A Farewell to Arms
SOME
INFO ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The first son of
Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller
Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was educated in the public
schools and began to write in high school, where he was active and outstanding,
but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his
family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On graduation from high school in
1917, impatient for a less sheltered environment, he did not enter college but
went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star. He was
repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but he
managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross.
On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian
front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he
fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry
him. These were experiences he was never to forget.
After recuperating
at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd
jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the
Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris--F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound--he began to see his
nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1923 his first important
book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was published in New York
City. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his
first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of
aimless expatriates in France and Spain--members of the postwar "lost
generation," a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This
work also introduced him to the limelight, which he both craved and resented
for the rest of his life. Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the
American writer Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in
1926.The writing of books occupied him for most of the postwar years. He
remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting,
fishing, or hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the
background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had
been advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the
stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933.
Among his finest
stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the
public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such
works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway
developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war
story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the
American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the English nurse
Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation after being wounded.
She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts
during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the
reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There,
however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, leaving Henry desolate
at the loss of the great love of his life.
Hemingway's love of
Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon
(1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as
sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in the big-game region of
Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game
hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he bought a house in Key West, Florida, and
bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not
is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class
violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression.By
now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country,
Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for
the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General
Francisco Franco, and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is
set in besieged Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is
based on the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war he purchased
Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana,
Cuba, and went to cover another war--the Japanese invasion of China.
The harvest of
Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics
consider his finest novel, in preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the
most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish
Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join
a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most
of the novel concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the
band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue,
flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the
Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up
by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near
Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed
to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is
wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a
last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.All of his life Hemingway
was fascinated by war--in A Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness,
in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates--and as World War II
progressed he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions
with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops
on D-Day (June 6, 1944).
Attaching himself
to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action
in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the
liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional
soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real expert in
military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.Following
the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work
seriously again. He also traveled widely, and on a trip to Africa he was
injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize
in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short, heroic novel about an
old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant
marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home.
This book, which played a role in gaining for
Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically
praised as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the
story of a professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had
been damned.By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba.
He settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as
before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was
twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he
received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum,
he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married four times and fathered
three sons.He left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some which has
been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of his years in Paris
(1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream,
three closely related novellas growing directly out of his peacetime memories
of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana during World War II, and of
searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in 1970.Hemingway's characters plainly
embody his own values and view of life.
The main characters
of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are
young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a
sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War
was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex,
filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and
destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one
must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of
principles known as "the Hemingway code."
To behave well in
the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace under pressure"
and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The
Old Man and the Sea.Hemingway's prose style was probably the most widely
imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language
of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and
sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible,
Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions using short,
simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric have been
eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few
adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their
effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet
is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement.
Hemingway's use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding.
The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written,
particularly from the 1930s through the '50s.A consummately contradictory man,
Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the
20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create
the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and
bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was
a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to
be validated by serious critical opinion.
Context
Ernest Hemingway
was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899. As a young man, he left
home to become a newspaper writer in Kansas City. Early in 1918, he joined the
Italian Red Cross and became an ambulance driver in Italy, serving in the
battlefield in the First World War, in which the Italians allied with the
British, the French, and the Americans, against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In
Italy, he observed the carnage and the brutality of the Great War firsthand. On
July 8, 1918, a trench mortar shell struck him while he crouched beyond the
front lines with three Italian soldiers.
Though Hemingway
embellished the story of his wounding over the years, this much is certain: he
was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with a Red Cross
nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are divided over Agnes' role in
Hemingway's life and writing, but there is little doubt that his affair with
her provided the background for A Farewell to Arms, which many critics consider
to be Hemingway's greatest novel.
Published in 1929,
A Farewell to Arms tells the story of Frederic Henry, a young American
ambulance driver and first lieutenant ("Tenente") in the Italian
army. Hit in the leg by a trench mortar shell in the fighting between Italy and
Austria-Hungary, Henry is transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he falls in
love with an English Red Cross nurse named Catherine Barkley. The similarities
to Hemingway's own life are obvious.
After the war, when
he had published several novels and become a famous writer, Hemingway claimed
that the account of Henry's wounding in A Farewell to Arms was the most
accurate version of his own wounding he had ever written. Hemingway's life
certainly gave the novel a trenchant urgency, and its similarity to his own
experience no doubt helped him refine the terse, realistic, descriptive style
for which he became famous, and which made him one of the most influential
American writers of the twentieth century.
