象征主义的运用,永别了武器

Symbolism as Means to Reflect the Theme in A Farewell to Arms

Liu Xiaohui

Abstract: This thesis is dedicated to the discussion of symbolism in Hemingwa y′s A Farewell to Arms. Under the skillful arrangement of the author, the mountain and the plain ,the rain and the snow all carry on their symbolic meanings, which help to express the themes—war and love

Key words: themes; war; love; symbolism

1 Introduction

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1954, is one of the foremost American writers, an epoch-making stylist with a highly original talent. Throughout his life, Hemingway wrote a lot of novels and A Farewell to Arms is one of his early works. In fact, A Farewell to Arms is based partly on Hemingway’s own experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy in 1918. What described in the novel are both a farewell to war and a farewell to love.

As the title of the novel indicates, A Farewell to Arms concerns itself primarily with the war, namely the process by which Frederic Henry withdraws himself from World War I and leaves it behind. The novel reveals the development of Hemingway’s philosophy of l ife—the universe is a chaotic one. There is no God to watch over man, to dictate codes of morality, or to ensure justice. Ins tead, the universe is indifferent, sometimes even hostile to man’s plight. In the novel, this indifference is best exemplified by the war—an ultimately futile struggle of man against man. There are no winners in a war, and there are no reasons behind the lives that are taken.

A Farewell to Arms is one of the finest war novels, reflecting the widespread disillusionment with war and a world that allowed such barbarity. To Hemingway, the war is a botch cheerfully begins by men with romantic notions of glory and honor, but fights with savagery. And to the end, as soldiers risk their lives fighting the enemies, their leaders, safely away from the front, tell tales of valor, patriotism and duty. Few of them think about those soldiers who have become cynical and disillusioned with the war.

The novel is primarily a love story that chronicles the relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley through courtship, consummation, reaffirmation and finally separation by Catherine’s death. Love can happen under any circumstances, even in the chaos of war, the love story between Henry and Catherine has something different from the others, because their love

first begins as a game. The fact that Catherine has recently lost a loved one in the war makes her almost desperate for someone to care for. She wants to distance herself from the pain of her loss. Likewise, Henry intends to get as far as possible from the talk of the war and looks for someone to pass the time with. So they quickly begin the role playing game, pretending they fall in love with each other. Henry thinks Catherine as “a little crazy” and does not care what he is getting into. He believes it is better than going every evening to the house for the officers. Their relationship is just a game, like bridge. As to Catherine, it is a rotten game. She calls Henry “darling”(Hemingway, 1992:30) to carry out her fantasy that her fiancéis still alive. In this way, they are well- matched. Henry treats seeing Catherine very lightly, but when he can not see her, he suddenly feels lonely and hollow. This psychological change of Henry reveals the change of his feeling towards Catherine.

A Farewell to Arms is a tragic love story. It develops with the themes of war and love, describing the fate and development of different characters. The war is cruel, absurd and it is indifferent to man’s plight. While the beautiful love brings people hope and helps them forget the painful experiences.

In literature, a symbol is a thing that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention or accidental resemblance. This is especially true with a visible sign of something invisible. A symbol pulls or draws together a specific thing with ideas, values, persons or ways of life in a direct relationship that otherwise would not be apparent. A person, thing, place, action, situation can all be symbols.

Hemingway makes use of some very important symbols in this novel. Even as early as the first paragraph, he sets up two major symbols — the plains and the mountains — which will be in conflict throughout the story. Hemingway represents the plains as dangerous, miserable, dry, and barren. The mountains, on the other hand, represent safety, happiness, and good health. The military action that Frederic Henry witnesses takes place on the plains, and his escape, through the cleansing, baptismal ritual of jumping into the river, reaches its end in the secluded mountain chalet with Catherine. But when Frederic must take Catherine out of the mountains and back down to the city below the hospital where she is to give birth, disaster strikes again. Rain is another important symbol throughout the novel. Often the rain suggests impending doom; there is a storm the night that Frederic learns he must leave Italy at once to avoid being arrested, Catherine dreams that she is dead in the rain, and indeed at the conclusion of the novel, it is raining when Frederic returns to his hotel. The critic Carlos Baker in his essay points out, "The

Mountain and the Plain," is an excellent source for studying these aspects of Hemingway's use of symbolism.(Donaldson, Scott,2007:82)

