I was writing my short essay and looked at Hemingway’s unwritten endings. He almost wrote “…you have to stop a story. You stop it at the end of whatever it is you were writing about.” This may not be the highest degree of textual analysis, but to me this answers with extreme clarity what exactly Hemingway was writing about. Or at least what he meant to write about, even if he ended up with a highly regarded war novel. His story ended when Catherine died, and Henry and Catherine ended. What else could he have been writing about?
Anyways, I just wanted to share that quote with y’all and see if it impacted the way anyone else might see A Farewell to Arms – also if anyone thinks it may be neither? I think the question is often a love story OR a war story, and I certainly don’t think this is a war story, but it doesn’t feel so much like a love story to me either. I can’t think of better label though – anyone got anything?
Hi Kimber! You make an excellent point.
I think that by definition, the characters in a novel of war are preoccupied with planning, coping, and recovering from the situations that arise as a result of the strife between nations. A war narrative is a tale of endurance in which the central characters encounter situations and events that always bring the reader back to the main protagonist, the conflict itself.
So, for me, AFTA is a tale of love embedded into the narrative of war. I think that when Catherine died it was such a blow to Frederic that his life lost its meaning and that is symbolic of the “Great War” winning after all. I think that her death crushed Frederic’s hope and those of us reading this text understand all that remains is the reality of war. I felt this sad ending was Hemingway’s clever twist which brings the reader “full circle” to the beginning of the work where Frederic is alone and disillusioned by the horrors of the war. I think Hemingway is saying exactly what Mary Borden tells us in The Forbidden Zone. That is: “War-nothing left in the whole world but War-War, world without end, amen (42).