Thesis:  Disillusioned and lonely, Frederick Henry is a man of action and a man with the concept of discipline and order as a Hemingway Code Hero.

Abstract: This paper briefly introduces Ernest Hemingway and analyzes the novel A Farewell to Arms. It mainly discusses the relationship between Hemingway’s life experiences and his creation of novels, Hemingway and the Lost Generation, Hemingway hero or code hero, and Hemingway’s themes, style and techniques in writing. It analyzes the story and its tragic atmosphere and studies character about Frederick Henry. Frederick Henry is a man of action, a man with the concept of discipline and order, a disillusioned, lonesome, confused and restless man, a man unable to live in a world separated from other people, and Henry’s initiation and development.

Ⅰ. Preface

Ernest Hemingway (1899--1961) is a major American novelist and short story writer. He affects many other writers in the world. His works are read by billions of people all the world and have been translated into more than one hundred languages. His major works are four novels. They are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell tolls? and The Old Man and the Sea. They win him reputation and prizes.

A Farewell to Arms is one of the greatest books written about World War I. It has two themes — war and love. It is both a great war story and a great love story. Gary Carey thinks that the intensity and tragedy of its love story can be compared with that of Romeo and Juliet. The love story takes place under the background of war, however, it is therein that lies its tragedy and its beauty.

All of Hemingway’s novels are tragedies. Some critics indicate that A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway’s most fatal work. The hero, Frederick Henry, and the heroine, Catherine Barkley, seem to have a happy end — they will have their baby and live a perfect life. But at the end of the story, the heroine dies and the hero loses his love and his wife. While the novel promises the satisfying life, it gives nothing but loss to Henry. Henry, like any of Hemingway code hero, is tested in the war and faces the disaster in the everyday life.

This paper will discuss the author Ernest Hemingway, including his times when he lived, his style in writing and Hemingway Code Hero. It will focus on analyzing Frederick Henry, a Hemingway code hero.

Ⅱ.  A Brief introduction to Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899 and died in 1961. He had enthusiasm for guns, fishing, hunting, bullfighting and boxing all his life. His colorful life of childhood was reflected in Nick Adams stories.

War forms a major part of Hemingway’s writing. He experienced and took part in World War I and World War II and the Spanish Civil War and so forth. He went to the Italian front as a Red Cross ambulance driver during the First World War. After being seriously wounded on the front, he received operations and recuperated his health in Milan. That provided “background” for A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Obviously, his adventurous experience in war provided much background and raw material for his strongly masculine novels.

As Ernest Hemingway did, many idealistic American writers volunteered to take part in the First World War. After they fought , these young people returned from the war and discovered that modern warfare was not glorious or heroic and the war had shattered their lives and hopes. They changed their perceptions and adopted unconventional style of writing and reacted to the tendencies of the older writers in the 1920’s. They became disillusioned and lost. They were all a lost generation. So “The Lost Generation” signifies the postwar generation and literary movement produced by the young writers.

The Sun Also Rises written by Hemingway in 1926 shows the postwar life and disappointed mood of the disillusioned veterans and expatriates, so it becomes the representative work of the Lost Generation. Hemingway is one of its spokesmen.

In the course of writing, Hemingway created a new type of fictional character. That is the Hemingway Code Hero. The Code Hero would himself never speak of a code. He is a man for whom it is honorable to suffer with grace and dignity, and who plays the game well though he senses that defeat is inevitable. (Carey 43) 

The code hero is a man of action. He is often tight-lipped. He doesn’t talk about what he believes in. He expresses himself not in words but in actions.  

The view of death is the code hero’s main concepts. He must not be afraid to die . He must be tested. So the code hero encounters death, either in war, or in bullfighting with coolness, grace, courage and discipline.( Carey 44)

The code hero is characterized by simplicity, manhood and stoicism. He is loved by beautiful women and respected by fighting men.

