A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Plot Overview)

A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

(Plot Overview)

 

Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American ambulance driver serving the Italian army during World War I. At the beginning of the novel, the war is winding down with the onset of winter, and Henry arranges to tour Italy. The following spring, upon his return to the front, Henry meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse’s aide at the nearby British hospital and the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Rinaldi, however, quickly fades from the picture as Catherine and Henry become involved in an elaborate game of seduction. Grieving the recent death of her fiancé, Catherine longs for love so deeply that she will settle for the illusion of it. Her passion, even though pretended, wakens a desire for emotional interaction in Henry, whom the war has left coolly detached and numb.

When Henry is wounded on the battlefield, he is brought to a hospital in Milan to recover. Several doctors recommend that he stay in bed for six months and then undergo a necessary operation on his knee. Unable to accept such a long period of recovery, Henry finds a bold, garrulous surgeon named Dr. Valentina, who agrees to operate immediately. Henry learns happily that Catherine has been transferred to Milan and begins his recuperation under her care. During the following months, his relationship with Catherine intensifies. No longer simply a game in which they exchange empty promises and playful kisses, their love becomes powerful and real. As the lines between scripted and genuine emotions begin to blur, Henry and Catherine become tangled in their love for each other.

Once Henry’s damaged leg has healed, the army grants him three weeks convalescence leave, after which he is scheduled to return to the front. He tries to plan a trip with Catherine, who reveals to him that she is pregnant. The following day, Henry is diagnosed with jaundice, and Miss Van Campen, the superintendent of the hospital, accuses him of bringing the disease on himself through excessive drinking. Believing Henry’s illness to be an attempt to avoid his duty as a serviceman, Miss Van Campen has Henry’s leave revoked, and he is sent to the front once the jaundice has cleared. As they part, Catherine and Henry pledge their mutual devotion.

Henry travels to the front, where Italian forces are losing ground and manpower daily. Soon after Henry’s arrival, a bombardment begins. When word comes that German troops are breaking through the Italian lines, the Allied forces prepare to retreat. Henry leads his team of ambulance drivers into the great column of evacuating troops. The men pick up two engineering sergeants and two frightened young girls on their way. Henry and his drivers then decide to leave the column and take secondary roads, which they assume will be faster. When one of their vehicles bogs down in the mud, Henry orders the two engineers to help in the effort to free the vehicle. When they refuse, he shoots one of them. The drivers continue in the other trucks until they get stuck again. They send off the young girls and continue on foot toward Udine. As they march, one of the drivers is shot dead by the easily frightened rear guard of the Italian army. Another driver marches off to surrender himself, while Henry and the remaining driver seek refuge at a farmhouse. When they rejoin the retreat the following day, chaos has broken out: soldiers, angered by the Italian defeat, pull commanding officers from the melee and execute them on sight. The battle police seize Henry, who, at a crucial moment, breaks away and dives into the river. After swimming a safe distance downstream, Henry boards a train bound for Milan. He hides beneath a tarp that covers stockpiled artillery, thinking that his obligations to the war effort are over and dreaming of his return to Catherine.

Henry reunites with Catherine in the town of Stresa. From there, the two escape to safety in Switzerland, rowing all night in a tiny borrowed boat. They settle happily in a lovely Alpine town called Montreux and agree to put the war behind them forever. Although Henry is sometimes plagued by guilt for abandoning the men on the front, the two succeed in living a beautiful, peaceful life. When spring arrives, the couple moves to Lausanne so that they can be closer to the hospital. Early one morning, Catherine goes into labor. The delivery is exceptionally painful and complicated. Catherine delivers a stillborn baby boy and, later that night, dies of a hemorrhage. Henry stays at her side until she is gone. He attempts to say goodbye but cannot. He walks back to his hotel in the rain.

The story grows originally out of the material base. Hemingway shows great craftmanship in interweaving the central theme of war and love. They are made related to each other. This is done by making hero to remember war when he is making love and love when he is fighting at the border. The word ‘Arms’ suggests both arms used in war and the arms of Henry’s beloved. Moreover, a contrast is shown even in different kinds of love. Again, Henry’s game type love, full of care and vigilance, is contrasted with his careless and all-pervading love.

The whole story is told in the first person and this gives a lyrical note to the novel. The term lyrical becomes more apt if we remember that the book is full of Hemingway’s personal reminiscences. Hemingway himself like Henry in the novel was wounded on the Italian front and fell in love with an English nurse at Milan hospital. This provides a realistic touch to the story.

The subsurface activity of the novel is organized connotatively around two poles: the one pole of the images of home, mountain and priest. And, the other pole of the images of non-home, rain and doctor. The home concept is associated with the mountain, with the dry cold weather, with peace and quiet, with love, dignity, health, happiness and good life, and with worship or at least the consciousness of God. The non-home concept is associated with low-lying planes, with rain and fog; with obscenity, indignity, disease, suffering nervousness, war and death; and with irreligion.

The total structure of the novel is developed in fact around the series of contrasting situations. To Gorizia, the non-home of war, succeeds the Home, which Catherine and Henry make together in Milan hospital. The non-home of the grim retreat from the Isonzo is followed by the quiet and happy retreat which the lovers share above Montreux. Home ends for Henry when he leaves Catherine dead in Lausanne Hospital. Hemingway’s contrasting images, developed for an aesthetic purpose, have also a moral value.

A Farewell to Arms, prizes once again the ultimate identity of the moral and the aesthetic. All the Home images are either moral or related to moral truths while the non-home images are related to immoral things. “Love is moral and war is immoral”, that is what the novelist intends to convey. The use of rain as a kind of symbolic obligate in the novel has been widely and properly admired. The whole idea of climate is related to natural-mythological structure. Every time rain brings some trouble for the hero and the heroine. The rain begins in Italy during October just before Henry’s return to Gorizia after his recovery from the wounds. It continues throughout the disastrous retreat and Henry’s flight to Stresa. The night during which Henry leaves Stresa for Switzerland is full of rain. The sound of the rain continues like an undersong until, with Catherine dead in the hospital room; Henry walks back to the hotel in vain. In contrast to rain, is dry sunny weather full of joy for both Henry and Catherine as in their happy life at Milan, at Stresa and on the Swiss mountains. The simple colloquial language, the contrasting images of Home and Not-home- all give a fine organic quality to the novel. The priest and Rinaldi, and the doctor also serve a purpose in giving weight to the symbolism of the novel. Each in turn represents religious, moral life and the unreligious. One is the man of God and the other is man without God. In the result one is quite tolerant and never deserts his faith while the other is broken by war. The whole structure of the novel is superb in its execution for it contains harmony of events and the character development. The action finds ups and downs, now sunshine then sunshade. It moves with dramatic tone and the lyrical note. The personality of Henry develops in the presence of lot of experiments.