ANALYSIS OF PROSE
A Farewell to Arms
By Ernest Hemingway (1929)

Compiled by:
Fatma Nur Lisa
2314026
PENDIDIKAN
BAHASA INGGRIS
FAKULTAS
BAHASA DAN SASTRA
UNIVERSITAS
PESANTREN TINGGI DARUL ULUM JOMBANG
2016
Chapter I
Summary of “A Farewell to Arms”
Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a
young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I.
At the beginning of the novel, the war is winding down with the onset of
winter, and Henry arranges to tour Italy. The following spring, upon his return
to the front, Henry meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse’s aide at the
nearby British hospital and the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Rinaldi,
however, quickly fades from the picture as Catherine and Henry become involved
in an elaborate game of seduction. Grieving the recent death of her fiancé,
Catherine longs for love so deeply that she will settle for the illusion of it.
Her passion, even though pretended, wakens a desire for emotional interaction
in Henry, whom the war has left coolly detached and numb.
When Henry is wounded on the
battlefield, he is brought to a hospital in Milan to recover. Several doctors
recommend that he stay in bed for six months and then undergo a necessary
operation on his knee. Unable to accept such a long period of recovery, Henry
finds a bold, garrulous surgeon named Dr.Valentini who agrees to operate
immediately. Henry learns happily that Catherine has been transferred to Milan
and begins his recuperation under her care. During the following months, his relationship
with Catherine intensifies. No longer simply a game in which they exchange
empty promises and playful kisses, their love becomes powerful and real. As the
lines between scripted and genuine emotions begin to blur, Henry and Catherine
become tangled in their love for each other.
Once Henry’s damaged leg has
healed, the army grants him three weeks convalescence leave, after which he is
scheduled to return to the front. He tries to plan a trip with Catherine, who
reveals to him that she is pregnant. The following day, Henry is diagnosed with
jaundice, and Miss Van Campen, the superintendent of the hospital, accuses him
of bringing the disease on himself through excessive drinking. Believing
Henry’s illness to be an attempt to avoid his duty as a serviceman, Miss Van
Campen has Henry’s leave revoked, and he is sent to the front once the jaundice
has cleared. As they part, Catherine and Henry pledge their mutual devotion.
Henry travels to the front,
where Italian forces are losing ground and manpower daily. Soon after Henry’s
arrival, a bombardment begins. When word comes that German troops are breaking
through the Italian lines, the Allied forces prepare to retreat. Henry leads
his team of ambulance drivers into the great column of evacuating troops. The
men pick up two engineering sergeants and two frightened young girls on their
way. Henry and his drivers then decide to leave the column and take secondary
roads, which they assume will be faster. When one of their vehicles bogs down
in the mud, Henry orders the two engineers to help in the effort to free the
vehicle. When they refuse, he shoots one of them. The drivers continue in the
other trucks until they get stuck again. They send off the young girls and
continue on foot toward Udine. As they march, one of the drivers is shot dead
by the easily frightened rear guard of the Italian army. Another driver marches
off to surrender himself, while Henry and the remaining driver seek refuge at a
farmhouse. When they rejoin the retreat the following day, chaos has broken
out: soldiers, angered by the Italian defeat, pull commanding officers from the
melee and execute them on sight. The battle police seize Henry, who, at a
crucial moment, breaks away and dives into the river. After swimming a safe
distance downstream, Henry boards a train bound for Milan. He hides beneath a
tarp that covers stockpiled artillery, thinking that his obligations to the war
effort are over and dreaming of his return to Catherine.
Henry reunites with Catherine
in the town of Stresa. From there, the two escape to safety in Switzerland,
rowing all night in a tiny borrowed boat. They settle happily in a lovely
alpine town called Montreux and agree to put the war behind them forever.
Although Henry is sometimes plagued by guilt for abandoning the men on the
front, the two succeed in living a beautiful, peaceful life. When spring
arrives, the couple moves to Lausanne so that they can be closer to the
hospital. Early one morning, Catherine goes into labor. The delivery is
exceptionally painful and complicated. Catherine delivers a stillborn baby boy
and, later that night, dies of a hemorrhage. Henry stays at her side until she
is gone. He attempts to say goodbye but cannot. He walks back to his hotel in
the rain.
Chapter II
Ø The Author’s Life
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899.
