects he is creating by portraying himself in this way. On this reading, Frederic becomes a kind of Humbert Humbert of the AWOL set, that is, a narrator much like Vladimir Nabokov's self-conscious artist in Lolita, one who carefully constructs his narrative as a work of art. To argue that Hemingway rather than Frederic is responsible for the double-voicing is to entail the conclusion that Frederic is not self-consciously creating the narrative's effects. The control of the effects, in other words, belongs not to Frederic but to Hemingway. The manuscript shows that at one stage of composition, Hemingway thought to have Frederic talk about his difficulty with the narration:

This is not a picture of war, or really about war. It is only a story. That is why sometimes it may seem there are not many people in it, nor enough noises, nor enough smells. There were always people and noises unless it was quiet and always smells but in trying to tell the story I cannot get all in always but have a hard time keeping to the story alone and sometimes it seems as though it were all quiet. But it wasn't quiet. If you try and put in everything you would never get a single day done.

(Ms. p. 174)

Although the passage emphasizes Frederic's lack of control, Hemingway's decision to delete it supports my point. By showing that Frederic was self-conscious about the task of telling his story, the passage interferes with the effects of the narrative discourse Hemingway left. As I have been suggesting, the discourse indicates that Frederic describes the way things looked and the way he felt in a manner that comes naturally to him; Hemingway arranges those descriptions so that we can understand more than Frederic is aware he is communicating.⁶

There are other places in the early part of the narrative where Frederic's apparently distinctive voice mouths conventional positions that he has not closely examined and that Hemingway clearly disapproves of. I will look at two especially important instances, the first involving his argument with Passini about the justification for the war, the second involving his interaction with Catherine. Just before he is wounded, Frederic debates Passini on the need for the war. Their positions are very clear and very opposed. Passini argues, “There is nothing worse than war,” while Frederic counters, “Defeat is worse” (50). Again Frederic is clear, authoritative—and, in a significant sense, naive. His authoritative tone again depends in part on the paratactic structure and in part on his own confidence in conventional justifications: “They come after you. They take your home. They take your sisters.” “I think you do not know anything about being conquered and so you think it is not bad.” “I know it is bad but we must finish it” (50). Passini's voice of respectful authority, by contrast, is established through its reference to concrete possibilities and its firm but carefully argued rejection of the conventional wisdom:

“War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele? What if we take Carso and Monfalcone and Trieste? Where are we then? Did you see all the far mountains to-day? Do you think we could take all them too? Only if the Austrians stop fighting. One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is a war.”

(50-51)

Hemingway shows that Passini has the greater share of wisdom not only by letting him “win” the debate but also by following it with the landing of the shell that kills Passini and wounds Frederic.

The difference in Frederic's voice when he describes the landing of the shell and Passini's death clinches the point: the voice is urgent, anxious, and focused on the concrete; it also makes way for the more urgent and anguished voice of physical pain that springs from the dying Passini. We recognize, though Frederic does not, that his voice of conventional wisdom loses its force when juxtaposed with the voices involved in the concrete rendering of the scene:

and then I heard close to me some one saying “Mama mia! Oh, mama Mia!” I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed. His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected. He bit his arm and moaned, “Oh mama mia, mama Mia,” then, “Dio te salve, Maria. Dio te salve, Maria. Oh jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia mama Mia oh purest lovely Mary shoot me. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Oh Jesus lovely Mary stop it. Oh oh oh oh,” then choking, “Mama mama mia.” Then he was quiet biting his arm, the stump of his leg twitching.

(55)

Besides Frederic's relation to the war, the other major instability of the early part of the narrative is his relation to Catherine. Again, one way that Hemingway establishes the instability is through the discrepancy between Frederic's voice and his own. Frederic remains the objective recorder speaking from the time of the action, but one of the things he records is Catherine's dialogue. By skillfully juxtaposing their conversations with Frederic's commentary, Hemingway plays Frederic's voice against Catherine's and double-voices Frederic's narration. Here is Frederic's rendering of part of his third meeting with Catherine:

“You did say you loved me, didn't you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.

“And you call me Catherine?”

“Catherine.” We walked on a way and were stopped under a tree.

