Farewell to Arms

2 Pages 377 Words

Edmund Wilson, in an internet article, “Ernest Hemingway: Bourdon Gauge of Morale,” suggests that A Farewell to Arms is a tragedy of love and war . His purpose is to link the two different sides of the novel together in order to give readers a better understanding.
Wilson supports this suggestion by showing examples throughout the book. No book gives the exactness of a foreigner in a war like this book does. Hemingway wrote this book “...long enough after the events for them to present themselves...” The characters are not tormented by the “dissonance between personal satisfaction and the suffering one shares with others...”, but as soon as we see the intimate relationship between the lovers we see that it is an “...idealized realationship...” A Farewell to Arms is a Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Henry fall in love after she gets pregnant with his child and the romance blossoms from there when they leave in the middle of the night for Switzerland because it is a neutral country and Henry will be safe from the Italian Army which was going to capture him and kill him because he fled from the war. He concludes the article by telling the readers the intimacy of the relationship in the story.
I thought that the article gave several excellent points in dealing with the love and war theme. Wilson tells how no other book captures the strangeness of an American in Europe during a war. I really felt that he made a really good point when he said that the Caporetto retreat was the finest part of the book because I enjoyed that part too and loved reading about all the misfortunes that he ran into. Wilson points out that Hemingway did not show any solid sense of character during the book. I learned that Hemingway makes it so that Catherine and Henry want to be with eachother forever, but its ironic when the child dies along with Catherine because a cesarian was supposed to be the safest and easiest way to go but it en...