Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" is a love story built around a theme of good versus evil, set against backdrops of war and hospitals. The author points out that, in this morality tale, Hemingway uses this war and the hospitals, both places where individuals fight a life-or-death battle, to symbolize facing one's own spirituality. The paper relates that the love between Frederic and Catherine is symbolic of the good in life; however, Frederic's unclean way of living, the bad side of human nature, is symbolic of death.

From the Paper:

"Rather, Hemingway uses his brief service as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in 1918, and his injury by a mortar burst as a source for realistic detail. Hemingway's wound was critical enough to be life endangering, and it has been observed by his contemporaries that this experience permanently altered his outlook on life. The author himself remembered the sensation of his life almost leaving him, "like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by a corner." The love story is based on his own affair with a nurse during this time, Agnes von Kurowsky. Although Hemingway was deeply in love with her, she did not regard the liaison as a serious affair, and left for Florence to care for a patient. While there, she became involved with someone else and broke the affair off."

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