A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway | Characters, Summary, Analysis

A Farewell to Arms was a lyrical poem by George Peel that he wrote for the occasion of the retirement ceremony of Queen Elizabeth I in 1590 in which he pledged his undying loyalty to the queen and addressed her as Goddess. Ernest Hemingway took this title for his war novel that was published in 1929. It is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army during World War I. While the novel is set against the backdrop of World War I, it tells the love story of Frederick Henry and an English nurse Catherine Barkley. It proved to be one of the most successful novels of Ernest Hemingway and is considered "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I." The novel is not an autobiography but the novel was based on Hemingway's own experiences serving in the Italian campaigns during the First World War.

A real nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky cared for Hemingway in a hospital in Milan when he was injured. Hemingway had planned to marry her but they broke off when he returned to America.

The novel is divided into five parts. Being a war fiction, the whole book is set in the historical background of World War 1. World War I or the Great War began in August 1914 with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The war pitted the Central Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) against the allied forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, who were joined in 1917 by the United States. The action of A Farewell to Arms takes place from 1916-18 in four locations, for the most part: 1) the Julian Alps, along what was then the border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2) the city of Milan, which lies in the plains of northern Italy, far from the front; 3) the Italian resort town of Stresa on Lake Maggiore, which straddles the border between Italy and Switzerland; and 4) various towns and villages of the Swiss Alps.

In the beginning, the Italian forces are busy trying to stop Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting German forces on western and eastern forces. Russia withdrew from the war in 1917 due to Communist Revolution while the United States decided to take the side of Italy, France, and Britain in the same year. At the beginning of the novel, The novel's narrator, and the protagonist are eventually identified as Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered for the Italian army because the United States has not yet entered the war. Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance drivers.
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