“Say ‘I've come back to Catherine in the night.”’

“I've come back to Catherine in the night.”

“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“I love you so and it's been awful. You won't go away?” …

I kissed both her shut eyes. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. 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 had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me. …

[Catherine:] “This is a rotten game we play isn't it?”

“What game?”

“Don't be dull.”

“I'm not, on purpose.”

“You're a nice boy,” she said. “And you play it as well as you know how. But it's a rotten game.”

“Do you always know what people think?”

“Not always. But I do with you. You don't have to pretend you love me. That's over for the evening.”

(30-31)

Clearly, Frederic's commentary is self-indicting in its selfishness, its calculation that playing this game with Catherine is better than going to the house for officers, its indifference to the consequences of his actions. But Hemingway's orchestration of the voices does more than that with the scene. Hemingway shows Catherine insisting that Frederic adopt a particular voice and speak the language of romantic love so that she too can adopt that voice. Yet to speak the language of love on command is to speak without sincerity, to mouth the words but be detached from the feelings they're intended to express. By thus commanding Frederic to speak a language that can never be sincerely spoken on command, Catherine puts herself in a position where her response to Frederic's words must also be at some remove from her feelings. To act as she does is indeed to act “a little crazy.” Then after Hemingway inserts Frederic's voice of selfishness in his address to the reader, the voice of the male on the make, Hemingway returns to Catherine and shows her speaking sincerely and frankly. The movement from her earlier voice to this one is so great that Frederic cannot keep up with it, and he tries to maintain the pretense of sincerity by feigning ignorance. With this move in the play among the voices, Hemingway shows us that Frederic's statement about what he is doing with Catherine is not just extremely selfish but is also woefully inadequate in its understanding of Catherine and what she knows about the way each of them is behaving. Frederic is out of his depth with her just as he is out of his depth in the war.

More generally, by establishing considerable distance from Frederic's commentary and some from Catherine's behavior in the earlier part of the scene, Hemingway is implicitly revealing his beliefs about love. It is unselfish, other-directed, based on honesty; Hemingway expresses some of what is implicit here in the priest's later words, “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve” (72). Another significant measure of Frederic's distance from Hemingway will be where he stands in relation to this authorial norm.

CLOSING THE DISTANCE

One of the striking features of A Farewell to Arms is how skillfully Hemingway gradually closes the distance between himself and Frederic and how he uses the narration to signal Frederic's changes. In Frederic's conversation with the priest after he returns from Milan to the front, Frederic articulates one of his traits, which in turn sheds light on Hemingway's general strategy in the novel: “I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking” (179). Frederic typically recounts his experiences without commenting on his feelings and thoughts about them. The devices that Hemingway uses to have us assess Frederic's progress are, for the most part, the ones we have seen in the passages already discussed: asking us to see behind what Frederic explicitly says to what he unwittingly reveals; using the dialogue of another character to give us a perspective different from—and sometimes superior to—Frederic's. In addition, by making Frederic more of a recorder than a reflector, Hemingway is able to emphasize those places where Frederic does explicitly reveal his feelings. For example, when Frederic, after engaging in the drinking contest at the mess and then rushing to the hospital only to find out that Catherine could not see him, tells us, “I had treated seeing Catherine very lightly, I had gotten somewhat drunk and had nearly forgotten to come but when I could not see her there I was feeling lonely and hollow” (41), we see the passage as a very powerful signal of his movement past the attitudes expressed in the “I didn't care if she was crazy” passage. The importance of Frederic's feelings here is further emphasized by Hemingway's use of “there.” The adverb indicates that Frederic's vision is shifting in this passage from the time of the action (when he says “to come” he is locating himself at the hospital) to the time of the narration (he steps back and looks at himself “there”) and thereby indicates the importance of the event in his memory.

This passage, however, also illustrates Hemingway's habit of asking us to see more than Frederic tells us. Even as Frederic is moving past his “I don't care if she is crazy” attitude, he remains self-centered. He does not think about Catherine and how she might be feeling, though Ferguson has told him that Catherine is “not awfully well.” He thinks only about himself and his feelings: “I was lonely and hollow.”