2 The rain—the symbol of death, pain and despair

The rain is a metaphor for death in the story. Toward the end of Catherine and Frederic's idyll in Milan, she tells him that she has always been afraid of the rain because she can imagine herself or him lying dead in it. He replies that he has always liked the rain and through this comment we understand that though he has suffered a combat injury and seen men die, he has not been touched by fears of mortality. Catherine on the other hand has been deeply affected by her fiancé's death. For her, death is more immediate and palpable and the rain serves to remind her of her mortality and the mortality of those she loves. Thus the rain falls when death is most tangible, such as when they part at the train or when Frederic narrowly escapes being shot by diving into the river. Most significantly, when Frederic leaves the hospital after Catherine has died, we are told that he walks back to the hotel in the rain. He is familiar with the emotional ramifications of death and its ability, like the rain, to fall upon anyone at anytime.

Rain is also symbolically used by Hemingway to understate the obvious. For instance, when Catherine dies, there is no emotional outpouring. Instead, the novel ends with the word "rain" as the only hint of the emotional stress that Henry is experiencing. This form of understatement is ironically introduced right at the beginning of the novel: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army. " (Hemingway,1992:7)

In this passage, rain and death are linked for the first time, yet there is no emotional content connected to the fact that seven thousand men have died. This understatement is a key feature of the novel and will be used every time a death occurs. For instance, when Aymo dies after being shot, Henry informs the reader that, "He looked very dead. It was raining."(Hemingway,1992:11). Those two lines embody the emotion that Henry has to a full extent.

This form of understatement, where a symbol substitutes for emotions, allows Hemingway to omit key facts. A good example of omission occurs right after Henry has been wounded. He is placed in an ambulance and driven to the hospital while the man above him bleeds to death. "The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone" (Hemingway,1992:15). This simple description reveals all the pain and suffering and replaces them with the image of

"drops" from an icicle.

Starting in the very first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, rain clearly symbolizes death: "In the fall when the rain came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain," "The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn." (Hemingway,1992:23) The rain symbolism is not entirely a literary conceit, either, as rain actually precedes an outbreak of fatal illness, the cholera that kills seven thousand that fall.

Later, during their Milan idyll, Catherine makes the symbolism of the rain explicit for Henry—and for the reader: "I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see myself dead in it," she says to him. "And sometimes I see you dead in it."(Hemingway,1992:38). During Henry and Catherine's trip from the armorer's to the hotel near the train station on his last night with her, the fog that has covered the city from the start of the chapter turns to rain. It continues to rain as they bid one another farewell; in fact, Catherine's last act in this part of the novel is to signal to Henry that he should step in out of the rain. Back at the front, "the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy."(Hemingway,1992:205)

It rains almost continuously all through the chapter when the tide of battle turns and the Italians begin their retreat from Caporetto—and from the Germans who have joined the fighting. The rain turns to snow one evening, holding out hope that the offensive will cease, but the snow quickly melts and the rain resumes. During a discussion among the drivers about the wine they are drinking with dinner, the driver named Aymo says, "To-morrow maybe we drink rainwater." (Hemingway,1992:97).Hemingway by this time has developed the rain symbolism to such a degree that the reader experiences a genuine sense of foreboding—and indeed, the following day will bring death to Henry's disintegrating unit.

It is raining while the fugitive Henry rides the train to Sresa, raining when he arrives, and raining while Henry and Catherine spend the night together in his hotel room. The open-boat trip across Lake Maggiore takes place in the rain, with an umbrella used as a sail. (Ominously, the umbrella breaks.) And in Chapter XL, as Henry and Catherine are bidding farewell to their wintertime mountain retreat for the city in which Catherine's baby is to be born, Henry tells us that "In the night it started raining."(Hemingway,1992:22)

Finally, when Henry leaves the hospital for lunch during Catherine's protracted, agonizing delivery, "The day was cloudy but the sun was trying to come through"—a literal ray of hope. During the operation, however, he looks out the window and sees that it is raining. Just after the

nurse has told him that the baby is dead, Henry looks outside again and "could see nothing but the dark and the rain falling across the light from the window." (Hemingway,1992:143).At the novel's end, Henry leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel in the rain. In fact, the final word in A Farewell to Arms is "rain," evidence of weather's important place in the story overall.

