Essay About Ernest Hemingway And Frederic Henry

A Gender Related Study Of How Trustworthy Our Memories Are
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A Farewell To Arms
All fiction is autobiographical, no matter how obscure from the authors
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 Hemingways
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
Hemingways 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
Frederics 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, Frederics 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 Frederics 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 Frederics
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