In the second half of the novel, after his long convalescence in Milan with Catherine, Frederic does change—and so does his voice. When Frederic returns to the front after his summer in Milan, he discusses the war with the priest.

[Priest:] “I had hoped for something.”

[Frederic:] “Defeat?”

[Priest:] “No. Something more.”

[Frederic:] “There isn't anything more. Except victory. It may be worse.”

(179)

Frederic's voice here now echoes Passini's; the conventional wisdom has been replaced by the values of the Italian peasant. Furthermore, as Frederic voices values more in line with Hemingway's, the authoritative quality of the voice is softened to some extent: victory “may be worse.” As I have argued at some length in Reading People, Reading Plots, the main reason for Frederic's change is Catherine. His time with her in Milan has exposed him to a world based on values of commitment, tenderness, and service, values that had been absent from his life before he met her. When he returns to the front, the contrast is sharp enough to shock him into articulate knowledge in this conversation with the priest.

Perhaps the best evidence of the change in his attitude toward Catherine occurs in a scene during the retreat from Caporetto in which her voice inhabits his. Early in the narrative—just before Frederic makes his comment about playing a game with Catherine—Catherine pretends that Frederic is her dead boyfriend, and she asks him to say, “I've come back to Catherine in the night.” She then says, “Oh, darling, you have come back, haven't you.” When Frederic says yes, she continues, “I love you so and it's been awful. You won't go away?” (30). Her voice here is romantic and committed at the same time that its dominant note is wistfulness: she knows she is only pretending, reaching back beyond Frederic for her lost love. During the retreat, Frederic dreams that he is with Catherine again. Still in the dream, he is surprised that they are together:

“Are you really there?”

“Of course I'm here. I wouldn't go away. This doesn't make any difference between us.”

“You're so lovely and sweet. You wouldn't go away in the night, would you?”

“Of course I wouldn't go away. I'm always here. I come whenever you want me.”

(197-98)

This time it is Frederic who says, “You wouldn't go away.” Intermingled with Catherine's voice this way, the utterance here conveys his attachment and dependence, his wistful desire to reach beyond the retreat and be reunited with Catherine.

Just before this part of the dream, we hear Frederic adopt not Catherine's specific words but her voice and its values:

“Good-night, Catherine,” I said out loud. “I hope you sleep well. If it's too uncomfortable, darling, lie on the other side,” I said. “I'll get you some cold water. In a little while it will be morning and then it won't be so bad. I'm sorry he makes you so uncomfortable. Try and go to sleep, sweet.”

(197)

This is Catherine's voice of solicitude and service, a voice that we hear Frederic using for the first time in connection with Catherine's pregnancy. Away from Catherine but slowly moving back to her (“You could not go back. If you did not go forward what happened? You never got back to Milan” [216]), Frederic shows more concern for Catherine's pregnancy than he did at any time in Milan. Living in the gap between his life with her and his life at the front, Frederic is learning what Catherine already knows: what it means to be in love. Again, as he learns, his voice moves closer to Hemingway's.

Both Frederic's changed understanding of the war and his commitment to Catherine undergird his decision not just to save his own life by diving into the Tagliamento but also to defect from the Italian army. This development resolves the instabilities surrounding Frederic's relation to the war, but those instabilities now give way to those surrounding Frederic and Catherine's attempt to construct their own haven from the malevolent world. In effect, they seek to establish a world based on the values of her voice. As they set about this task, there are further changes in Frederic's voice, but I will restrict my focus for now to those involving Frederic's relationship to and understanding of that larger world because in that way I will be best able to assess Frederic's voice at the very end of the narrative.