3 The plain—the symbol of rotten life and messy war

The concept of the plain has appeared dimly at the very beginning. Then it comes out clearer and clearer when we see the priest from the mountain areas is decent, honest and loves God. While the priest suggests Henry going to Abruzzi, a beautiful and clean place, the captain just interrupts him and says “let’s go to whorehouse before it shuts.”(Hemingway,1992:69)While the life in Abruzzi is peaceful, idyllic and decent, the life in lowland is just rotten, numb and obscene. The priest himself also forms a contrast with the surgeon Rinaldi who comes from the plain and has no religious belief. When the war gets worse and worse, Henry goes to the front from Milan and finds that the priest does not change much. He is the same as ever, small and brown and compact looking, and he is surer of himself. Even the baiting of captain will not touch him. But for Rinaldi, the one who comes from the plain, the situation is quite different. Apart from doing his job, Rinaldi spends all his time drinking and going to whorehouse to get a temporary apathy narcotic. He himself says ”self-destruction day by day .It ruins the stomach and makes the hand shake…”(Hemingway,1992:71).This has such a great impact on that when he speaks of “very bad” all he thinks of is Rinaldi.

The big destructive retreat also happens on the plain. There are deserted cars, houses, carts, axes everywhere. There are also the fighting and cursing soldiers, the sad and numb country people, the dead bodies, the shooting and the unreasonable battle polices. Everything is in mess and everything ends up in chaos and destruction.

Catherine’s death also happens on the plain. When Henry and Catherine both flee to Switzerland, they really have a quite happy life on the mountains. But in the spring, with the coming of rain and an urge for a hospital for the childbirth, they move down the mountain to Lausanne, a small town in the plain besides the lake. There Catherine dies of the childbirth and the child is still boom. Though it seems to be an accident, there is a kind of inner association between the misfortune and the plain. So while the mountain symbolizes the peace and family, the plain just symbolizes the destruction and war and a kind of rotten life.

4 The mountain —the symbol of happiness and love

The priest is a quiet young man and easily blushes. He is often picked up by others,

especially the captain from the lowland. But he is honest and loyal to God. In the winter of the next year there is snow which stops the war. So Henry gets a leave. Before the leave, Henry is suggested going to Rome, Naples, Sicily and many other places. The priest also suggests Henry going to his hometown Caprecotta in Abruzzi, a mountain area. The concept of the pries t's hometown for the first time comes to the readers.

〝I would like you to go to Abruzzi〞the priest said, 〝There is good hunting. You would

like the people and though it is cold it is clear and dry. You could stay with my family. My

father is famous hunte r...〞(Hemingway,1992:11)

From the description of the priest, we peep a little into his hometown Abruzzi. It is in the mountain areas where there is good hunting and dry and clear weather. Here the image of the mountain appears once more. But it only strikes the readers slightly because it has not spread out its associations. The description of the priest is interrupted by the captain from the lowland who suggests Henry to go to the whorehouse before it shuts. During the leave, Henry goes every part of Italy except Abruzzi. After he comes back, the image of mountain is enhanced by the contrast

of his own experience in the lowland. He tells the priest:

〝I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and

hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery. And

hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you lord and there was

good hunting. I had gone to no place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room

whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop. Nights in bed, drunk, when you

knew that was all there was…〞(Hemingway,1992:14 )

Now the image of the mountain becomes quite clear. It is associated with the frozen and hard road, the clear cold and dry weather, the dry and powdery snow, the polite and decent people and the good hunting. All in all, it is associated with the peaceful and decent life in which you will never feel hollow and meaningless. On the other hand, the image of the plain is also presented before the readers. The smoky cafe, the whirling night while you lie in bed, the drunks, the whores. Everything is meaningless, and you peep a little into the war through the picture of the plain. After the experience in lowland, the image of the mountain becomes so conspicuous that it is just a dream in Henry's mind to go there in such a messy war time.

When Henry is seriously wounded, the priest comes to visit him. They talk about war, about God and about Abruzzi. Now, the concept of the priest's hometown is presented the third time.

The priest tells Henry:

〝At Carpracotta, there was trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play

the flute at night…Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in

Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting…the

birds there all good because they feed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the

peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses…〞

(Hemingway,1992) .He also says:〝in my country it is understood that a man may love God.

