Griffin, Peter.  "The Search for Home."  In Monteiro, George, ed. 
        Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. 
        New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1994: 175-188.

        Drafted to conclude Monteiro's collection of essays, Griffin's essay describes the Hemingway home where Ernest spent his childhood (175).  Summarizing an unpublished story fragment about a soldier named "Orpen" who dreams he goes to Valhalla, rejects the fighting, and finds home with a loving mother and the piano he'd rather play than fight.  Griffin suggests that such a home, with his mother blessing, is what Hemingway never found and why he hated his mother, as he proclaimed to family and friends (177-178). 

        After summarizing Hemingway's war experience, including being famous as "the first American wounded on the Italian front," and the failed engagement to nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, Griffin claims that A Farewell to Arms is driven by a search for "home" (179) and that this theme is announced in the novel's famous opening paragraph, which has images of the stream of life (flowing water) and the stream of death (moving troops).  This scene in Gorizia is in front of the first of several "homes" for Frederic.  Gorizia is not the priest's Abruzzi, something the opposite, in fact.  Griffin associates the values of the Abruzzi, especially the hunting, with Hemingway's own father, Clarence Hemingway.  Catherine's "home" in the hospital of Gorizia is a place where she exposes her psychological wound to Frederic (180).

        The field hospital, where Rinaldi and the priest visit the wounded Lt. Henry, is "incomplete" (181); the Milan hospital, with Catherine waiting, will be "home" for awhile, where she and her patient can talk their private talk, a "conspiracy of innocence" (181): "Keep right on lying to me" (qtd on 182).

        Griffin defines the "haves" in Frederic's philosophy as people who are "considerate, sensitive, tough" (182) and "self-disciplined," like the competent Dr. Valenti who works on Frederic's knee.  The "have nots," on the other hand, "are awkward, secretly insecure, sadly ridiculous" and only pretend to competence (182), like the bearded doctor who can't even read Frederic's x-rays.  Griffin claims that Hemingway is poking fun at his own father in his musings on incompetent doctors, since his father referred him to an incompetent doctor who botched a job on Ernest's tonsils (183).  Miss Van Campen, Griffin claims, is modeled on the hypocritical Grace Hemingway, Ernest's mother, including their hatred of alcohol.  Though not evil, such "have nots" are typically "stupid and weak." 

        When they separate in Milan, pretending for a while that the hotel room is "home," Catherine promises to have a real home established when he returns from the front (184).  Going back to Gorizia isn't a homecoming, especially now that things are going badly and Rinaldi thinks he has syphilis and the captain is war-weary.  Griffin associates the officer's whore house, the Villa Rosa, with Hemingway's childhood home, his mother's vulgarity, and the manipulation of his father done by Grace and her own father, Ernest Hall, who owned the house.

        Stealing the clock on the retreat, Griffin sees as a symbolic attempt to steal time, but the sergeant doing the looting will soon be dead, shot by Lt. Henry.  The Marvell reference to "Time's winged chariot" merge with the statues of the dead past when Frederic tries to stop time himself after Catherine is dead in her hospital room in Lausanne, she herself having become like a statue (185).  

        Catherine's death has been foreshadowed since the beginning of her pregnancy by her narrow hips and on through to the trip to the hospital where Frederic learns that the first labor always takes longer (186).  In fact, the marching troops in the first chapter, looking "six months gone with child" because of their ammo packs under their ponchos, foreshadow Catherine's death in childbirth.  With his beard, Frederic reflects the incompetent doctor in Milan and his father, and he doesn't know what he's doing when he gives Catherine the anesthesia (186-187). 

        Griffin sees Ernest Hall in the passage about the ants trapped on a log--"the concept of a mocking, tyrannical god, the embodiment of selfishness, of will in the absence of love" (187).  Griffin [who wrote a 3-volume biography of Hemingway] ends by suggesting that even Hemingway's failed first marriage was an attempt to find home, a yearning that was established in his first six years in Oak Park "where he spent his first six years with an 'heroic' grandfather, an impotent father, and a mother who denied him her love" (187).

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