Young, Philip.  "Death and Transfiguration." In Monteiro, George, ed. 
        Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.  New
        York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1994: 104-108.

        The title of the novel comes from a poem by George Peele in which the speaker laments that he can no longer fight, so it is ironic.   Young (writing in 1966 in Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, published by Pennsylvania State University Press) traces the love story back to a sketch within Hemingway's earlier work, In Our Time, which also concerns alcohol, lust, an Italian hospital, a wounded American, a nurse, and their desire to marry.  In this story, the two part, the nurse plans to marry another but doesn't, and the soldier at home gets a social disease from a sales girl in the back of a taxi (104).  [Except for the social disease, the short sketch follows Hemingway's brief interlude with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, though she reports they never made love nor planned to marry each other.]

        The war story was also tried out--in chapter VI of In Our Time, in which the soldier and Rinaldi make a separate peace due to a wounded knee, like Hemingway had.  Young suggests that Frederic Henry's moral progression from complicity with the war to bitterness and finally escape is powerful because it parallels the American nation's experience of WWI (105). 

        Young judges that Catherine is the most believable of Hemingway's female protagonists, memorable despite being "idealized" and "compliant."  He also praises the minor characters--the priest, Rinaldi especially, Count Greffi, and the Italian ambulance drivers--as real, particularly due to their language patterns.

        In terms of style, Young acknowledges that some of Hemingway's sentences are rhapsodic and experimental, yet "never finer or more finished than in this novel."  [See the passage list on style in this website.]

        Though Hemingway had used water as a symbol of cleansing even before Lt. Henry plunges into the river and out of the war, the foreshadowing rain in this novel is new, initiated at the beginning of the book [with the pregnant-looking soldiers marching in the rain and the cholera report].  Young points out that this rain puts a new turn on the "pathetic fallacy" in that "good and bad weather go along with good and bad events" (106).  [See the passage list on rain in this website.]  "They win when it's sunny and lose in the rain."

        Young notes that the play on "arms" incorporates both the war and the love story, that the end of war is escape and the end of the love story is eradication.  He traces the structures of both--

The point of this parallel structuring, says Young, is to show that "life, both social and personal, is a struggle in which the Loser Takes Nothing. . . " (106).  In both realms, the protagonist is trapped--biologically by death in childbirth and socially by the retreat.  Young cites the "killer world" passage about how the world kills or breaks everyone, yet calls it "a little bit romantic" and "perhaps the finest in all of Hemingway" (107). 

    Though the experiences of Frederic and Catherine are not typical, they may yet be realistic.  Young quotes Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon suggesting that a man who survives his beloved is one of the loneliest men, that love doesn't end happily.

Copyright and Permission: This web on Ernest Hemingway's early novel was begun under a small grant from the VCCS, which holds copyright.  © 2001 by the Virginia Community College System.  This web was made by Dr. Eric Hibbison, Professor of English and Chief Chair, VCCS Regional Centers for Teaching Excellence (1998-2002). Materials in this web may be used free for educational purposes, but this web should not be behind a portal for which users must pay a fee without written permission from the VCCS.  If you're an educator using this web, please inform ehibbison@jsr.vccs.edu, especially if you'd like contact with other educators who are using this web.