Adair, William.  "A Farewell to Arms: A Dream Book." In Bloom, Harold, ed. 
     Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.  New York: Chelsea House,
    1987: 33-48.

    Adair sees recurring patterns in the novel--geometry (lots of lines) and intense, dreamlike chaos.  These qualities make the novel more "Romantic" than "Realistic" (33-34).  Adair sites Young's notion, based on Freud's theory, that wounded people come to deal with their wounding by recurrent dreams.  Coupled with the "lyric impulse" to unity of imagery, the book offers three images of wounding in spring, fall [1917], and finally again in spring [1918] (35), accomplishing the same wounding [of Frederic Henry] with nearly identical mood and images.  In between these images of wounding/death ("thanatos") are two interludes of "eros" (36) [in Milan and Switzerland].

The opening of the book presents Lt. Henry's wounding after being separated from Catherine and his removal from the place where he is "broken" (37-38).  Recurrences of this threat of death happen when Lt. Henry plunges into the river to escape being shot by Italian carabinieri and later in Catherine's death.  But the preamble to each of these scenes is a time spent in familiar geometric terrain with roads and rails, bridges and lines of trees (39).

The time in Milan is often daytime, sunny summer days.  "Libido" and "anima" live amid benevolent "parent-figures," such as Dr. Valentini and "George, the headwaiter" (40). The "light" interludes are like paintings by Cézanne, while the more dangerous and fragmented, rainy times are like paintings by Dali (geometric) followed by paintings by Goya--lightning and violence (41).

Frederic returns to the front with "Time's winged chariot" chasing him in the rainy fall, "a season of flight from time and death" (41).  The retreat takes place on the landscape of a nightmare, but it repeats the pattern of the wounding, including being away from Catherine and moving away from where the army has broken (42).  But this action only foreshadows the ending of the novel.  Nevertheless, a broken and battered landscape--in the rain--takes over from the crossing of roads, bridges, and a "maze" of parallel lines, made surreal by looking back across the patterns (43). Repeated images include "landscape, action, weather, time (mountains and plains, nighttime flights from violence, rain, clear cold mornings, Time's winged vehicle)--and . . . characters as archetypes . . . rendering the dominant emotion" (43-44). 

The winter spent in Switzerland (1917-1918) recreates the romantic interlude of the couple's time in the American hospital in Milan.  Benevolent parent-figures, such as the Guttingens--again assist the couple.

When the rains come in March, 1918, the linear landscape prefigures the nightmarish chaos to come and the final recreation of wounding of the protagonist by the death of Catherine (45-46). This time the linear landscape is the hospital hallways, along with the statues that remind us of the time early in their relationship when Lt. Henry felt bad because he couldn't see Catherine--as well as foreshadowing the ending when it feels like "saying goodbye to a statue" (47-48).

Coupled with the Reynolds article that follows it, this essay helps to show us the creative craft of Hemingway in this novel because the landscape is totally invented, the countryside of the heart.

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