He later portrayed his middle-class parents rather harshly, condemning them for
their conventional morality and values. As a young man, he left home to become
a newspaper writer in Kansas City. Early in 1918, he joined the Italian Red
Cross and served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, in which
the Italians allied with the British, French, and Americans against Germany and
Austria-Hungary. During his time abroad, Hemingway had two experiences that
affected him profoundly and that would later inspire one of his most celebrated
novels, A Farewell to Arms. The first occurred on July 8, 1918, when a
trench mortar shell struck him while he crouched beyond the front lines with
three Italian soldiers. Though Hemingway embellished the story over the years,
it is certain that he was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in
love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are divided over
Agnes’s role in Hemingway’s life and writing, but there is little doubt that
his relationship with her informed the relationship between Lieutenant Henry
and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
After his recovery, Hemingway spent several years as a reporter, during
which time he honed the clear, concise, and emotionally evocative writing style
that generations of authors after him would imitate. In September 1921, he
married his first of four wives and settled in Paris, where he made valuable
connections with American expatriate writers including Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound. Hemingway’s landmark collection of stories, In Our Time,
introduced Nick Adams, one of the author’s favorite protagonists, whose
difficult road from youth into maturity he chronicled. Hemingway’s reputation
as a writer, however, was most firmly established by the publication of The
Sun Also Rises in 1926 and A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
Critics generally agree that A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway’s
most accomplished novel. It offers powerful descriptions of life during and
immediately following World War I and brilliantly maps the psychological
complexities of its characters using a revolutionary, pared-down prose style.
Furthermore, the novel, like much of Hemingway’s writing during what were to be
his golden years, helped to establish the author’s myth of himself as a master
of many trades: writing, soldiering, boxing, bullfighting, big-game hunting.
Hemingway was skilled, to a greater or lesser extent, in each of these
arts, but most critics maintain that his writing fizzled after World War II,
when his physical and mental health declined. Despite fantastic bouts of
depression, Hemingway did muster enough energy to write The Old Man and the
Sea, one of his most beloved stories, in 1952. This novella earned him a
Pulitzer Prize, and three years later Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Still, not even these accolades could soothe the devastating
effects of a lifetime of debilitating depression. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway
killed himself in his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
Ø The Social Background
In 20th century the
whole world has been through lots of wars and social conflicts. All the aspects
of life came about the same general concepts of love, war, isolation of man,
democracy, freedom, individuality and fame. Likewise, Hemingway, a writer of
novels and short stories, in his works' themes he had mainly focused on:
Masculinity, death, fatalistic heroism and isolation as major factors of
twentieth century. Doubtlessly that is because the writer himself had been
through such hard experiments; either personally or as a witness to what is
mentioned of wars and social issues around the world, from USA to Cuba in
Americas to France, Italy and Spain in Europe, and Africa as well. Generally,
Hemingway's works were influenced by the society of his time in two different eras;
those are WWI, Italy, and France, then WWII, Spanish Civil War, Cuba and
Posthumous Work.
Chapter III
Analysis among the novel “A Farewell to Arms”,
the author’s life, and the social
background
The character of Frederic has
many similarities to Hemingway. For starters, he's an American living in
Europe. Hemingway spent a lot of time in Europe, working for the Red Cross and
also as a foreign correspondent for various American publications. Both the
character of Frederic and Ernest Hemingway himself worked as ambulance drivers
for the Italian Army in World War I, he got injured and fell in love with the
nurse who cared for them. In Hemingway's real life, the nurse in question was
named Agnes von Kurowsky. In A Farewell to Arms, her name is Catherine
Barkley.
The character of Catherine
Barkley has sparked a lot of debate amongst literary critics, particularly in
relationship to what her character says about Hemingway's attitude towards
women. Catherine, by Hemingway's description, is almost impossibly beautiful
with apparently the most amazing hair this side of Rapunzel. Feminist critics
tend to find Catherine too submissive, too willing to do anything to make
Frederic happy and keep his love, and having no will of her own.
Those are relation between the
story and the author’s life. The other is about relation between the story and
the social background of Ernest Hemingway in 20th century. It told
us about a depressed and soul unoccupied by most of army that did not know and
understand why the World War should be happened? What did they get from that
World War? What was the important to do something by using weapon? and will
there any “enough” word for World War?. It represents in the story when
Frederic Henry was lost of belief in war until he was run off from that war and
choose to live with Catherine in Swiss. He wanted to be human being as usual.
In spite of that, he still figured as patriotic man. Although he’s American, but
it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t lost of his love in Europe, especially in Italy.
So, A Farewell to Arms novel has many reflections to the author’s life
and the social background.
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