SUMMARY
Book I, Chapters
1-6
Frederic Henry
begins his story by describing his situation: he is an American in the Italian
army near the front with Austria-Hungary, a mile from the fighting. Every day
he sees troops marching and hears gunfire; often the King rides through the
town. A cholera epidemic has spread through the army, he says, but only seven
thousand die of it.
His unit moves to a
town in Gorizia, further from the fighting, which continues in the mountains
beyond. His situation is relatively enjoyable; the town is not badly damaged,
with nice cafes and two brothels--one for the officers and one for the enlisted
men. One day Henry sits in the mess hall with a group of fellow officers
taunting the military priest. A captain accuses the priest of cavorting with
women, and the priest blushes; though he is not religious, Henry treats the priest
kindly. After teasing the priest, the Italians argue over where Henry should
take his leave; because the winter is approaching, the fighting will ease, and
Henry, an ambulance driver, will be able to spend some time away from the
front. The priest encourages him to visit the cold, clear country of Abruzzo,
but the other men have other suggestions.
When he returns
from his leave, Henry discusses his trip with his roommate, the surgeon
Rinaldi. Henry claims to have traveled throughout Italy, and Rinaldi, who is
obsessed with beautiful girls, tells him about a group of new English women and
claims to be in love with a Miss Barkley. Henry loans him fifty lire (Italian
money). At dinner that night, the priest is hurt that Henry failed to visit
Abruzzi. Henry feels guilty, and tells him that he wanted to visit Abruzzi.
The next morning,
Henry examines the gun batteries and quizzes the mechanics; then he travels to
visit Miss Barkley and the English nurses with Rinaldi. He is immediately
struck by Miss Barkley's beauty, and especially by her long blonde hair. Miss
Barkley tells Henry that her fiancee was killed in the battle of the Somme, and
Henry tells her he has never loved anyone. On the way back, Rinaldi observes
that Miss Barkley liked Henry more than she liked Rinaldi, but that her friend,
Helen Ferguson, was nice too.
The next day, Henry
calls on Miss Barkley again. The head nurse expresses surprise that an American
would want to join the Italian army, and tells him that Miss Barkley is gone--
but says that Henry may come back to see her at seven o'clock that night. Henry
drives back along the trenches, eats dinner, then returns to see Miss Barkley.
He finds her waiting with Helen Ferguson; Helen excuses herself, and Henry
tries to put his arm around her. She refuses, but allows him to kiss her. Then
she begins to cry, and Henry is annoyed. When Henry goes home, Rinaldi is
amused.
Three nights later,
Henry sees Miss Barkley again; she tells him to call her Catherine. They walk
through the garden, and Henry tells Catherine he loves her, though he knows he
does not. They kiss again, and he thinks of their relationship as an elaborate
game. To his surprise, she suddenly tells him that he plays the game very well,
but that it is a rotten game. Henry sees Rinaldi later that evening, and
Rinaldi, observing Henry's romantic confusion, feel glad that he did not become
involved with a British nurse.
Book I, Chapters
7-12
Driving back from
his post, Henry picks up a soldier with a hernia; they discuss the War, and Henry
arranges a way to get the man to a hospital. Henry thinks about the War, and
realizes that he feels no danger from it. At dinner that night, the men drink
and tease the priest; Henry nearly forgets he had promised to go see Catherine,
and before he rushes over, Rinaldi gives him some coffee to sober him up. At
the nurses' villa, Helen Ferguson tells Henry that Catherine is sick and will
not see him. Henry feels guilty and surprisingly lonely.
The next day an
attack is scheduled. Henry goes to see Catherine, and she gives him a Saint
Anthony medal. He spends the day driving to the spot where the fighting will
take place.Henry and his men wait in the trenches as the shelling begins. They
are hungry, and Henry risks being shot to fetch some cheese. As he sits down to
eat it, he hears a loud noise and sees a flash and believes he has died. A
trench mortar shell has struck him in the leg. Wounded men fall all around him.
Henry's surviving
men carry him to safety; a British doctor treats him on the field, then sends
him in an ambulance to the field hospital. Henry lies in intense pain. Rinaldi
comes to visit him at the field hospital, and tells Henry that he will get a medal.
Henry shows no interest in medals. Rinaldi leaves him a bottle of cognac and
promises to send Miss Barkley to see him soon.
At dusk, the priest
comes to visit. They discuss the war, then God. Henry tells the priest he does
not love God--he says he does not love anything much. The priest tells him he
will find love, and it will make him happy. Henry claims to have always been
happy, but the priest says Henry will know another kind of happiness when he
finds it. Half delirious, Henry thinks about Italian towns, then falls asleep.