Soon after he and Catherine are reunited, Frederic speaks from the time of narration; his voice merges temporarily with Hemingway's and he articulates what his experience has taught him about the world:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these things you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

(249)

The effectiveness of this famous passage is partially hindered because Hemingway's voice overrides Frederic's to some extent. The passage gives us a voice that is too great a departure from any of the voices that we have heard Frederic use to this point. Although the syntax is characteristic of Frederic, the sententiousness of the language is not. The passage sounds a little too much like a set piece of Hemingway's.⁷

Frederic's voice is more authentically his own as he tells us his thoughts in the hospital after he learns of the baby's death: “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and didn't tell you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end” (327). Given everything that the narrative has shown us to this point, from the rain and the cholera to the disastrous retreat, from Passini's death to Aymo's, Frederic's response here seems appropriate: he is articulating a vision of the world that Hemingway has presented as true. Nevertheless, through the repetition of the phrase “they killed you” and especially through its first disruptive appearance in the baseball metaphor (“the first time they caught you off base they killed you”), Frederic's voice also carries a heavy tone of frustration and complaint. It has not yet fully merged with Hemingway's; indeed, a distinctive element of the “If people bring so much courage to this world” passage is that, instead of a complaining tone, it incorporates a kind of ironic acceptance: “if you are none of these, it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Now consider the final sentence, the ending that Hemingway produced so many alternatives to. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” (332). The emphasis on sequence and the use of coordination with and recalls a significant feature of the style of the opening paragraph: this happened and this and this. But the relation of Frederic's voice to Hemingway's is substantially different here. Just before this sentence, Frederic has told us about his attempt to say a melodramatically romantic good-bye to Catherine:

“You can't come in now,” one of the nurses said.

“Yes I can,” I said.

“You can't come in yet.”

“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”

He is imperious here because of the strength of his romantic fantasy. But the reality of Catherine's death destroys the fantasy: “But after I got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue” (332). The shift to honest, matter-of-fact assertion beneath which lies very deep feeling sets up the last sentence.

If the voice of the first passage was naive in its lack of evaluation, the voice of the last sentence is wise in that lack. If the author of the first passage spoke behind the style to reveal that naïveté, he speaks here to reveal a strength in the face of knowledge. Frederic now knows the destructiveness not only of the war but also of the world; indeed, he has experienced that destruction firsthand in the most excruciating way imaginable. The world has destroyed his life by destroying Catherine. He has no illusions about the finality of the destruction. But as the voice speaks and as we hear Hemingway's voice behind the sentence, we see that Frederic is not really destroyed. Despite what he knows he acts. Despite what he knows he speaks without frustration and without complaint. Both the voice and the action are slow and deliberate, controlled and dignified (compare Hemingway's version to “Then I headed back to the hotel in the rain”). He has no reason to live, no hope for the future: “That was what you did. You died.” But the control in the voice and the deliberateness of the action signal a refusal to be crushed by that world. Furthermore, in sending that signal, the control and the deliberateness also signify that Frederic has taken the final step in his remarkable growth from authoritative spouter of conventional wisdom to understated but informed source of Hemingway's own values. The final sentence is one of the times Hemingway got it just right.

PROBLEMS WITH THE TECHNIQUE

I have argued that by making Frederic a character who is not much given to reflection on his experience and a narrator who is an unselfconscious but faithful recorder of those experiences, Hemingway has communicated more to us than Frederic realizes in two main ways. Hemingway double-voices Frederic's narration and he uses the dialogue of other characters to offer perspectives whose significance Frederic does not fathom. I turn now to consider the limits of what Hemingway can accomplish with this technique by focusing on two problematic segments of the narrative: Frederic's shooting the Italian sergeant and Frederic and Catherine's interlude in Switzerland.

As I briefly indicated above, one of Hemingway's tasks in his representation of the retreat from Caporetto is to trace Frederic's gradual evolution from a committed, competent leader of the ambulance corps to a justified fugitive who makes his separate peace. Early in the retreat, we see Frederic at his most decisive and most active: leading Aymo, Bonello, and Piani, he decides that Aymo can bring the virgins, that they can give a ride to the sergeants, that they should ride in a certain order, when they should ride, when they should eat, when they should rest, when they should get off the main road. In short, he is dedicated to carrying out their orders to get to Pordenone. He is also dedicated to certain group values: they share the food they find, they help each other out, they do not harm the young women, they help the sergeants, they do not plunder the farmhouse where they stop for food. The sergeants, on the other hand, violate many of these values: they take the ride, but they want to save their own skins; they enter the farmhouse to see what they can steal from it; having eaten, they don't care whether the others eat. Their greatest violation occurs when the ambulance gets stuck and they take off. All this comes through Frederic's narration very clearly. The problems arise when Frederic reacts to their greatest offense by shooting at them and wounding one, who is then killed, with Frederic's approval, by Bonello.