The principal themes in Hemingway’s works are violence and war, which show machismo. Many of them are about war, injury and love. They examine and test the nature of courage. Generally, his heroes can face the world of disorder, violence and misery honorably, courageously and endurably.

Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature for “his powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration” (Carey 9) His style of writing is simple, terse, objective and implicit. Hemingway said , “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water.”

His sentences are short and uncomplicated. He uses active and declarative sentences to describe his characters and scenes. (Booz 31)

His words are precise, simple with very few adjectives. His dialog is terse. He uses few words to convey emotion. He is “a master of dialog.” (Carey 56) Even he uses silence to deliver many things in his fiction. (Bode 16)

Hemingway forges a set of techniques all his own. He repeated words, phrases, and sentence structures to substantiate detail or build up emotional intensity. (Wan 249-250)

 Ⅲ. An analysis of A Farewell to Arms

All of Hemingway’s novels are tragedies. A Farewell to Arms is his most fatal work..

A Farewell to Arms describes war and love. Frederick Henry, an American lieutenant, fought in Italy in the First World War. He met an English beautiful nurse, Catherine Barkley. He would like to be with her, and gradually fell in love with her though at first he didn’t want to love her. Frederick was wounded on the front. When he was in hospital, they loved each other very much and spent a happy summer in Milan. After being recovered, Frederick left Catherine and returned to the front once again. There he experienced the Italian army retreat. He saw the retreat in total disorder and confusion. He was caught as a German spy and was nearly shot by the military police. He decided to desert the Italian army and make his separate peace. He made his own farewell to arms. The war theme ended. The love one continued. He returned to Catherine again and they together escaped to Switzerland, the place of peace. They lived a happy and peaceful life there. Unfortunately, Catherine died in childbirth.

In short, the hero Frederick suffered from three shocking events. First, he was wounded in the battle. Second, he experienced a retreat which was in undisciplined chaos and destruction. So he deserted the Italian army. Third, his baby was stillborn and his wife died in childbirth. He was defeated and didn’t know what to do.

In the fatal novel, rain is a symbol of disaster. It comes with misfortune, misery, disease and death. Rain deepens the tragic atmosphere. Catherine fears:“I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”

At the beginning of the novel, there was a description about an unsuccessful fighting and the bleak autumn.

“……in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the roads and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes;……” (Hemingway 7)

When winter came, it began to rain permanently. Cholera came with the rain. Tragic color began from the beginning.

In the rain Frederick said good-bye to Catherine in order to go back to the front. It was raining hard. He was going to catch the midnight train. At the station their words for parting showed Hemingway’ style. The dialog with a several words in the rain reflected their more and stronger feeling.  

“ ‘We might as well as say goodbye.’

     ‘I can’t go in?’

     ‘No.’

‘Goodbye, Cat.’

     ‘Will you tell him the hospital?’

     ‘Yes.’

……

‘Goodbye, darling.’

‘Goodbye, ’I said.” (Hemingway 116)

They felt sad and didn’t know whether they could see each other again. The rain foreshadowed the misfortune would come.

On the front the Italian army was forced to retreat. It was raining heavily. The road was muddy and crowded. The retreating army marched very slowly. They marched one moment and stopped the next. The retreat was in chaos and disorder. Many soldiers died, some escaped, and some were killed by their own countrymen. The soldiers cursed officers and killed some of them. The rain was the background to despair and grimness.

When the barman hurried at night to tell Henry that danger was to come., there was a storm. It produced the mood in which disaster was of great urgency . On the contrary, when they arrived in Switzerland safely, it was clear. It implied that they were out of danger and a happy and peaceful life would come.

It was dark and the rain was falling. The baby was dead. Now Catherine would die. The tragedy was to come. Henry was thinking about the life and fate. He felt bitterly that the people who lived in the miserable world and in the war were like the ants on the burning log. At first, the ants went towards the centre where the fire was, then turned back and ran towards the end. Wherever they ran, it was doomed to death. All the people are doomed to be swallowed by the big fire.