Rinaldi and a Major
from their group come to visit Henry the night before he moves to a better
hospital in Milan. Henry is still half-delirious, and they drink profusely.
After a confused conversation, Henry falls into a drunken sleep. The next day,
he is taken on a train to Milan.
Book II, Chapters
13-17
At Milan, Frederic
Henry is taken to the American hospital. A young, pretty nurse named Miss Gage
makes his bed and takes his temperature. The head nurse, Miss Van Campen,
irritates Henry by not allowing him to have wine. Henry pays some Italians to
sneak wine into his room with the evening papers.
In the morning,
Miss Gage tells Henry that Miss Barkley has come to work at the hospital--she
claims not to like her, but Henry tells her she will learn to like her. The
porter brings a barber to shave Henry, but the barber mistakes Henry for an
Austrian soldier and threatens to cut his throat. After the barber and the
porter leave, Miss Barkley comes in, and Henry realizes he is in love with her.
He pulls her down into the bed with him, and they make love for the first time.
Henry goes through
a round of doctors who remove some of the shrapnel from his leg. The doctors
seem incompetent, and tell Henry he will have to wait six months for an
operation if he wants to keep his leg. He cannot stand the thought of spending
six months in bed, and asks for another opinion; the house doctor says he will
send for Dr. Valentini. When Dr. Valentini comes, he is cheerful, energetic,
and competent and says he will perform the operation in the morning.Catherine
spends the night in Henry's room, and they see a bat. Catherine prepares him
for the operation, and warns him not to talk about their affair while under the
anaesthetic.
After the
operation, Henry is very sick. As he recovers, three other patients come to the
hospital--a boy from Georgia with malaria, a boy from New York with malaria and
jaundice, and a boy who tried to unscrew the fuse cap from an explosive shell
for a souvenir. Henry develops an appreciation for Helen Ferguson, who helps
him pass notes to Catherine while she is on duty. Catherine continues to stay
with Henry every night, but Henry and Miss Gage finally convince her to take
three nights off of night duty--Miss Van Campen has commented that Henry always
sleeps till noon.
Book II, Chapters
18-24
That summer Henry
learns to walk on crutches, and he and Catherine enjoy Milan. They befriend the
headwaiter at a restaurant called the Gran Italia, and Catherine continues to
see Henry every night. They discuss marriage, but Catherine remains opposed to
the idea for the time being. They pretend to be married instead. Catherine
tells Henry that her love for him has become her religion.
When not with
Catherine, Henry spends time with a soldier named Ettore Moretti, an Italian
from San Francisco who is very proud of his war medals. Ettore is extremely
boastful about his military prowess, and Catherine finds him annoying and dull.
One night Henry and Catherine lie in bed listening to the rain, and Catherine
asks Henry if he will always love her. She says she is afraid of the rain, and
begins to cry.
Henry and Catherine
go to the races with Helen Ferguson, whom Henry now calls "Fergie,"
and the boy who tried to unscrew the nose cap on the shrapnel shell. They bet
on a horse backed by a racing expert and former criminal named Mr. Myers; they
win, but Catherine feels dissatisfied, so they pick a horse for the next race
on their own. Even though they lose, Catherine feels much better.
By September,
Henry's leg is nearly healed. He receives some leave time from the hospital,
and Catherine tells him she will arrange to go with him. She then gives him a
piece of startling news: she is six months pregnant. Catherine worries that
Henry feels trapped, and promises not to make trouble for him, but he tells her
he feels cheerful and thinks she is wonderful. Catherine talks about the
obstacles they will face, and mentions the old quote about how the coward dies
a thousand deaths, the brave but one. She says that, in reality, the brave man
dies perhaps two thousand deaths in his imagination--he simply does not mention
them.
The next morning it
begins to rain, and Henry is diagnosed with jaundice. Miss Van Campen finds
empty liquor bottles in Henry's room, and accuses him of producing jaundice
through alcoholism to avoid being sent back to the front. Miss Gage helps Henry
clear things up, but in the end he loses his leave time.
Henry prepares to
travel back to the front. He buys a new pistol, and takes Catherine to a hotel.
The hotel makes Catherine feel like a prostitute, but before the night is over
they feel at home there. Before midnight, they walk downstairs and Henry calls
a carriage for Catherine. They have a brief good-bye, and Henry boards the
crowded train that will take him back to the war.