How much distance is there between Hemingway and Frederic at this point? Does Hemingway want us to see Frederic's response as justified in some way? Or is the shooting a sign that the violence of the war is infecting Frederic as well? What is the significance of the placement of the incident so soon after Frederic's dream about being together with Catherine again? How does the incident fit in with the two other shootings during the retreat—Aymo's by the Germans, and those by the carbinieri at the Tagliamento? Developing satisfactory answers to these questions is an extremely murky business, and the murkiness is inextricably wound up with Hemingway's particular deployment of the autodiegetic narration.

Just as we can be confident that Hemingway does not endorse the values behind the assertion at the end of the first chapter, we can be confident that he does not fully endorse Frederic's reaction here. Given Hemingway's attitudes about the war's destruction, we can infer that shooting to kill under these circumstances is overdoing it. One sign of Hemingway's disapproval is that he slightly distances Frederic from the killing by having Bonello fire the fatal shot. If Hemingway wholeheartedly endorsed the shooting, it would make sense to have one of Frederic's shots kill the man. Bonello's dialogue also provides a clue to Hemingway's values here. Bonello is proud of what he has done, but his boasting reveals the problems with his viewpoint: “all my life I've wanted to kill a sergeant” (207). His joke about what he will say in confession, “Bless me, father, I killed a sergeant,” also underscores this reading of Frederic's action. When we recall the standard way of beginning a confession, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” we can see how Hemingway is double-voicing Bonello's utterance here. Bonello is not just melding the language of war onto the language of religion. He is also transforming the confession of guilt into a source of pride—bless me, I did something good in killing the sergeant. By asking us to read the religious formula underneath Bonello's line, Hemingway reminds us that Bonello has in one sense “sinned.” Significantly, Bonello's joke does not succeed with Frederic; he reports not that “We all laughed” but that “They all laughed” (208). Frederic's inability—or unwillingness—to laugh is a further sign that he has overreacted. Although Frederic never reflects on the incident, we see that one source of his uneasiness is that he has been operating by the same code of war that sanctions Bonello's actions and Bonello's comments. The code says that a commanding officer has the right to command obedience; violations of that command are punishable by death. Despite other moves Frederic has been making away from the war, he is still bound by the military mentality.

But Hemingway apparently wants to communicate other things with the scene as well. His representation of the sergeants as consistently violating the values of sharing and respect being honored by Frederic and the others suggests that the scene is also showing Frederic taking some kind of stand about those values. This issue is important because Frederic has earlier been someone who simply did what was easiest. By showing Frederic reacting so strongly to the sergeants' violations of the group's values, Hemingway seems to be showing—or trying to show—some significant change in Frederic as well. Again, Hemingway's technique for conveying this aspect of the incident is the use of another character's dialogue. Immediately after the shooting, Piani delivers a judgment about the sergeants whose accuracy we must recognize: “the dirty scum” (204). Later he returns the group's conversation to Frederic's action, saying with approval, “You certainly shot that sergeant, Tenente” (207).

Viewed in this way, the incident becomes an important checkpoint by which to measure the alterations Frederic undergoes during the retreat. When he shoots the sergeant he is simultaneously entrapped in the code of the military and committed to values that will eventually move him to make his separate peace. The subsequent events of the retreat, especially the shooting of Aymo and the executions at the Tagliamento, push him finally and completely away from the military code.

The trouble with this view of the incident is that I am not sure it is fully substantiated by the narration. The reading hangs heavily on the few lines of dialogue given to Bonello and Piani—and even more on my sense of how what Hemingway is doing with Frederic in the rest of the novel has implications for what he needs to do with his character here. The dialogue of the minor characters, especially Piani's, seems susceptible to alternative interpretations: Piani can be seen as closer to Bonello than my reading suggests; Piani does, after all, laugh at Bonello's joke. The more positive side of Frederic's action may not really be built into the incident. But then Hemingway's previous choices in representing the sergeants and in showing Frederic's commitment to certain values seem problematic. This second-guessing of my reading is not meant to dislodge it, only to indicate that I do not believe it can be as well substantiated as the earlier interpretations I have offered. The larger point is that if Hemingway had given Frederic different traits as a narrator and a character, if Frederic not only recorded but explicitly interpreted the incident through reflecting on it, Hemingway would be able to communicate its complexities far more firmly than he can through Frederic's tight-lipped, recording, time-of-the-action perspective. But to alter Frederic that way would be to lose much of the power of the rest of the book.

