In his Death in the Afternoon, a
meditation on the arts of bullfighting and writing, Hemingway advocates
an “Iceberg Theory” of fiction:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what
he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader,
if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things
as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of
movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above
water.
True to Hemingway’s ideal, the above description
of trees, leaves, and a dusty road leaves the reader with more than
a simple sense of Henry’s environment. The lieutenant’s language,
mournful and repetitive as an elegy, hints at the great losses that
he will eventually suffer.
Once Henry picks up the narrative in Gorizia, the reader
is introduced to several of the novel’s major characters and themes.
Rinaldi immediately emerges as a vibrant and mischievous character
(only Henry’s word positions him as a passionate and committed surgeon).
Henry soon establishes himself as a conflicted soldier. Having joined
the army with neither a thirst for glory nor a fierce belief in
its cause, Henry is physically, psychologically, and morally drained
by the war. He is not alone. Catherine Barkley, who is tense and unnerving
the first time Henry meets her, softens toward him quickly. Her
strange behavior—the haste with which she attaches herself to a
man whom she barely knows—belies the grief that she feels over the
death of her fiancé.
Two dominant themes in A Farewell to Arms are
love and war. War, which is described with brutal intensity, fills
the mind of everyone in Henry’s world. Thoughts of it afflict the
characters like a painful, chronic headache. War fuels the sense
of despair and grief at the heart of the book, establishing the
harsh conditions whereby the loss of seven thousand soldiers to
a cholera epidemic can be considered nominal. As Henry’s initial
conversations with Catherine make clear, everyone is desperate for
an antidote to the numbing effects of war. People would prefer to
think any other thoughts, to feel any other emotions, and so plunge
headlong into love as a means of overcoming their fear, pain, and
grief. Rinaldi pretends to love every beautiful woman he meets,
while Catherine and Henry, upon meeting, play a seductively distracting
game in which they pretend to love and care for each other.
