A Farewell to Arms is a terrific and thought provoking novel written by Ernest Hemingway. It tells the somewhat story of love, death, and war that is based on Hemingway's actual war experience in the first world war. The book was published in 1929 but not in published in Italy until 1948 because the way Hemingway depicted the Italian battles were seen as anti-militaristic by the Italian government and could have been detrimental to the war effort. Hemingway wrote no less than some thirty nine different endings to the novel until he picked the one he ended up with. What makes this book great, terrific, and probably his best novel, and best known work?
Well, the book describes three different things superbly. Love, war, and death. These themes permeate the literature of the western canon and Hemingway's depiction of the first world war is probably one of the best descriptions of war in the western canon. Especially modern warfare. Remember, when this came out in 1929 there was no realistic depiction of modern warfare in fiction. You end up really living the life of this soldier, how he gets wounded, how he falls in love, how he talks to and works with his officers. You get the feeling that this was really how it was on the battlefield. A lot of the off duty time of the officers was spent on drinking, drinking, and drinking. Alcohol appears in endless scene after scene and it permeates throughout Hemingway's life, continuously leading to his suffering.
Another important theme was love. We get the feeling at first that our young Frederic Henry is wounded and just wants a girl to pass the time until his recovery. What instead happens is that he falls in love with her, but is it really love? The circumstances of war were excruciatingly difficult especially with his war wound [a shell hit him in the leg], not to mention his surgery to his knee. So what we have is a wounded soldier and a lonely nurse. It's a match made in heaven.
Lastly, it must be mentioned the theme of death. Death appears many times. A fellow friend and officer gets shot down out of nowhere for no reason, but when Frederic and another officer go out into the open, nobody shoots them, and they walk past both German and Italian soldiers unmolested.
Now, the most striking part of this book for me was the ending. The nurse is pregnant and gives birth but nearly dies. Frederic hates the baby and states within himself, "I care nothing of fatherhood of it, it nearly killed its mother," which goes back to the Greeks, the idea of the father hating the son because he could take his place in the patriarch of the family. However, in this case I prefer to see it as Hemingway's allegory for war, meaning that war is a ghastly nihilism, no good will ever come of it, it brings only evil and destruction and misery. To add insult to injury, the baby ends up dying and our young father is relieved.
That ending knocked my socks off because although it seems simple I found it to be philosophical, a display of existentialism in fiction format. It's an ending I will never forget. Something sort of like what Tolstoy did with War and Peace, it was a fictional novel but parts of it translated into philosophy, at least in my viewing. Obviously you can make the case that Hemingway's take on war is that it is terrible and must be eradicated at all costs. Although the first 140 pages focus on the romance, the rest of the novel is thrilling, moving, and mindful. A must read for the western canon, a must read Hemingway, a must read war novel, and a must read novel for all.