The situation with the events in Switzerland is both similar and different. Hemingway again wants to accomplish something complex: to show that Frederic and Catherine have reached a place that is both idyllic and impossible to maintain; to show also that Frederic and Catherine sense that their life has no future; to show further that if the world were different, Catherine and Frederic would always be very happy, and that the reason they are only sometimes so lies not with them but with that world and their knowledge of it. All these effects will serve the larger purposes of his narrative. By showing that their union is very attractive, he will increase the sense of loss we feel in Catherine's death. By showing that they have no real future, he will reinforce his thematic point about the malevolence of the world. By showing that they sense their own plight, he will add another dimension to their situation and will be able to make a further thematic point about how best to respond to a knowledge of the world.⁸

Part of Hemingway's strategy in chapters 38 to 40 is to use Frederic's narration to achieve these different effects at different times, but there are places where the effects interact. Consider the end of chapter 38. Frederic reports that he and Catherine awaken in the night. She had been thinking, she says, about the time when they first met and she was a “little crazy”; she insists that she is no longer crazy, just “very, very, very happy” (300), and she proposes that they both go back to sleep at exactly the same moment. The disturbance underneath her waking and her proclamation of happiness prevents Frederic from going back to sleep when she does. “I was awake for a long time thinking about things and watching Catherine sleeping, the moonlight on her face” (301).

Why should Catherine wake? Because she, who has known about the world all along, knows that their idyll can't last and she is disturbed by that knowledge. Why should Frederic not be able to fall back asleep? Because he senses what she knows. He makes a similar point at the end of chapter 40: “We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together” (311). But earlier in chapter 38, Hemingway has also used Frederic's record of a long conversation with Catherine to show that she is worried about his feelings for her, a worry that also comes from her recognition that they have no real future. In the conversation, Catherine asks Frederic whether he is bored or restless, asks him about his having gonorrhea and says that she wished she'd had it, says that she wants to be exactly like him. Hemingway's sexism comes through clearly here, but so does a rather different consequence of Catherine's worry about their future. Her fear of what's coming also makes her somewhat desperate about the present: there seems to be some lack in the here and now that she wants to fill. Thus, when she wakes at night and proclaims that she is very, very, very happy, we can't help inferring that she protests too much.

But how do I know that it is her fear of the future that makes her desperate about the present? One could plausibly argue that her desperation is a sign of Frederic's present inadequacy and her own endless insecurity. Again, I think that what has happened is that Hemingway has run up against the limitations of his narrative perspective, only here those limitations become even stronger because of the sexism. Just as Hemingway turns in the shooting incident from Frederic's recording to the dialogue of Piani and Bonello to create his effects, he turns here to Catherine's dialogue. In addition to the limits Hemingway faces as a consequence of Frederic's tight-lipped recording, he faces the problem of the way the narrative perspective constrains our view of Catherine. Because the perspective allows us to see Catherine only from outside—and because Hemingway has conceived her character in a sexist way—her conversation can give rise to interpretations that the trouble with their life in Switzerland is not the world but the two of them. Such interpretations alter our view of Catherine's death: it becomes not the culmination of the tragedy but a convenient way for Frederic to escape from this sterile, constricted relationship. Although I think that the larger progression of the narrative finally calls such interpretations into question, I would also suggest that the limits of the autodiegetic narration make them appear more plausible.

