A Farewell To Arms Rhetorical Analysis

"‘There is nothing worse than war,’ said Passini.” “‘Defeat is worse,’ [countered a compatriot].” “‘I do not believe it,’ Passini [persisted] ‘What is defeat? You go home.’”

Throughout A Farewell to Arms, many characters remain apathetic or disillusioned in matters most would deem vital. Frederic Henry struggles throughout the book to find sufficient resolutions to his problems but in the end realizes the futility of his hardships. In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway uses disillusionment and apathy to show the futility of mankind and the intimations of mortality.

Hemingway doesn’t explain why Frederic Henry, the book’s protagonist, has joined the Italian Army. Americans may have joined European armed forces before war was declared during

Henry is also apathetic toward nearly every aspect of the war. Because he is likely fighting in the war for adventure, he doesn’t care much for the outcome is. “I knew I would not be killed,” he says early in the book,” not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies” (37). Right from the start, Lt. Henry almost makes the audience feel as if he isn’t taking it seriously- as if the war was some dramatic and far-off fairy tale. Several instances in Book II does Hemingway make the war seem distant. The newspapers, for example, give a feeling of isolation and immunity from the war. “I do not remember much [about my time in Milan, except] that there were many victories in the papers. [I] stopped at the cafe and had a drink and read the papers... Perhaps wars weren't won any more Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War. I put the paper back on the rack and left the club” (112-113). Not only does Lt. Henry seem indifferent regarding the war, but reading about the battles in the newspaper makes it distant and unrelated to life in Milan. Another example in Book II is when Henry’s talking with Ettore Moretti. Moretti tells old war stories, which make the war seem distant not only in location, but also in time. By talking about what happened, in lieu of what was happening at the time of their conversation, Moretti made the war seem like it happened years earlier. This idea of a

David Wyatt argues that the book “is Hemingway’s most fatal book. While it promises the most life, it delivers nothing but loss” (Wyatt 291). “We stand aside [in the first chapter] and conserve ourselves,” Wyatt notes, “parallel syntax presents an army of falling leaves. Men are ‘marching’ and leaves are ‘falling,’ and through... parataxis they become all too easily confused. The leaves last; the men disappear. What remains is the emptiness of landscape- ‘a road bare and white’- which the human presence interrupts but cannot master.” Although his wife and child die in the end of the story, the reader feels empty and unfulfilled rather than grief or sympathy for Henry. The remaining landscape, that of a “a road bare and white,” is very similar to the state of Frederic by the end of the last chapter. Perhaps this is because nothing in the book seems lasting- he never married Catherine. The book “is stillborn Like the child, ‘it had never been alive.’ It never knows an interval of time free from intimations of mortality. We do not experience its middle as a discovery of its end.” By the end of the book, Frederic Henry is left with nothing. His child was stillborn, his girlfriend died from hemorrhaging, he had deserted his post in the Italian Army, and he could not leave Switzerland due to the war. John Aldridge claims that A Farewell to Arms was, “dominated