Book III, Chapters
25-28
After returning to
Gorizia, Henry has a talk with the major about the war--it was a bad year, the
major says; Henry was lucky to get hit when he did. Henry then goes to find
Rinaldi; while he waits for his friend, he thinks about Catherine. Rinaldi
comes into the room and is glad to see Henry; concerned, he examines Henry's
wounded knee. He says that he has become a skilled surgeon from the constant
work with the wounded, but now that the fighting has died down temporarily he
has a frustrating lack of work. They talk about Catherine, and at dinner the
officers tease the priest.
After dinner, Henry
goes to talk with the priest. The priest thinks the war will end soon, but
Henry remains skeptical. After the priest leaves, Henry goes to sleep; he wakes
when Rinaldi comes back, but quickly falls asleep again.
The next morning,
he travels to the Bainsizza area, and sees the damage caused by the war: the
whole village is destroyed. Henry meets a man named Gino, and they discuss the
fighting. Gino says the summer's losses were not in vain, and Henry falls
silent--he says words like those embarrass him. He says that the names of
villages and the numbers of streets have more meaning than words like sacred
and glorious.That night, the rain comes down hard, and the Croatians begin a
bombardment. In the morning, the Italians learn that the attacking forces
include Germans, and they become very afraid--they have had little contact with
the Germans in the war so far, and prefer to keep it that way. The next night,
the Italian line has been broken, and the Italian forces begin a large-scale
retreat.
As the forces
slowly move out, Henry returns to the villa, but finds it empty; Rinaldi is
gone with the hospital. Henry finds the drivers under his command, including
Piani, Bonello, and Aymo. Before leaving in the morning, Henry gets a good
night's sleep.
They drive out
slowly through the town, in an endless line of soldiers and vehicles. Henry
takes a turn sleeping, and shortly after he wakes, the column stalls. He finds
that Bonello has given two engineer sergeants a ride, and Aymo has two girls in
his car. Exhausted, Henry falls asleep again, and dreams of Catherine.That
night, columns of peasants join the retreating army. In the early morning Henry
and his men stop briefly at a farmhouse, eating a large breakfast. Soon, they
continue slowly on their way, rejoining the line of trucks and soldiers.
Book III, Chapters
29-32
Aymo's car gets
stuck in the soft ground; the men are forced to cut brush hurriedly to place
under the tires for traction. Henry orders the two engineer sergeants riding
with Bonello to help; afraid of being overtaken by the enemy, they refuse, and
try to leave. Henry draws his gun and shoots one of them, but the other
escapes. Bonello takes Henry's pistol and kills the wounded sergeant.
They begin to cut
branches and twigs; in the end, they are unable to save the car. Henry gives
some money to the two girls travelling with Aymo and encourages them to go down
to a nearby village, Aymo gets in Henry's vehicle, and they set out, now cut
off from the main column.
Crossing a bridge,
Henry sees a nearby car full of German soldiers. As they travel, they begin to
notice more and more signs of German occupation, and they worry that they have
been completely cut off from Italian-controlled land. They proceed with
caution; a sudden burst of gunfire kills Aymo. They realize he was shot by the
Italian rear guard--the Italians are ahead, but because the rear guard is afraid,
they are almost as dangerous as the Germans.
Fearing death,
Bonello leaves in hopes of being taken prisoner. The men hide in a barn that
night, and in the morning they rejoin the Italians. The enlisted men become
furious with the officers, and Piani is afraid they will try to kill Henry.
Suddenly, two men (battle police) seize hold of Henry. They seize Henry because
he is a foreigner, and in the chaos of the retreat they intend to shoot him for
a spy. When they look away for a moment, Henry dives into the river and swims
away.
After floating in
the river for what seems like a very long time, Henry climbs out, removes the
stars from his shirt, and counts his money. He crosses the Venetian plain that
day, then jumps aboard a military train that evening, hiding under a canvas
with guns.
Lying under the
canvas, Henry thinks about the army, about the war, and about Catherine. He
realizes that he will be pronounced dead, and assumes he will never see Rinaldi
again. Rinaldi has been concerned he will die of syphilis, and Henry worries
for him. Exhausted and hungry, he imagines finding Catherine and going away
with her to a safe place.
Book V, Chapters
38-41
That fall, Henry
and Catherine live in a brown wooden house on the side of a mountain. They
enjoy the company of Mr. and Mrs. Guttingen, who live downstairs, and they
remain very happy together; sometimes they walk down the mountain path in
Montreux. One day Catherine gets her hair done in Montreux, and afterwards they
go to have a beer--Catherine thinks beer is good for the baby, because it will
keep it small; she is worried about the baby's size because the doctor has said
she has a narrow pelvis. They talk again about getting married, but Catherine
wants to wait until after the baby is born when she will be thin again.