Catherine was dead. Heart-broken Henry got out the nurse and shut the door in order to see the last of his Catherine. But it was no good at all. It was like saying goodbye to “a statue”. Now, he had to leave the hospital. He walked towards the hotel in the rain. The rain seemed to be the tears that the whole world shed for his sorrow. Obviously, the hotel was not his end-result. He stood at the cross-roads again. He was disillusioned.

The tragic mood lasted from the beginning to the end. It made us readers experience what the hero experienced. It showed that one must be brave in face of despair, disaster or defeat, that was, to act “with grace under pressure”.

Like the typical Hemingway code hero, Henry was not interested in the empty forms of receiving a medal for any act in the war. After Henry was wounded in the battle and sent into the hospital, Rinaldi, one of his Italian friends, came to see him and told him a piece of good news that he would be decorated. When he asked Henry if he did any heroic act, Henry answered honestly that he was “blown up ” while eating cheese. He didn’t brag about his act. He didn’t want to get a medal. A medal was an empty form itself. He was not concerned with forms.

While Henry was in hospital, he behaved quietly and gracefully. Though his wounds ached him, he didn’t utter moans. He chatted and drank with his friends in the hospital as he had done before. They forgot he was suffering . He was a man that acted with grace under pressure.

Ettore Moretti was a legitimate hero. He was regarded as this kind of men for whom the war was run. He was conceited and so often talked about his own heroic action. He was much concerned with medals and ranks. He chattered how he shot the enemy soldiers and how he was wounded and how he got his medals. He showed his scars to others often. He also taught Henry what to do in order to be promoted. Henry did not like him, for Ettore Moretti talked so much and was so much fond of an empty form.

Henry was always embarrassed by the words “sacred”, “glorious” and “sacrifice”. For Henry, the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago. Their difference was to bury meat in the war. He cared for the concrete names, the numbers and the dates. For example, when at the front one of the soldiers said what they had done that summer could not be meaningless, Henry felt uneasy at the high-sounding abstractions. The action or the act itself was more important for Henry than the concept or the idea of act. He performed something and never talked about it later. Thus, Henry preferred the doing of the action to the emotions or the talking about it.

The military police had never themselves been tested in battle and they had remained behind lines. When they accused the soldiers at the front of treachery and having lost fruits of victory and thought that they were saving their country, Henry was indignant with them. These abstract words had no relationship to the reality of the situation, to the actual objective fact. So they had no meaning to the Hemingway hero, Frederick Henry. On the contrary, they irritated him.

Henry didn’t pursue medals and ranks. Those had not a lot of meaning to him. He was fond of what he could see and touch. He did not talk so much and did not brag, either. He did his own work well. He drove his ambulance and put the wounded in it and transported them to dressing station. He was a man of action.

Henry took the concept of discipline and order seriously. The Hemingway code hero believed in discipline, respect and order.

During the Italian retreat, the rain was falling, the road was muddy and was crowded with troops, peasants, carts and horses. They moved slowly and were often stuck. The Italians were frightened to be cut off by Germans and firing on anything they saw. To Henry and his drivers, Italians were more dangerous. Aymo was killed by his won countrymen. Henry and Bonello shot and killed the Italian sergeant The killing happened suddenly and unreasonably. Henry himself was caught as a German in Italian uniform by the Italian battle police. The soldiers cursed officers and killed some of them and discarded their arms. There was a long line of abandoned trucks and carts on the road. The battle police were insane. They caught officers who were separated from their troops, questioned them carelessly without any explanation and killed all of them one by one.

These all indicated that there was military and complete confusion. So Henry decided that he would no longer be in the Italian army which was no longer disciplined. He deserted the Italian army. Partly for undiscipline on the front, Henry made his separate peace, and created a life apart from the war. The war theme stopped here.

