Essay on The Irrelevant God in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

The Irrelevant God in A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms begins with a god’s-eye-view, cinematic pan of the hills surrounding Gorizia-the camera of our mind’s eye, racing forward through time, sweeps up and down the landscape, catching isolated events of the first year in the town as it goes. The film ultimately slows to a crawl, passing through the window of a whorehouse to meet the eyes of Frederic Henry watching the snow falling. As we attach ourselves to Frederic Henry’s perspective we turn (as he turns) back to the conversation at hand, a theological debate between the priest and Lieutenant Rinaldi. This debate, its dialectic made flesh in these two polar opposites, is a central question of A Farewell to Arms: What is our relationship to God? This is, indeed, the overriding philosophic arc of the novel; A Farewell to Arms can be seen as the synthesizing of these two worldviews into Henry’s final relationship with God.

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Fredrick Henry’s silence during this original debate is very telling-it indicates, of course, that he has not yet made up his mind. It would be very easy for him to cast his lot with either Rinaldi and his atheists or the priest, yet he remains silent as they talk-even after comments about an antireligious book called Black Pig are directed at him from both camps. “It is very valuable. It tells you about those priest. You will like it,” says Rinaldi. “Don’t you read it,” responds the priest (8). Henry’s only comment in this chapter is his statement that the coming of winter will end the offensive-a comment which is seized upon by the group and used as another bone of contention for the group. The priest wants Henry to go to the Abruzzi: “There is good hunting. You would lik…

…ta P, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987.

Donaldson, Scott. Frederic Henry’s Escape and the Pose of Passivity. Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy: Whitson, 1983.

Fenton, Charles A. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, 1954.

Fetterly, Judith. Hemingway’s Resentful Cryptogram. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987.

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 1973.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1957.

Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1960.

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