THE PARADOX OF FREDERIC'S NARRATION

I turn finally to the way in which much of what I have been saying about Frederic's narration implies that it is built on a paradox. Strikingly, this paradox has the potential to undermine the novel's illusion of realism, yet that potential is never realized. The paradox arises from three features of the narration, two of which I have already discussed explicitly. (1) With few exceptions, Frederic speaks from his perspective at the time of the action. (2) The growth or change in Frederic's character occurs at the time of the action, not during the time of the narration or through the act of narration. Thus, when I read the last sentence of the novel (“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain”) as a sign of Frederic's growth, I am also understanding that the growth occurred then. The understated style is capturing Frederic's control during his walk, not a control that he has acquired through the act of writing. (3) Frederic is a recorder, not a self-conscious narrator. He is intent on telling his story, but he is no artist, no Humbert Humbert trying to render the most artistically effective narrative that he can muster for some rhetorical purpose that serves as his motivation for telling the story.

Since it is always possible—even easy—to find confirmation for the hypothesis that Frederic is self-consciously crafting the narrative (it's clearly his story, and his story clearly shows evidence of careful crafting), I want to pick up once again the issue of how we determine whether a homodiegetic or autodiegetic narrator is self-conscious. One of the conventions of homodiegetic narration is that unselfconscious narration is the unmarked case: that is, we take the homodiegetic narrator as unselfconscious unless we are given reason to do otherwise. Thus, we assume that the homodiegetic narrator is not the source of such things as foreshadowing, patterns of imagery, parallelism of incidents, the lyricism of a particular style—unless we have some signal that calls our attention to the narrator's self-consciousness. For example, when Huck Finn describes the sunrise over the Mississippi in sentences with impressive poetic power, we don't marvel at Huck's artistic prowess and his selective display of it; instead, we see Huck as the window through which Twain's artistry is being revealed. On the other hand, when Nabokov wants to create Humbert Humbert as a self-conscious narrator, he has Humbert frequently comment on his own narration: in chapter 1, he says, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (11); later, he says, “Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” (34); and finally, of course, Humbert talks about his narrative—and its artistry—as an attempt to compensate for the crimes he has committed against Lolita: “I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art” (285). “One had to choose between [Clare Quilty] and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art” (311). Frederic is clearly more like Huck than like Humbert.

The second reason that I want to argue for Frederic as recorder is the internal evidence of the narration. In addition to the evidence I have discussed earlier, I would like to add a final example, one in which Frederic does fluctuate between his perspective at the time of the action and his perspective at the time of the narration. In chapter 7 just before Frederic proclaims that the war “was no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies” (37), he mentions that he had met two British gunners when he was on his leave in Milan. “They were big and shy and embarrassed and very appreciative together of anything that happened. I wish that I was with the British. It would have been much simpler. Still I would probably have been killed. Not in this ambulance business. Yes, even in the ambulance business. British ambulance drivers were killed sometimes. Well, I knew I would not be killed” (37, emphasis mine). The passage indicates Frederic's habit as a recorder: his reactions here arise out of the stream of his recollections rather than being motivated by his conscious artistic purpose. When he thinks of the British gunners at the time of narration, he jumps to his wish of having been with them because it would have been much simpler. But then he catches himself up by thinking of the possible negative consequences of that situation, then he has a short dialogue with himself about whether he would have been killed, then he quickly ends that by giving his view that the war was not real to him. To say that Frederic has planned all these shifts for some artistic purpose of his own is to make an interpretive leap for which the narration provides no spring.

The paradoxical consequence of these three features of the narration can be effectively illustrated by returning to my reading of the sentences ending the first chapter. “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” The rub in seeing Frederic as the victim rather than the source of the irony is that if unselfconscious Frederic has learned about the war and the world at the time of the action, then this knowledge should always be a part of his perspective as he retells the story. In other words, Frederic writes as if he does not know what he in fact knows—and he is not deliberately suppressing his knowledge or manipulating our understanding of his knowledge for any conscious artistic purpose of his own.

Genette has noticed and named this phenomenon of homodiegetic narration, calling it a paralipsis, a narration in which less information is given “than should presumably be given in terms of the focalization code governing the narrative,” as Gerald Prince describes it in his Dictionary of Narratology.⁹ But neither Genette nor Prince has analyzed the rhetorical logic of paralipsis's paradoxical nature—as I now propose to do for the case of A Farewell to Arms.