Frederick Henry was a disillusioned man. He lost his traditional values. Henry took part in World War I and fought as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. He came to know that modern warfare was not glorious or heroic. He no longer believed in the traditional values and old system. He wanted to discard all these values but didn’t establish new ones which were suitable for the modern world. (Carey 48-49)

Henry’ s attitude to the war was different at the beginning and at the end of the novel. He volunteered to take part in the First World War as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. He had enthusiasm for the fighting. Just before being wounded, Henry was talking about the war with his drivers. Though some of them were against and even hated the war, Henry didn’t then. When he was receiving treatment in Milan, he also wanted to get back to the front earlier though he was having a happy summer with Catherine. Once a nurse accused him of disabling himself to escape the front, he got very angry and denied it strongly at once. Back to the front, he saw the officers and soldiers were tired of the war and they were depressed by it. Those didn’t change him a lot. It was during the Italian retreat that Henry found that the war was not glorious nor heroic at all. He escaped from the front and didn’t care for the war and didn’t want to know anything about it. He hated the war now.

Throughout the novel Henry was looking for some consistent system of values to which he could adhere. But he failed. In Chapter 2, Book I, the priest suggested that Henry go to his cold, clear, dry country in the mountains. It symbolized a place of values, a place where a man could find his inner self. Though Henry was trying to obliterate the meaninglessness of this world of war, he just escaped by submerging himself in a series of sensual experiences. He just blinded himself to any true system of values by devoting himself to fulfillment of the appetites. Consequently, he refused to go to the “clear, cold, dry country.” Later, he regretted not going there though.

Henry was lost between two worlds. On one side, he no longer accepted the bad and empty world. He wanted a good and simple life. On the other side, he was unable to completely relinquish this traditional world. When Henry was with Catherine, he acted contrary to the traditional concept of morality. Yet he often felt uneasy and quite worried about it. So he suggested that they be married and have their child baptized. He fell in contradiction.

Although Henry wanted to escape from the traditional world, he didn’t relinquish all his ties with the traditional values inherent in western civilization and particularly western Christianity. After Catherine’s fiancé was dead, she realized that when a man was dead, death ended all things. He didn’t think so until Catherine died. For another example, when Catherine was in the hospital and dying, he tried to pray, he tried to catch any of the traditional sources of comfort. He tried to make a separate peace with God again. “Oh, God, please don’t let her die. I’ll do anything for you if you won’t let her die.” (Hemingway 234)

Basically, Henry couldn’t live a life which was “apart from established patterns.” (Carey 41) Army was something traditional. After he escaped from the undisciplined and disordered Italian army, he thought that his act was like playing truant. He felt that he was a traitor. His escape disturbed and troubled him. He even felt “a masquerader” in civilian clothes. He missed the feeling of being a military personnel.

From all of those we realized that Henry couldn’t reject all of the traditional values. He was disillusioned.

Henry often felt lonely. He was lonesome inside. He wandered from one house of prostitution to another . He was lonely even when he was with many girls. He couldn’t discover any meaning in life. He ate and drank. He didn’t have any true love only passion. He didn’t want to love any girls. For example, at first he didn’t love Catherine, he saw her very lightly, but he preferred to sleep with her rather to go to the houses of prostitution to be with a strange girl every evening. When he couldn’t see Catherine, he felt “lonely and hollow.”  He hoped to get rid of loneliness within her tender feeling. When he was lying alone with wet clothing under a canvas in a train to escape from the front, he felt damned lonely. After he had a reunion with Catherine, he felt no longer alone.

He was also restless and confused. He couldn’t face the darkness of the night and couldn’t sleep in a dark room. He thought “The world all unreal in the dark”(Hemingway 234) and the night was different from the day and the things of the night couldn’t be explained in the day. The night was a dreadful time for him. As Henry and Catherine loved each other very much, they formed a relationship with a type of order, a type of commitment to a regular existence. Compared with the Italian disorder and confusion in the retreat, he could discover a sense of duty, a sense of order in the love they had for each other.(Carey 49)

In short, Henry was very lonely and couldn’t stand the darkness of the night. He had only passion first, then love. After he was with Catherine who he came to love so much, loneliness disappeared. Yet even the true love for Catherine couldn’t make him feel very easy in mind all the time.

