This week, I’ll be discussing A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.  Like most of the books I write about, I read this book as part of my AP English Literature and Composition class in twelfth grade.  

 

When I read this, I admired that Hemingway’s style of writing made the book really easy to read.  However, it was a little too easy to read. As someone who did not really enjoy the story of the novel and only read the book to get it done, I found myself realizing that I essentially skimmed the text and did not absorb much of the information as I first read it.  This was the last book I had to read in high school, and I probably remember its content much less clearly than the other books I had to read before it.

 

Set during World War I, the novel tells the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving in the Italian Army as an ambulance driver.  The story explores the roles Henry played in the war and the decisions he had to make while he was on the battlefield.  He suffers injuries that land him in the hospital, and he makes his way back to fighting on behalf of the Italians once again.  

 

It is also worth mentioning that throughout the story, Catherine Barkley plays the role of the love interest; although, in the beginning, she is still coping with the death of her fiance.  Henry experiences a sort of “love at first sight” for her while she nurses him in the hospital.

 

In my class, we debated the level of emotional commitment Catherine has for Henry, as most students viewed Catherine as simply needing a distraction from her husband, especially because of how their relationship originally began based off of sex.  Other students felt as though she did love Henry, as they viewed her willingness to start a relationship with Henry as a bold sign of her moving on from her previous relationship.

 

Additionally, another big debate my class had about this novel was about the message Ernest Hemingway was trying to communicate to the readers.  This debate was based off of the idea of heroism in the novel.  My teacher encouraged us to consider: Who is the hero?

 

Generally, people assume that the character who risks his life in war is the hero, but many argued that Henry did not seem to exhibit the characteristics of a hero as the story progressed.  He did not play any critical roles within the war that were life-changing, unlike most protagonists in stories about war, and he even tries to escape the scene towards the climax of the novel in order to be with Catherine.

 

Some people considered Catherine to be the hero for her qualities of bravery and modesty.  She played a critical role in a scene in which she and Henry escape across a lake, which is even more impressive to read about when considering she was pretty far along in pregnancy.

 

There were two prominent perspectives about Hemingway’s goal in defining heroism that emerged in my class, and they were each opposites of one another.

 

Half of the class believed that the idea Hemingway was trying to get across was that nobody is a hero.  They felt that the idea of heroism is overrated, and when it comes down to it, nobody is ever really above the rest.

 

On the other hand, the rest of us thought that Hemingway was trying to say that anyone can be a hero, which is why it was hard to determine who the actual “hero” of the story is.  With that idea in mind, students considered how the media has influenced the way we view heroism.  We have been conditioned to think that people need to perform grand gestures in order to truly be a hero, but, in reality, those grand gestures we see in moves do not actually occur.

 

Overall, A Farewell to Arms sparked a great deal of discussion among us readers, which is why I think that the book is rather beneficial for students to read.  Hemingway illustrated many familiar topics and ideas throughout the book in a way that challenged people to think critically about what he was trying to get across.  As a whole, I rate A Farewell to Arms as a 7/10.  Although the text was easy to read, I was still encouraged to try to read between the lines for a deeper meaning.