A Farewell to Arms: Apathy or Self Preservation?
Lieutenent Frederic Henry goes through hell in Hemingway's celebrated pacifist novel, A Farewell to Arms, yet as each crisis sweeps him along, it doesn't seem to quite register. He tells the story a decade later which could partly explain the baldness of statements like this one: "But [the cholera] was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army" (4). He describes the horrors of war in bare and matter-of-fact tones while waxing most eloquent about the countryside or food and drink. He often even recounts times spent with Catherine in a flat and uninflected voice. Is he simply a passive observer, content to let the traumas of war buffet him from one place and
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True to his training, Henry does his best to keep his drivers and cars together, even shooting a deserting Italian sergeant in the back. But during the ensueing nightmarish attempt to escape both the oncoming German army and the panicking Italians who are now shooting anyone not obviously Italian (and this certainly includes Henry), the man who does his job and doesn't ask questions, emerges from the river having "made a separate peace" (243).
Frederic Henry walks away from the war, finds Catherine and escapes to Switzerland where they spend the winter playing chess, eating and drinking and making love. Catherine delights in their isolation and if Henry chafes at the inactivity, he never admits to it. He describes their wintertime of sanctuary in great detail; sharing the weather, the tastes and smells and sights of this last oasis. The story is now told predominantly through dialogue; the two lovers talking about when they should get married, how they are hungry all of the time and where Catherine would like to go in the United States after the war. The war has returned to background status and is only mentioned as something that is read about in the papers; Henry's feelings about this are mentioned, but not extensively.
In the tragic closing of the story, as he comes to realize that Catherine is dying, again he retreats to recounting meals, drinks, who he sees in the tavern, in marvelous detail. Even as he agonizes "But what
First, one should focus on the language and Henry's ethos. The soldiers are burdened with the thought of a
As he is walking, a few soldiers that seems to be fleeing run into him. As Henry tries to stop them to ask what’s been happening, one of the soldiers swings at him with a rifle, opening a bloody gash on the top of his head. After a long while of waiting, a friendly soldier finds him and leads him back to camp, where a friend tends to his wound. After a few days of waiting, they come across another battle. This time Henry doesn’t flee, instead he thinks about all the people who have fought and died in the war, and decides to do the same: fight. Not only for the glory this time, but for the people he was
After the Vietnam War, Henry was crazy and unstable. For instance, when Henry was watching television and he bit through his lip with blood pouring everywhere (977). The blood was getting on his bread every time he took a bite, but because of his lost ability to think straight Henry doesn’t even flinch as blood pours everywhere. Also, at the end of the story Henry snaps on his brother Lyman. He punches Lyman, which leads to a fight ended by the laughing of Henry (980). During the fight with Lyman, the extent of Henry’s mental changed, to turn on a family member and physically strike him. Henry illustrates how crazy he is when he jumps in to the river all of the sudden to “cool off”(981). This action by Henry ends his craziness and his life.
Henry Fleming enlists as a youth with heroic fantasies of battle lingering in his mind and walks off the "place of blood and wrath" three days later a serene veteran of battle. He came from hot plowshares seeking a Homeric Iliad, timid and anxious about his potential and what others think of him. He ponders a great dilemma: will he run from battle? He is reassured after asking the tall soldier his question. His friend tells him that he would do what the rest of the regiment was doing. Henry is not an individual yet, he is a
After the war, Henry remained cold to everything around him. “He sat in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt. He was not easy. He sat in his chair gripping the armrests with all his might.” By comparing Henry to a rabbit frozen in fear, it really shows how immense his anguish is. “I looked over, and he’d bitten through his lip… So we went and sat down. There was still blood going down Henry’s chin, but he didn’t notice it and no one said anything even though every time he took a bite of his bread his blood fell onto it until he was eating his own blood mixed in with the food.” This quote uniquely shows how closed off he is emotionally. He has experienced so much pain from the war that he ignores his own suffering. It is clear that Henry had some extent of PTSD from the war. He was drowning in pain so much that he ignored his own purpose and value, so much so that he ended up taking his
When faced with adversities early into his first battle, he quickly reconsidered his views on war and courage. By running away from the face of battle, Henry “saw his vivid error, and he was afraid that it would stand before him all his life” (Cane 24.30). This pushed him into believing that he would never be a man of courage of masculinity. This “error” of running away caused Henry to be angry at himself for mistakenly thinking the battle was over and abandoning his fellow soldiers. While away from the battle Henry discovers “that he had a scorching thirst” and “his body was calling for food” (Cane 11.21). From the struggle of war and the experience of Wilson, Henry learns to reflect upon his life and learn from his mistakes, rather than being angry at himself. This allowed Henry to be influenced by the culture around him, shaping him into acknowledging that courage was not depicted by a gunshot or a wound, but by the act of adhering to the line of duty and learning from your
Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms, a celebrated historical fiction, amidst a time of war and personal suffering. Hemingway believed at this time that “life is a tragedy that can only have one end” (Hemingway, VIII). He continues further, calling war a “constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime” (Hemingway, IX). Hemingway also suffered at home, in addition to his issues regarding the state of the world. His wife had just endured a difficult pregnancy and delivery, which contributed to the last bitter chapter of his story. Keeping in mind the tortured and surly mental state of Hemingway, it is difficult to swallow the idea that he would write a wholesome, well founded love story that attracts people. To some readers, A Farewell to Arms tells of a whirlwind romance between an ambulance driver and a nurse that is based on an unbreakable foundation of love, trust, magnetism, and compassion. Anxious modernists, like Trevor Dodman who are cited in Joel Armstrong’s nonfiction text, will come up with a remarkably different outlook on this tragedy. With aid from “‘A Powerful Beacon’ Love Illuminating Human Attachment in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”, the loveless relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley will be seen as rushed, meaningless, and mentally destructive to the parties involved.
