FREE ESSAY ON A FAREWELL TO ARMS

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

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.
Commentary 
Henry and Catherine's simple domestic rituals in the first half of this section
illustrate their simple happiness together, and make the tragedy of the second half of
the section all the more painful. Catherine's haircut, Henry's new beard, their walks
through the mountains, and their time with the Guttingens all signify a world that Henry
and Catherine have longed for, devoid of war and filled with tranquil time together.
Throughout this section, however, as throughout the novel, Hemingway uses subtle actions
and words to foreshadow Catherine's death, such as her attempt to keep the baby small by
drinking beer. Images linking pregnancy to war and death have been peppered throughout
the novel, even in the first chapter, where Henry says that the soldiers holding their
rifles under their capes looked six months gone with child.
This subtle foreshadowing creates a current of expectation--the reader at least senses
that Catherine's pregnancy will be fatal--utterly opposed to the domestic bliss and
optimism with which Catherine and Henry now live their lives. Henry giving Catherine the
anaesthetic gas at the beginning of Chapter 41, for instance, shows his tender but
unworried desire to help her, but the obsessive need Catherine shows for the gas
indicates to the reader that all is not well. The tension in both the reader's and the
characters' expectations builds throughout Catherine's labor, and contributes to the
heart-wrenching effect of her death: Henry believed Catherine would live, and though we
know better, we want to believe him. Catherine's death, when it comes, achieves the
highest tragedy in plain understated terms: It seems she had one hemorrhage after
another. They couldn't stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she
died.
Catherine's death and the novel's tragic ending are made ambiguous by their failure to
initiate an epiphany in Frederic Henry. He does not seem to learn anything from her
death, or to feel any catharsis after it, except what he possibly already knew and
already felt: that the universe is hostile and painful, and the only thing he can do is
live his life with clarity and honesty. In many ways, A Farewell to Arms is simply an
illustration of that theme: war and love both lead to violence and death, and tragedy
follows happiness as quickly as it follows misery.
The rain that follows Henry and Catherine throughout the novel is a perfect simple symbol
of the malevolence of the universe; Catherine fears it, and it comes down relentlessly at
every turn, even at her death. After she dies, Henry never interprets her death; that
interpretation came in Chapter 34, when he thought of the world killing the good and the
brave. But after describing Catherine's death in Chapter 41, he simply tells how he
walked back to the hotel in the rain, somewhat lost and alone in the world--as, A
Farewell to Arms seems to say, we all are. Love can be an antidote for the painful
feelings of war, but it does not change the basic unforgiving hardness of the world.