Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms as an Anti-War Novel Essay

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is based largely on Hemingway's own personal experiences. The main character of the book, Frederic Henry experiences many of the same situations that Hemingway experienced. Some of these experiences are exactly the same, while some are less similar, and some events have a completely different outcome.

First, one should focus on the language and Henry's ethos. The soldiers are burdened with the thought of a

    There are two major themes in A Farewell to Arms that Hemingway clearly conveys: war and love. The war theme is obvious because the book is set during the World War. The theme of love is less obvious, it begins faintly because of the uncertainty between Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley. Neither desire love or commitment to anyone, but act upon their desires of passion. As the story progresses, so does their love. The strength of their love is enforced by various understandings and agreements. Love is the theme that closes the book, leaving a final allusion of what their love is about.

In the beginning of the book, the author describes Henry’s beliefs about the war. He thinks war is about the glory soldiers receive or dying a hero’s death. As he gets into the first battle, he is suddenly faced with the reality. Passing be dead soldiers and watching the battle before him causes Henry to flee. As he is running away, he happens to stumble upon a rotting corpse, this makes the realities become even more clear. Shaken from the encounter, he moves on.

Henry is trying to communicate to his audience that the British will betray them in terms that his audience will relate to or understand, so he uses a situation that happens in a well-known piece of

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about love and war. Frederic Henry, a young American, works as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I. He falls tragically in love with a beautiful English nurse, Miss Catherine Barkley. This tragedy is reflected by water. Throughout the novel Ernest Hemingway uses water as metaphors. Rivers are used as symbols of rebirth and escape and rain as tragedy and disaster, which show how water plays an important role in the story.

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

Then comes the second battle,he is so tired and scared,he hope it’s a dream or a mistake,but the war begins.Then soldiers near him suddenly drop their gun and run away,which apparently encourages Henry to flee.He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is sud- denly made aware. …He yelled then with fright and swung about. For a moment, in the great clamor, he was like a proverbial chicken. He lost the direction of safety. Destruction threatened him from all points. (Chapter6)

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.

Novels published after a major war are often the most deeply emotional, profound ruminations on human nature. The authors of these novels were once soldiers, living in fear and enduring sleepless nights. These authors channel their experiences and emotions into their work, often creating masterpieces of literature. A Farewell to Arms is one such novel. Its author, Ernest Hemingway, was in the Italian ambulance corps in World War I, much like the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry. The themes in A Farewell to Arms reflect his mentality and the typical soldier’s disillusionment in the institutions and values he had always held close. A Farewell to Arms explores the far-reaching disillusionment that seems to plague Frederic. The theme of Frederic Henry’s disillusionment of all that he believes in appears through his desertion of the war, the deterioration of his relationship with Catherine, and his thoughts on life.

The first piece of evidence supporting this theme is the deaths caused by the war, especially those important to Henry. Directly, soldiers are killed in battle, from being shot by enemies, hit by mortar shells, or in one case, shot by their own allies. When Henry and his companions are separated from the Italian army and try to get back to the main forces, as they attempt to cross an embankment, “Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down” (Hemingway 213). Henry believes the Italian soldiers were the ones who fired the shots, saying, “We are in more danger from Italians than Germans. The rear guard are afraid of everything. The Germans

In A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway uses damaged characters to show the unglamorous and futile nature of war and the effects it has on people. Hemingway wants readers to know that war is not what people make it out to be; it is unspectacular and not heroic. Hemingway also feels that war is futile by nature and that most goals in war have almost no point. He also shows readers that military conflict often causes people to have shallow values and to hide their pain for their own protection.

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

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms tells the tale of two young, star-crossed lovers in the midst of World War I. A powerful romance and stirring history of the war, this semi autobiographical novel meshes the contrasting worlds of love and war, setting war as the backdrop of love. The novel’s portrayal of love is an issue that has attracted critical debate, prompting many academics to reflect on its existence, form, and role in the plot. Joel Armstrong is one such academic. His literary criticism entitled, “‘A Powerful Beacon’ Love Illuminating Human Attachment in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,” asserts that love is the centering principle of the novel, and that the narrative’s world is one in which “love illuminates all of life” (Armstrong 79). As Armstrong asserts, love is the centering principle of A Farewell to Arms because it serves as an anchor for Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley during the tumultuous events of war, motivates them to go through significant struggles, and works along with loss to lend more meaning to significant events in the plot.

In WWI nearly 37 million people died, Ernest Hemingway was not one of them. Hemingway was an ambulance driver in the Italian army until he was eventually injured by an artillery shell. Once Hemingway returned home he began writing a book based on his experiences of WWI. That book is A Farewell to Arms. In 1929 he published this book and it was met with mixed feelings and calls for it to be banned. I believe that A Farewell to Arms should not be banned because it brings to light many different viewpoints about the war as well as strong literary strategies beneficial to good writing.