In the first battle, Henry fights along side the other soldiers. At this time, Henry is feeling confidant in his fighting skills and counted on his fellow soldiers to do their job. The narrator says, "He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was apart- a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country - was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire". In this quote, it talks about how he feels that he believes in his regiment. He isn't so selfish, he believes he is no longer an individual with regiments, they work as a whole person. In the second battle, it's different, he flees with the regiment.
Henry retreated during the second attack but eventually came back. Henry was immature and he felt wronged because most men in the regiment deserted him and left him to fight without much help. He fled because of annihilation. Another example of how immature Henry is, is that seeing a squirrel run made him feel better because it helped him rationalize his own flight of danger. As Henry becomes more mature, he promises Jim that he will not let him die in the road. His actions show maturity because at this point, Jim’s life is more important that his own. After seeing all the dead soldiers Henry begins to realize that this is a part of a war. He wishes he were dead because he was a coward and had run from battle. He wants to be a war hero but does not believe he can be because he had run from the war earlier.
During war, a soldier's most important support system is his/her regiment. This is a support system that Henry has, then loses throughout this time period in his life. All through the war Henry questions his courage and bravery. He wonders if he will turn and run when death is looking him in the eyes, or if he will decide to stay and do what he came to do; prove that he is a man and can handle even death itself. During battle several soldiers are wounded earning their "red badge of courage" and Henry's confident, Jim Conklin, dies. Here is where Henry's second isolation, the isolation from his regiment, occurs. The soldiers in the regiment feel a certain pride and respectability from earning their "red badge." Henry didn't earn this sense of pride and respectability because of the abandonment of his fellow soldiers. He felt that his assumption was clearly rectified- he was a coward. Henry Fleming seemed to become the virtuoso of separation, individualism, and isolation. The tension is eased after he mistakenly "earns" his "red badge" from a friend.
Henry fights with himself on the issue of if he is ready for this war or not when he contemplates on whether he would run away during battle or stay in combat. He views the war as almost a dream at first, visioning “marches, sieges, conflicts,” hoping that he would encounter challenges like these (Crane 4). He would soon come to find however, that war was nothing like he imagined. This realization leads to his psychological transformation and growth and sets the stage for Henry’s journey of becoming a man through battles and deaths that prepare him to evolve into the hero he is later.
He described that he couldn’t escape even if he wanted to. Through this analogy, the reader can see that Henry is reducing the soldiers to unthinking, unfeeling machines, performing their duty without taking into account the threat of injury or death. As he looks around at the faces of the rest of the soldiers in his regiment, he notices their focused commitment to the firing of their rifles. He wonders if he is the only one faced with questions of morality. While the regiment began to advance, Henry was shocked to receive a packet of letters from Wilson, who feared he would die in battle. After the battle, he is glad that he made it through the first day. He begins to lose the romantic vision of war by seeing the realities, but he starts lying to himself about who is really is.
In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the main character, Lieutenant Fredric Henry, undergoes a dramatic change in perspective over the course of the novel. It is most interesting to see how the Lieutenant's views on religion change as he becomes more involved in the war.
Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms covers a romance that takes place during World War I. The novel itself came out shortly after the war, and was the first of Hemingway’s books to become a best-seller. Essentially, the novel contrasts the horrors of war with the romance of Henry and Catherine. Throughout the plot, Hemingway, a World War I veteran himself, uses the events of the book to make a statement about his thoughts on war. The core message of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is that war damages the soldiers who fight in it both physically and emotionally, which is primarily illustrated by the number of deaths caused directly and indirectly by the war, the actions Henry is forced to take over the course of the book, and Henry’s growing cynicism towards war.
Ernest Hemingway's WWI classic, A Farewell to Arms is a story of initiation in which the growth of the protagonist, Frederic Henry, is recounted. Frederic is initially a naïve and unreflective boy who cannot grasp the meaning of the war in which he is so dedicated, nor the significance of his lover's predictions about his future. He cannot place himself amidst the turmoil that surrounds him and therefore, is unable to fully justify a world of death and destruction. Ultimately, his distinction between his failed relationship with Catherine Barkley and the devastation of the war allows him to mature and arrive at the resolution that the only thing one can be sure of in the course of life is death