Farewell to Arms, Essay Example

One of the prominent themes in Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) is the loss of innocence. This theme is shown at many different levels throughout the novel. At one level, Frederick Henry’s loss of innocence relates to his experience of war and politics. However, at another , perhaps more profound level, his experience of lost innocence relates to his sexual and romantic entanglement with Catherine. In this way it can almost be suggested that the novel’s title relates to these two levels of experience: war and love. Also that through these experiences a person becomes less innocent because they are exposed to the reality of death. The way in which these ideas are tied together in the novel is demonstrated in a famous passage in Book Four, that begins on page 249. In this single passage the theme of the loss of innocence and its attachment to the subjects of love and war is obvious. Also of interest is the way in which Hemingway uses stylistic techniques to help express his themes.

For example, the first paragraph of the passage is passage comprised of one long sentence. The long run-on sentence is supposed to evoke a child-like sense of excitement and wonder. As Frederick Henry lies in bed with Catherine, the world is a single rushing feeling of love and sexual power. The sentence begins with the words “That night” — words which often carry frightening or at least mysterious connotations. The feeling of night quickly shifts to images of home and contentment. Hemingway writes: “feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.” (Hemingway, 249). To believe that the outside world of night and war and death and fear had ceased to exist in their love represents the height of innocence. The sentiment is so naïve, in fact, that the careful reader will already suspect that Frederick Henry is idealizing in his imagination to compensate for the horrible reality that surrounds them despite their passionate love.

To think of the outside world as “unreal” indicates that Frederick Henry has become irrational to some degree due to his love for Catherine. It is his love for Catherine that has both given him a reason to live and also alerted him to the fact that death is all around him at all times. The opening, breathless sentence can be seen as what he wishes he could believe, just like a child’s breathless with while blowing out birthday candles or wishing on a star. The opening sentence of the passage represents the idealization and innocence that we have all experienced in the world as children. Hemingway is trying to show how, as adults, many of us look to romantic love as a way to recreate or recapture the innocence and wonder of childhood which begins to slip away just as we are becoming sexually aware.

The connection between innocence and sexual experience is shown in the opening sentence by the reference to the smooth sheets and the “excitement” of the bed. Hemingway uses the symbol of the bed as a way of showing how marriage or love between two people can build an island where innocence and wonder can be preserved and protected despite the war and the realities of the world. The opening sentence of the passage is particularly powerful when it is viewed against all of the preceding material of the novel where Frederick Henry is presented as a jaded, opportunistic soldier who was wounded while serving as an ex-patriot in the Italian army. In other words, very little about the preceding events and characterization of the novel showed Frederick henry as particularly innocent or naïve. the question raises in the reader’s mind when encountering the passage on page 249 as to just where the romanticism in Frederick Henry’s tone is coming from, given his past.

The secret to finding the answer to that question lies in the passage itself. After opening with the run-on sentence of excitement and optimism, the passage moves to a further idealization. Hemingway writes: “We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone […]. we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together” (Hemingway, 249). Frederick henry goes on to describe to himself the way in which Catherine, unlike most people, shows very little difference between her behavior in the day and at night. The idea is that people wear masks and that, although he wears a mask himself, the love affair with Catherine has encouraged him to take his mask off, at least part of the time. For Frederick Henry, removing his mask means removing his “soldier” persona and the idea that he is a thrill-seeker out to prove his mettle by fighting in a war with which he has no personal connection.

By taking down his facade, even for a moment during the nights with Catherine, Frederick Henry learns that he still retains some of his innocence. the reader now understands where his opening breathless sentence came from., he has “hidden” or protected his last bit of innocence from the larger world, he will only find this place and those feelings when he is safe in the bed with Catherine where the real world has become fiction and his ideal world becomes reality. This is the whole purpose of the passage: to show that Frederick Henry has not lost his sense of idealism or innocence, he has simply hodden it from a world he considers too cruel and harsh to understand it.

This feeling is evidenced in the passage when Frederick Henry thinks about the difference between night and day “I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist” (Hemingway, 249). He realizes that the real world has little connection with his ideal world and he also realizes that although the two worlds are connected or even in some way reciprocal, it is impossible to have both simultaneously. The ideal world must at some point come into the light of day and under that light diminish until it is a rote acceptance of the “real.”

The fact that Hemingway wanted the passage to show that Frederick Henry had not yet lost his innocence completely was important from athematic point of view. it was also an important aspect of developing the love relationship between the characters because after this point, the reader understood, clearly, that Frederick henry and Catherine were involved not in a sordid lust affair as they had originally believed, but in an almost sacred love affair that touched to the very core of the lives and experiences as human beings. This is the ultimate “treasure” that must be protected from the cruelties of war and the horrors of everyday life.

Once Hemingway succeeds in showing that Frederick Henry’s great secret is that he retains his sense of innocence and hope despite the grievances of the world, he proceeds to foreshadow the ultimate loss of innocence through the specter of death. In the closing section of the passage, the reality of death is revealed as the true danger to love and innocence and the one danger that could not be evaded. Hemingway shows that Frederick Henry’s preserved innocence and selfhood allow him to honestly face the reality of human mortality.

He considers what that reality means in connection to his love for Catherine: “If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them […] If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” (Hemingway, 249). It is unclear as to whether or not Frederick is fully conscious that his words are connected directly to Catherine and his unborn child, but the description of the rain on the windows outside the hotel room is the symbolic foreshadowing of the two deaths. When Catherine and his baby die, the reader is left to wonder whether or not Frederick Henry’s last spark of innocence and hope died with them. At the same time, having read the passage just explicated in this examination, the reader will know that, despite the reality of love and death and the loss of innocence, Frederick Henry had the courage and conviction to follow love to a shared ideal with another human being no matter how brief or how doomed to tragedy.