A Rotton Game

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway was a fantastic novel which mainly focused on his anti-war point of view. The story does take place mostly when the main character is serving in the war, but there are subtle hints within the text telling us that the war is just a ridiculous rotten game that we play. Inside the rotten game of war, lie even more rotten games such as relationships. In the passage on page 31 of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and Henry talked about a "rotten game". Henry does not know what the rotten game is, and the actual rotten game is not revealed to the readers, however, Catherine tells him he plays it well. Catherine also does not want Henry to lie to her anymore, unless he has to.

The "rotten game" that Catherine and Henry talked about could either be the crazy relationship they were in, or the war. Either way, Henry does not know how to play the game very well. If Catherine was talking about their relationship, Henry has never truly been in a relationship, and he had never been in love, so he was new to the whole idea. He was playing the relationship game as well as he could, but he did not know what he was doing most of the time. Especially when Catherine began to babble, and asked him if he loves her, then two seconds later tells him to stop lying to her.

Catherine could have also been talking about the war Henry was fighting in when she mentioned the rotten game. Henry was an American fighting for the Italians, and he was an ambulance driver. Yes, Henry played a role in the war, but not a very big one, and half the time he probably did not know what was really going on. Plus, it was his first time being in the war, and back then, everybody was joining the war because it was the thing to do.

When you are in a war, or in a relationship, sometimes you have to lie to keep your relationship going, or to help you survive in a war. However, even though sometimes you have to lie in both situations,