We spoke briefly in class today about the parallels between A Farewell to Arms and the other works we have read this semester and finishing up my essay on Roy and Nellie in Not So Quiet made me reflect some more on that. In my copy, under the scene where Catherine talks about her fiancee, I wrote “I hope Nellie talks to Roy like this.” After coming across this again, I think her complete honesty is really appealing as a model for how Nellie would communicate her trauma. For instance, she says “he was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the Somme…You see I didn’t care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn’t say anything”(23). For a woman of her time, this honesty to her romantic partner is unique. It is an interesting display of how the war can just completely remove certain expected methods of decorum. I obviously hope Roy would not respond to her in the callous, distant manner Henry speaks to Catherine, but at least putting it all out there in a way like this would be important for her to at least have some shot at coping. Would Nellie even be able to have the emotional connection Catherine does though? Is Roy so broken himself he would not have the emotional capacity to do any better than Henry? I think it is also interesting to think about the parallel that this could have been Nellie. Roy, a boy she grew up around and knew for a long time as Catherine knew her fiancee, could have died and she could have kept on going in the war and eventually met a new man. Maybe thinking of Catherine as an alternate reality version of Nellie will help me view her in a ore positive light.