ABSTRACT
In Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway 2003[1929])2, a novel in fi ve acts, ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls for nurse Catherine Barkley and gets wounded at the Italian front; impregnates Catherine in a hospital bed; abandons the Caporetto retreat to avoid execution for disloyalty; fl ees from Italy to Switzerland with Catherine; and watches her die giving birth to a stillborn boy. The novel, a feverishly tragic and haunted and bruising love story, suffuses with cruelty and despair. What jouissance the narrative evinces or attracts with its relentless suffering has long been interpreted as necessary for Hemingway’s doctrine of stoic heroism. The fi nal scene encapsulates, in this view, the lesson of A Farewell to Arms: In this brutal, pointless world Frederic can only trudge off in the rain with war and death behind but no peace or life ahead. This putative “code”
heroism would render Hemingway a nihilist, staging morbid death-in-life scenarios to enforce a life-as-death ethos of mere survival. But A Farewell to Arms-brimming with play, love, energy, and decency-embodies an ethics of desire, fi delity, and multiplicity that rejects precisely this euthanasiac either/or moralism of nihilism/theodicy.
