Nagel, James.  "Catherine Barkley and Retrospective Narration." In
        Monteiro, George, ed.  Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's A
        Farewell to Arms.  New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1994: 161-174.

        Nagel's article appeared in Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism, edited by Linda Wagner (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987: 171-185).  Nagel's thesis, in rejection of Fetterley and others who portray Catherine as unrealistic, is that "A Farewell to Arms is fundamentally not a realistic novel about World War I narrated by Ernest Hemingway; it is, rather, a retrospective narrative told by Frederic Henry a decade after the action has taken place for the purpose of coming to terms emotionally with the events" (161).  So the time of the action described is different from the time frame of the story telling.  The army action occurs from 1915-1917, and the Swiss action occurs from fall, 1917, to the following spring, 1918, ending in April in Lausanne (162).  Nagel assumes the time of the telling "is roughly synonymous with the period of composition in 1928."  Nagel depends for his dating on

Most important is the notion that the ideas from Frederic come from reflection and not insights of the moment.  "To expect [Frederic] to present a fully realized portrait, an objective and realistic account of his lost love, is to be insensitive to the emotional context of the telling of the novel" (162).  So the question is not whether Catherine matches a late-20th-Century feminist ideal but whether Frederic's memory of her, filtered by the grief of loss, matches his depressed state.

The killer world passage, then, reflects the bitterness of lost love, not just a reaction to the chaos of WWI (163).  So the feeling of loss that Frederic reports when he got drunk early in their relationship and she wouldn't see him is a foreshadowing of the total loss of Catherine.  Nagel sees three strands of memories intertwined in the novel, reflecting Frederic's choices of what to tell--

1. "his duplicity as opposed to her selflessness and nobility
2. "his growing commitment to her as he moves from the hope of sexual exploitation to genuine love
3. "his progression from an intense involvement in a group to his present status, at the time of narration, of loneliness and isolation." (163)

Taking up the idea of Henry's duplicity, Nagel suggests that Frederic's telling of their early days is "confessional," deliberately holding up for readers his shallowness and cynicism: "I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her."  But he also recalls that Catherine was aware of his two faces: "It's a rotten game we play, isn't it?" she had said to him (165).  Nagel feels the pain of Frederic telling how "lonely and hollow" he felt in 1917 when he couldn't see her, realizing that in 1928, Frederic's "feelings of loneliness and hollowness at the loss of Catherine would be inexorable and pervasive" (165-166).  When Frederic tells about their reunion in Milan, he is not boasting about a sexual conquest but telling about love, yet revealing some unflattering truths about himself, e.g. that he had had gonorrhea, in contrast to Catherine's selflessness, sacrificing a wedding, for instance, in order to not be sent away from Frederic and maintaining their agreed upon delusion that they feel married, even alone together (167). 

Due to the double time frames of the action of the story and the telling of the story, Nagel sees a particular poignancy in Frederic's relating his dreams of being reunited with Catherine when he is hiding in the gondola car on the freight train back to Milan after deserting (167).  The notion of his going crazy if he thinks of her when he isn't with her must, in 1928 when he tells the story, "suggest an almost irremediable sadness in the present" (168).  [Nagel stops short of Brenner's suicide thesis, yet perhaps unwittingly lays the groundwork for it even after a ten-year delay.]

Their reunion shows joy in the story line but followed closely by the killer world passage after the billiards game with Count Greffi, the foreshadowing makes sense only as a retrospective philosophy developed after Catherine's death.  Even during the idyllic time in Montreux, says Nagel, the landlord couple is, in retrospect, a reminder of what Frederic and Catherine have lost by her death (170).

In retrospect, Catherine dies bravely.  Unlike the telling of his own wounding, Frederic's telling of Catherine's demise is unemotional, without reflection, because, Nagel suggests, "the emotion would be too much to bear . . . " (171).

Overall, then, Nagel sees Frederic's grief and sense of loss as overriding factors in the telling: "He would, of course, subordinate any deficiencies in her nature to concentrate on what is of moment to him now, the quality of his loss, the death of a love he has not replaced" (172).  In Stresa, Frederic admitted to Catherine that he had nothing with her, so in 1928 Frederic has had ten years of confronting nothing except his "memories of the most painful and yet meaningful episode of his life" (172).  Nagel has hope that Frederic is telling his story as a prelude for "movement into the world once again" and "to move beyond his loss" (172).  Nagel pointedly rejects Brenner's suicide thesis as groundless (172-173). 

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