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A Farewell To Arms

All fiction is autobiographical, no matter how obscure from the author's

experience it may be, marks of their life can be detected in any of their

tales. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is based largely on Hemingway's

own personal experiences. The main character of the novel, Frederic Henry,

experiences many of the same situations that Hemingway lived. Some of these

similarities are exact, while some are less similar, and some events have a

completely different outcome.

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway

worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star after graduating from high

school in 1917. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver in the

Italian infantry and was wounded just before his 19th birthday. Hospitalized,

Hemingway fell in love with an older nurse. Later, while working in Paris as

a correspondent for the Toronto Star, he became involved with the expatriate

literary and artistic circle surrounding Gertrude Stein. During the Spanish

Civil War, Hemingway served as a correspondent on the loyalist side. He fought

in World War II and then settled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954, Hemingway was

awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After his expulsion from Cuba by the

Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. In his life, Hemingway married four times

and wrote numerous essays, short stories and novels. The effects of

Hemingway's lifelong depressions, illnesses and accidents caught up with him.

In July 1961, he committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. What remains, are his

works, the product of a talented author.

A Farewell to Arms is the story of Frederic Henry, an American, driving an

ambulance for the Italian Army during World War I. The novel takes us through

Frederic's experiences in war and his love affair with Catherine Barkley, an

American nurse in Italy. The novel starts in the northern mountains of Italy

at the beginning of World War I. Rinaldi, Frederic's roommate, takes him to

visit a nurse he has taken a liking to. Catherine Barkley, the nurse Rinaldi

speaks of, is instantly attracted to Frederic and he is to her. Frederic

courts her for a brief time before he goes to the front.

At the front, Frederic is wounded in the legs and taken to an aid station and

then to an army hospital. He is then transferred to an American hospital in

Milan where he meets up with Catherine again. Their love flourishes. They

spend their nights together in Frederic's hospital bed and their days going to

restaurants, horse races and taking carriage rides.

Frederic returns to the war after his recovery. The war is going badly in

Italy. The German troops forced a full-scale retreat. Soon after Frederic's

return, he deserts the war in a daring escape. Frederic leaves and meets a

pregnant Catherine in Stresa.

The two go over to Switzerland where they spend an idyllic time waiting for

the birth of their baby. Catherine has a long and difficult labor. Their

baby is delivered dead. Catherine dies soon after from "one hemorrhage after

another." After Catherine dies, Frederic leaves and walks back to his hotel.

A Farewell to Arms is a story of love and pain and of loyalty and desertion

set in the tragic time of war.

There are many similarities in the experiences of Ernest Hemingway and his

character Frederic Henry, in A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway and Henry were

both involved in World War I, in a medical capacity, but neither of them were

regular army personnel. Like Hemingway, Henry was shot in his right knee

during a battle. Both men were Americans but were ambulance drivers for the

Italian Army. In real life, Hemingway met his love, Agnes, a nurse, in the

hospital after being shot; Henry met his love, Catherine Barkley, also a

nurse, before he was shot and hospitalized. In both cases, the relationships

with these women were strengthened while the men were hospitalized. Another

difference is that in A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and her child died while

she was giving birth, this was not the case with Agnes, who left Henry for

another Italian Army officer. Nevertheless, these differences are only

surface. These slight changes allowed Hemingway, an extremely private man, to

try and prove to the public that it was not himself and his own experiences

which he was writing about. On the contrary, In the book Modern Critical

Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Millicent Bell sees the novel as "not

the