The Big Read at Kansas City Public Library

The story is told about a scientist who picked apart a flower.  She examined the petals, the stem, the pistol and stamens, etc.  She reported, “I’ve examined every part of this flower, and I cannot locate its beauty.”

Literary analysis, and indeed most types of analysis, runs the risk of picking apart the object studied while missing the character of the whole.  The question I want to put forward is this:  “How did Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms make you feel?”  With a writer like Hemingway, who is unquestionably capable of conveying what he wishes to the reader, what you experience when reading the book is what he wants you to experience.  That is the purpose for his writing, that communication of the experience that reading his work creates.  Certainly we can study how he manages to convey the experience so successfully.  We can note that, when engaged in warfare, his description of the weather is that its effect is depressing and demoralizing.  The rain is unending and oppressive.  Apart from the war context, rain is neutral and even refreshing.  We can observe his use of stichomythia to display love, camaraderie, compassion, and to break up what would otherwise be an overly dark tale that would bog the reader down in the swamps of despair.  We can explore all the little elements contained in the story – the Saint Anthony medal, the discussions about if war ever ends, the espionage flavor of the early stages of Frederic and Catherine’s love relationship, to mention a very few.  All of these, however, must take second place to how Hemingway makes us feel and, with that, what he wants us to reflect about.

I read this classic work many years ago, and found that, what I didn’t already remember, I recalled readily this time around.  The feeling remained.  That feeling is one of despair and helplessness.  The characters are maneuvered, completely manipulated, and control of anything in their lives is pure illusion.  If the elements aren’t brutalizing the characters, other people are.  From the enemy army to the military police executing officers in one’s own, people take up where nature leaves off.  Relief, comfort, sympathy, help, all come from individuals, and are dwarfed by the giant forces of nature and warfare.  The love relationship against the compellingly dark backdrop seems puny, overly optimistic, childish, even silly, and certainly doomed.

For Hemingway, people are ants on a burning log.  When he offers this image, about tossing an ant-infested log on a fire, he says that he could have pulled the log out of the fire, like some benevolent god, and rescued the still-living ants, but he did not.  Neither does the Benevolent God rescue us.  Frederic is cast as a non-believer, but he is really a cynic.  He believes in a God that allows us to be beaten down by the forces of nature, and who is uninterested in saving us from our own brutal selves.  His God can, but will not, rescue us from the “fire.”  At the end of the tale, Frederic prays (to whom if he does not believe?) and his prayer is one of desperation, one last-ditch effort to awaken a sense of responsibility in an uncaring Deity.  The escape from tragedy by escaping from the war is a cruel illusion.  Tragedy reaches out to grab him anyway.  There is no way off the burning log, just the occasional temporarily-cool spot.

A Farewell to Arms is a dark work.  It poses powerful puzzles to ponder.  Hemingway offers no help in the challenge laid down by the problem of evil in the world.  The work stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page, because Hemingway can convey with force the futility of hoping to evade the funeral march which is the human condition. 

Well done, Ernie!  Pardon me if I don’t read your story to the children.  And pass the shotgun, please – the shot glass is only a short-term fix.