After they escaped together to Switzerland, they almost isolated from other people and the world. Henry refused to know anything about the war. He didn’t want to think of the war. Now he thought that he had nothing to do with the war. Love became the only thing in his life. Catherine was his only tie associated with life.

Henry lived with Catherine in a brown wooden house in the pine trees. Sometimes they went through the pine forest, taking a lovely walk in the woods. Sometimes they walked down the mountain and strolled on the road between fields and in the streets between the houses of the villagers and looked in the windows of the shops. He read books, papers and magazines and played two-handed cards with Catherine. They lived an idyllic and nearly isolated life. They felt very happy though they hardly knew anyone here.

Yet Henry was very dissatisfied with existence. He used to get along with people well and know many people even in Milan, where he was treated while in Switzerland he spent almost every hour with Catherine and failed to notice other people and knew very few people there. He once said,“My life used to be full of everything.” (Hemingway 14) He meant that he talked and drank with other people, he fought and did everything. Now he was far away from those all. He missed the past life. He tried to grow a beard, which gave him something to do and made him feel more masculine. Then he started to learn boxing so that he could associate with other people and encounter difficulties, dangers and be tested.

After Catherine’s unfortunate death, Henry’s tie with life was broken. He was thoroughly defeated spiritually.

Obviously, Henry could never isolate himself from the main activities in the world. He must be with other men and be tested in danger.   

After discussing the central character’s development, we know that Henry was not the perfect Hemingway code hero until the end of the novel. During the course of the novel, he changed, developed and matured gradually under tests and initiated into the discipline of the code hero.

Almost throughout the novel, Henry didn’t accept the view of death, that was, death was the end of all things. At the end of the novel, with Catherine’s death, Henry realized that death ended all things. For example, after her death, Henry insisted upon returning to the room to see her once again. He saw that live vibrant body was now only “a statue.” It was then that he accepted the view of death that everything ended with death. Consequently, it happened only with Catherine’s death. At the closing sections of the novel, Henry initiated into the discipline of the code hero.

As was mentioned earlier, one of the most important concepts of the Hemingway hero is his view of death. For him, life is everything. Life must be treasured. So far Henry finished the process of becoming the code hero. Now he was the true Hemingway code hero.

 Ⅳ. Conclusion

This paper has discussed the relationship between Hemingway’s life experiences and his creation of novels. It has also discussed Hemingway as one of the spokesmen for the Lost Generation and Hemingway hero, and his unique style of writing and terse type of writing. British writer H. O. bates thinks that Hemingway’s concise type of writing has caused “Literary Revolution.” (Chinese Encyclopedia 407) Hemingway is regarded as a linguistic art master.

Through the character studies about Frederick Henry, we know that he is a Hemingway code hero. He will refuse any praise or prize. He is a man of action. He likes life with discipline and order. He is a disillusioned man. He doesn’t believe in the traditional values, yet cannot completely relinquish them. He has lost his past, hasn’t the present, and doesn’t know what to do in the future. He is also lonely, confused and restless. He must live with other people and be tested under difficulties.

The two themes —war and love<, /SPAN> —go through the whole tragic story. Love happens in the war. The war makes them love each other more. They escape from the war and enjoy their love. The heroine Catherine dies in childbirth unexpectedly. In the rain, Henry, once again, has to think about what to do.

As a Hemingway code hero, Henry has faced wounds, misfortune, disasters and even death both in the war and in the peaceful life. He becomes a true Hemingway code hero gradually.

Some critics regard A Farewell to Arms as Hemingway’s greatest work. It has become one of the famous modern literary works of the world. (Chinese Encyclopedia 407) It will remain a great work of war and love.

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