Although there is a sense in which Frederic's paralipsis seems to violate the conventions of mimesis, it does not actually destroy the mimetic illusion. Why? First, because the narration makes artistic sense and, second, because it makes sense in such a way that there is no reason for the reader to register the paradox during the actual temporal experience of the narrative. Hemingway, in effect, wants to write a Bildungsroman with a tragic twist. If he were to do that from a heterodiegetic perspective, there would be no problem in showing that the protagonist started out in ignorance and ended in knowledge. The narrator and the audience would start out ahead of the character, but eventually he would catch up to and perhaps surpass the audience. But to tell such a story from the perspective of a protagonist who would unselfconsciously record his experiences and some of his judgments and beliefs at the time of the action would have some significant advantages. Such a narration would allow the audience to have a deeper, more intimate relationship with that protagonist, and such a relationship might be necessary for the audience to maintain partial sympathy for him in the early stages of the narrative. Such a narration would also necessarily involve the audience in a great deal of inferential activity that would in itself be a source of the narrative's pleasure. Furthermore, although this procedure would entail the paradoxical situation described above, it would not be noticed. It would not be noticed because as the audience reads the early chapters—and indeed, the middle and later chapters—it does not know whether the narrator will attain any more knowledge than he has at the time of the narration. Thus, when we read the last sentence of chapter 1 in the temporal progression of the novel, we are not aware of the paradox because we do not know that Frederic comes to an understanding of the war and the world that would make it impossible for him to utter such a sentence without being ironic.

If the analysis of this chapter has been at all persuasive, then I think it suggests several noteworthy conclusions about Frederic's narration. First, it indicates the subtlety and skill with which Hemingway handles that narration. As Hemingway carefully constructs a progressive action in which Frederic works through his unstable relations with the war, with Catherine, and finally with the destructive world, he also develops a highly nuanced but clearly discernible progression of voice. Though Frederic's style does remain recognizably the same from beginning to end, his voice does not. Instead, as Frederic takes on features of Passini's voice and Catherine's, he is gradually moving closer to the values of the Orchestrator of the voices, Hemingway himself. Second, in showing that the technique has limits as well as powers, the analysis offers an account for some of the interpretive disagreement about the novel that accuses neither Hemingway nor his critics of being butchers. The disagreements stem not from sloppiness but from divergent inferences that naturally arise as Hemingway bumps up against the limits of his technique. Third, in showing that according to the standards of naturalistic probability Frederic could not logically tell his story as he does, the analysis suggests something about the conventions of homodiegetic narration. We will overlook the mimetic impossibility to allow Hemingway to tell the story in the most effective way—provided that the awareness of the impossibility is not foregrounded by the narrative itself. Taken together, these conclusions suggest that the smooth surface of Hemingway's prose belies the dynamic interaction of voice, character, and action that we must attend to in order to feel the progression of the narrative.

Notes

1. I borrow the term from Wayne C. Booth, who uses distance in The Rhetoric of Fiction to denote the relations between unreliable narrators and implied authors.

2. See Reynolds, Hemingway's First War, 56; and Oldsey, Hemingway's Hidden Craft, 64.

3. Behind this sentence is the assumption, now somewhat familiar to readers of this book, that in reading a fictionalized narrative we are asked to join two distinct audiences—the narrative audience that exists on the same fictional plane as the narrator and the authorial audience that seeks to understand the whole communication from the author, including the functions of the narrative audience. The question about voice here is tied up with a question about how the authorial audience is asked to relate to its simultaneous participation in the narrative audience. For more on these audiences, see Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction.”

4. For a discussion along different lines of Frederic's “retrospective narration,” see Nagel.

5. For more on this point, see Hamburger and Fleishman.

6. There are, of course, a few occasions when Frederic shifts from past to present and speaks with the vision he has at the time of narration: most notably when he talks about the priest knowing what he (Frederic) “was always able to forget” and when he articulates his knowledge of how the world kills everyone. But the vision and voice of these passages do not carry over into the rest of the narration, and they do not indicate that he has become a self-conscious narrator.

7. For further discussion of the passage, see Reading People, Reading Plots, 177, 184-85.

8. For another view on chapters 38 to 40, see Robert Lewis, Hemingway on Love.

9. The binary opposite of paralipsis is paralepsis, a narration defined by Prince as one “giving more information … than should presumably be given in terms of the focalization code governing a narrative.”