"A farewell to arms" by Ernest Hemingway

Gliederung

• The Author and his Times
• The plot
• Characters
• Frederic Henry
• Catherine Barkley
• The Priest
• Rinalidi
• Helen Ferguson
• Setting
• Themes
• Love
• War
• Human Values
• Loss of innocence - disillusionment
• Style
• Point of view
• Form and strucutre
• Hemingway's heroic code
• Summary
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Book II
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Book III
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapters 31 and 32
• Book IV
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Chapter 41
• Gloassary
• On Hemingway's reputation as a writer
• On the worth of a farewell to arms as a novel
• A critical appraisal of Hemingway's women
• On Hemingway's writing style
• On a farewell to arms, Hemingway, and the movies

The Author and his Times

Ernest Hemingway once gave some advice to his fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. If something in life hurts you, he said, you should use it in your writing. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway followed his own advice. The painful experiences of his own life that, consciously and unconsciously, he placed in this novel help make it a major artistic achievement.

The first of these experiences was a physical "hurt" that occurred on July 8, 1918. On this date, two weeks shy of his nineteenth birthday, Hemingway lay in an Italian army aid station, his legs riddled by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets.

The story of how he got there goes like this. By 1917 the United States had entered World War I, which had begun three years earlier. Although Hemingway was old enough to be in the service, his bad eyesight made him ineligible. (Characteristically, he later bragged that his vision had been hurt in boxing matches with dirty fighters. Actually, the damage was congenital.) But bad eyes or no, Hemingway had an urge to go to war. He wrote his sister, "...I'll make it to Europe some way in spite of this optic."

Make it he did by joining the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was sent to the mountains of northern Italy where the Italians, allied with England, France, and the U.S., were fighting the Austrians, allied with Germany.

Ambulance driving was too tame for him, and when a chance came to get closer to the action, he grabbed it. The Red Cross, concerned about the welfare of front-line troops, set up emergency canteens close to the battle lines. Hemingway eagerly volunteered to man a forward post. His job was to dispense chocolate and cigarettes. Or, as he wrote, "Each aft and morning I load up a haversack and take my tin lid and gas mask and beat it up to the trenches. I sure have a good time."

It was on one of these "good time" trips that he was struck in the legs by an Austrian shrapnel burst. Near him lay a screaming man, gravely

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