Three days before
Christmas, the snow comes. Catherine asks Henry if he feels restless, and he
says no, though he does wonder about his friends on the front, such as Rinaldi
and the priest.
Henry decides to
grow a beard and by mid-January, he has one. Through January and February he
and Catherine remain very happy; in March they move into town to be near the
hospital. They stay in a hotel there for three weeks; Catherine buys baby
clothes, Henry works out in the gym, and they both feel that the baby will
arrive soon.
Finally, around
three o'clock one morning, Catherine goes into labor. They go to the hospital,
where Catherine is given a nightgown and a room. She encourages Henry to go out
for breakfast, and he does, talking to the old man who serves him. When he
returns to the hospital, he finds that Catherine has been taken to the delivery
room. He goes in to see her; the doctor stands by, and Catherine takes an
anaesthetic gas when her contractions become very painful. At two o'clock in
the afternoon, Henry goes out for lunch.
He goes back to the
hospital; Catherine is now intoxicated from the gas. The doctor thinks her
pelvis is too narrow to allow the baby to pass through, and advises a Caesarian
section. Catherine suffers unbearable pain and pleads for more gas. Finally
they wheel her out on a stretcher to perform the operation. Henry watches the
rain outside.
Soon the doctor
comes out and takes Henry to see the baby, a boy. Henry has no feeling for the
child. He then goes to see Catherine, and at first worries that she is dead.
When she asks him about their son, he tells her he was fine, and the nurse
gives him a quizzical look. Ushering him outside, the nurse tells him that the
boy is not fine--he strangled on the umbilical cord, and never began to
breathe.
He goes out for
dinner, and when he returns the nurse tells him that Catherine is hemorrhaging.
He is filled with terror that she will die. When he is allowed to see her, she
tells him she will die, and asks him not to say the same things to other girls.
Henry goes into the hallway while they try to treat Catherine, but nothing
works; finally, he goes back into the room and stays with her until she dies.
The doctor offers
to drive him back to the hotel, but Henry declines. He goes back into the room
and tries to say good-bye to Catherine, but says that it was like saying
good-bye to a statue. He leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel in the
rain
CHARACTERS’ PROFILE
Frederic Henry -
The novel's protagonist. A young American ambulance driver in the Italian army
during the First World War, Henry is disciplined and courageous, but feels
detached from life. When introduced to Catherine Barkley, Henry discovers a
capacity for love he had not known he possessed, and begins a process of
development that culminates with his desertion of the Italian army. Throughout
the novel, the Italian soldiers under Henry's command call him "Tenente"--the
Italian word for "lieutenant."
Catherine Barkley -
An English nurse who falls in love with Frederic Henry. Catherine's fiancee was
killed in the battle of the Somme before she met Henry. Catherine has cast
aside conventional social values, and lives according to her own values,
devoting herself wholly to her love for Henry. Her long, beautiful hair is her
most distinctive physical feature.
Rinaldi -
Frederic's friend, an Italian surgeon. Mischievous and wry, Rinaldi is
nevertheless a passionate and skilled doctor. Rinaldi makes a practice of
always being in love with a beautiful woman, and at the beginning of the novel
is attracted to Catherine Barkley; Rinaldi's infatuation causes him to
introduce Frederic and Catherine to one another.
Helen Ferguson - A
friend of Catherine's. Though she remains fond of the lovers and helps them,
Helen is much more committed to social convention than Henry and Catherine; she
vocally disapproves of their "immoral" love affair.
Miss Gage - An
American nurse. Miss Gage becomes a friend to both Catherine and Henry--in
fact, she may be in love with Henry. Unlike Helen Ferguson, she sets aside
conventional social values to support their love affair.
Miss Van Campen -
The superintendent of nurses at the American hospital where Catherine works.
Miss Van Campen is strict, cold, and unlikable; she is obsessed with rules and
regulations and has no patience for or interest in individual feelings.
Dr. Valentini - An
Italian surgeon who comes to the American hospital. Self-assured and confident,
Dr. Valentini is also a highly talented surgeon. Frederic Henry takes an
immediate liking to him.
Count Greffi - A
spry ninety-four year old nobleman. Henry knows Count Greffi from his time in
Stresa, and the two play billiards together toward the end of the novel.
Despite his advanced age, the count is intelligent, disciplined, and fully
committed to life.
Список литературы
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