A Farewell to Arms an Ironic Metaphor to Explore Physical and Literature review

A Farewell to Arms an Ironic Metaphor to Explore Physical and Emotional Death - Literature review Example   Ã¢â‚¬Å"A Farewell to Arms† is a novel set during World War I. It is filled with human despair, loneliness, and confusion (Bloom 17). It is told in the first person, using the character of Lt. Frederic Henry, who is an American serving in the Italian army as an ambulance driver. He falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, and the whole story revolves around how each character tries to survive life, conquer death, and placate their loneliness and misery (Burden and Hemingway 9). If one is familiar with the life of the author, Ernest Hemingway, one could easily see several allusions to the events that occurred in the author's life, particularly in the relationship between the main characters Frederic and Catherine. Hemingway served in the Red Cross in Italy during the war (Hewson 53). Not surprisingly, he was an ambulance driver, much like the main character in the story, Frederic. Hemingway got wounded and during his hospitalization, met and developed a relatio nship with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky (Hewson 56). A large part of the story is based on the realities that Hemingway encountered during the war, and to explore this in the novel, he utilizes several metaphors (Harrington 60) mainly using rain or the weather to forecast major events in the characters' lives (Bloom 19). Rain, or water for that matter, is usually seen as something that supports life, yet Hemingway effectively utilizes this as an ironic representation of gloom, pain, and destruction (Harrington 60-1). From start to finish, rain symbolizes the many emotions associated with death. At the beginning of the novel, one can see the immediate turning of summer into autumn. Summer is â€Å"rich with crops,† while autumn is where â€Å" the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain† (Hemingway 7). This alone forecasts the turning of events from happy to desolate. This is because, in that same chapter, death is foreshadowed. â€Å"In the fall when the rains c ame, the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain† and â€Å"The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn† (Hemingway 7). This is followed by the line â€Å"At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came cholera. But it was checked and in the end, only seven thousand died of it in the army† (Hemingway 8). Here, the link between death and the pouring of the rain is stated clearly. However, there is no reference to emotions usually associated with death.