Analysis of the Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway American novelist and well-known journalist was born on July 21, 1899, in Chicago and lived there until he was 18 years old. Hemingway worked as a news reporter after graduating from high school before leaving the nation to serve as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I. It was here that Ernest Hemingway got the idea for his novel “A Farewell to Arms. Ernest Hemingway traveled widely after joining the war effort and married many times before attempting suicide in 1961. Hemingway's works were mostly written between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Ernest Hemingway's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century was strengthened by A Farewell to Arms, one of the greatest American novels of World War I. Mainly based on Hemingway's own experiences, this is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver who is wounded on the Italian front, a beautiful British nurse he falls in love with, and the story of a little war maniac in the world. Their journey to asylum is beautiful and tragic, soft and hard, and with a realistic twist.

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms reflects a desperate man's inspiring trials and troubles between love and war. Driving an ambulance on the Italian front during World War I, Frederick Henry realizes his values when he realizes his love for Catherine Barclay, a beautiful English nurse. In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry fights between his passion for British nurse Catherine and his responsibility as part of the Italian army, perhaps more fiercely than any other character. As time passes, he prefers his non-domestic spirit to the patriotism he inherited.

Frederick Henry, an American second lieutenant in the Italian Army Ambulance Corps, is portrayed as an average man in search of a set of values. At first, Frederick is lonely, lustful, confused, and restless, but as he joins Catherine Barclay, he finds his place and meaning in life. Frederick can be considered brave in that he is honorable, has no interest in material things, and always put fellow soldier before his life.  When the whole mess hall has teased the Pastor, Frederick defends him and is his only true friend. Also, when an award is offered, Frederick refuses. Furthermore, when he and other drivers are bombed, he ignores his injuries to help others and insists that doctors treat others first.

Catherine Barkley is a young English nurse who has already lost her fiancé in the war and has been introduced as a partial lunatic. She begins her relationship with Frederick, pretending that he is her lost fiancé who is back, but soon falls apart! In love with her and regain her sanity. Throughout the story, Catherine remains static and represents Hemingway's ideal character to be Frederick at the end of the novel.

People often find meaning in their lives by devoting themselves to a particular passion or belief. In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, individuals struggle to find meaning and order in a different world of chaos and war. For example, Frederick Henry, who has little sense of the direction or purpose of despair from war, seems to find solace in love, which serves as a conviction that Frederick needed peace and stability. Although his efforts to find order fail and cause him great inconvenience, Frederick, with a better understanding of life, become more mature.

Hemingway uses Frederick's conflict between his duty as a soldier and his love for Catherine to show that maturity and true peace come from practicing a belief and accepting the difficulties that come after it. Is obtained. Frederick begins the war as a naive and indifferent young man who seeks a purpose in life to guide him through life's troubles. He lacks the confidence needed to guide his decisions and lead a meaningful life. In this way, he enters the war and tries to find the structure.

However, since he is an American with very little connection to Italy, Frederick has no practical reason to feel an affiliation with the Italian military, as it appears when he says:   “Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me”.  The promise of honor and the duties of patriotism also mean little to Henry. In saying this, Frederick expressed his views on the irrationality of war rhetoric: “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”.

Despite his romantic theories about war, Frederick feels that countless people were dying, not in dignity but in vain, and he was rewarded with a disgrace that can be compared to that of animals in stockyards. Burial is only after slaughter. Frederick is unwilling to sacrifice for the sake of war, as he has no attachment to the cause of the Italian army, nor is he interested in patriotic rhetoric. Frederick is slowly regaining the passionate and emotional side that was lost in the war. Her love for Catherine goes far beyond her loyalty to the military, which enabled her to flee the war and seek peace.

As he talks to Frederick about the falsehood in his religious life, Count Griffith states: “you are in love. Do not forget that is a religious feeling”. According to the count, both Frederick and Catherine express their love with religious devotion. As a result, Frederick creates a sense of meaning and purpose by isolating himself from Catherine, away from the chaos and corrupt world around him. He finally finds peace when he separates himself from his chaotic environment in pursuit of his desires: “I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace”. His new sense of purpose is so strong that Frederick can bring himself to ignore the potential dangers of abandoning his military responsibility in pursuit of his passion. Frederick is deeply discouraged by pursuing his own desires instead of his moral duty, but through these experiences, he gains wisdom and acceptance of life's tragedies. After Catherine's tragic death, he admits that “I haven’t any life at all anymore”.

Frederick soon realized that Catherine was mistakenly the only source of discipline and power in his life and that he was doomed as a result. But, as he tells the pastor about farmers fighting in the Italian army: “They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is”. Frederick himself believes that enduring adversity is the pearl of great wisdom and understanding in the world.

Prophesying the terrible end of their relationship, Frederick says: “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 everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”. Frederick, in his pain, is forced to understand that peace and stability must come from within, not from external sources such as that people or institutions because the world is cruel and unpredictable.

Because of the suffering that resulted from following his conviction, Frederick is able to acquire wisdom that would be unattainable if he did not do so. The love that Frederick feels for Catherine goes far beyond the moral obligation he feels for the Italian army and gives her something to live on. Although he suffers from his growing pain at the beginning, at the end of the story, he is significantly more mature and accepts his difficulties. Ultimately, Frederick's love and his military responsibility, two of his many comforts for chaos during the war, serve only as a step in the search for true meaning in life.

In the end, Henry's battle between passion and responsibility seems like a trivial trick of fate, but he handles battles well and loves it as much as he can. He gives his all to Catherine, and nothing is lost on her. Henry's classic warfare teaches us to look at actions and weigh things carefully for every outcome. It also shows us an important, real part of Hemingway himself.