A Farewell to Arms in Pick-a-Shelf

Aug 31, 2012 Booknblues rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-literature, hemingway

A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Hemingway's story of war and love set in Italy during World War I. Hemingway uses his earnest sparse journalistic style to tell the story through the perspective of volunteer ambulance driver Frederic Henry a young architecture student from the United States. Frederic is a young man who noticed the landscape around him the fields, the mountains, the humidity, the crops, the buildings and the roads and rivers. He has an easy camaraderie with the soldiers around him. A A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Hemingway's story of war and love set in Italy during World War I. Hemingway uses his earnest sparse journalistic style to tell the story through the perspective of volunteer ambulance driver Frederic Henry a young architecture student from the United States. Frederic is a young man who noticed the landscape around him the fields, the mountains, the humidity, the crops, the buildings and the roads and rivers. He has an easy camaraderie with the soldiers around him. As Frederic returns from leave he states:
"I left them working, the car looking disgraced and empty with the engine open and parts spread on the work bench, and went in under the shed and looked at each of the cars. They were moderately clean a few freshly washed, the others dusty. I looked at the tires carefully, looking for the cuts or stone bruises. Everything seemed in good condition. It evidently made no difference whether I was there to look after things or not. I had imagined that the condition of the cars, whether or not things were obtainable, the smooth functioning of the business of removing wounded and sick from the dressing stations, hauling them back from the mountains to the clearing station and then distributing them to the hospitals named on their papers, depended on a considerable extent on myself. Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not."

He soon meets a young Scottish nurse named Catherine Barkley and they begin to fall in love during the difficult wartime setting. It is interesting that Hemingway who has such dynamic conversations between comrades in arms has such banal and saccharine conversations between the two young lovers. Through hardships and difficulties they never seem to progress beyond smoochy, smoochy.

With Hemingway's spare style he has chiseled Catherine down to a shell. She doesn't exist as a solid being without Frederic whose voice we constantly here though rarely do we here his name. It is surely written in full no more than five times in the book. And yet in his commentary on war, we read that it is indeed the names that are concrete and real:

"I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost our of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and I had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages , the numbers of roads a, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

When one examines the plot, it is quite wonderful and exciting, with the daring and dangerous escapades one expects of a war time story, combined with the angst and yearning of young love. While it may not be an antiwar novel in the truest sense A Farewell to Arms certainly provides a realistic look to the confusion of war along with a look at the common valor which goes with being a soldier.

While it may not be everyone's cup of tea for a variety of reasons, A Farewell to Arms surely deserves its place among the classics. ...more

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