It's not a dirty joke.〞(Hemingway,1992:57 )

By such a repetition of the detailed depiction of the priest's hometown, the image of the mountain becomes clearer and clearer. It is also more integrated. Between the messy and merciless war, between the injury and the death, between blood and fire and between the rotten and hollow life, the mountain has become a symbol of peace and a dream of idyllic life. Also through the tie of the priest, the mountain carries on a new meaning—that is the love and love to god. From this point of view, the image of the mountain is raised to a higher level, the religious level.

Catherine Barkley is the central character of the images of the mountain. Her love affair with Henry begins as a kind of degenerated enjoyment. Since her boyfriend dies in war, she is a little mentally disordered and quite easy to be conquered. But in the American hospital in Milan, since Henry is badly wounded their accidental love affair turns into respectable marriage, though no priest to witness it. Catherine is capable of making everywhere she lives a family. Henry has spoken of it several times. Catherine even makes a hotel where there was much red plush and brass and Catherine Barkley just feels like a whore, she also makes it a family in several minutes. And “their at the hospital had been their own home and this room is their home too in the same way. ’’(Hemingway,1992:186) .With the capacity of making everywhere she lives a home, Catherine is quite naturally linked with the concept of family, happiness and love. Henry and Catherine have a quite happy life in the hospital. But soon they have to depart because Henry is going to return to the front. The later retreat ends up in undisciplined chaos and destruction. Disillusioned with the war, Henry deserts and joins Catherine who has now been transferred to Stresa and later they both flee to Switzerland. It is not until now that Catherine becomes the central character of the images of the mountain. She always goes first and then Henry follows. It seems she is the spiritual essence of mountains and calls on Henry to follow her. They establish their home in Montreux. There they live in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of mountain. At night there is fog so that there is thin ice over the water in the two pitches on the dresser in the morning. When the sun is bright they eat lunch on the porch. Sometimes they walk down the mountain into Montreux. And when the snow comes they often walk down the roads

where the snow is packed hard and smooth. It seems their dream comes true under the unconscious guide of the priest.

Now nearly at the end of the novel, the images of the mountain stand out completely and dominate a series of grand associations. The snow, the clear cold and dry weather, the kind and courteous peasants, the love and love to God, the peace and happiness, the family and idyll life, are all linked together and form a great net while the focus is still on the mountain. It is not until now that the images of the mountain are completed. It stands there, dignified, holly and shining, calling upon the young couple to march to it.

5 The snow—the symbol of peace and dream

The opposite image of the rain is snow. While rain always appears with cholera, messy retreat, frightened escape and death, snow always appears with the mountain, with cease-fire, with peaceful life. When snow first comes in the fall, the war is all over that year. It’s a happy thing for soldiers that snow falls because they do not like the war, they disgust it and hate it.

Then in the priest’s country we can see frozen and hard roads, the dry and powdery snow, and the hare-tracks in the snow. When Henry goes to the front, from the car, he can see two ranges of mountains, green and dark to the snow line and then white and lonely in the sun. Maybe it’s a dream. Henry deserts the army and makes a separate peace in Switzerland. The snow accompanies Catherine and Henry the whole winter until the coming of spring and rain. With the disappearing of the snow—it has turned into slush—their happy life also comes to an end.

Through the whole novel, the snow impresses us as something clearn, cold and dry. It’s connected with the mountain. Together they symbolize the peace and happy life and to some degree they also symbolize an idyllic dream on the mind of war-wounded people.

In stories such as “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, snow and ice quite logically represent danger and death. After all, one can freeze to death, fall through thin ice and drown, or perish beneath an avalanche. But in chapter Ⅱ of A Farewell to Arms, it is snow that ends the fighting described in the book’s first chapter. Thus snow stands for safety rather than its opposite. (Note, though, that although snow covers the bare ground and even the Italian army’s artillery in Chapter Ⅱstumps of oak trees torn up by the summer’s fighting continue to protrude—a reminder that winter is of course not permanent but merely a reprieve from combat, a cease-fire.)

Shortly thereafter, Frederic Henry describes the priest’s home region of Abruzzi as a “place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear and cold and dry and the snow was dry and powder…”, and the context leaves no doubt that this characterization is a positive one.

Later in the novel, the argument between the Swiss policemen over winter sports not only provides much-needed comic relief, but also marks the beginning of Henry and Catherine Barkley’s second idyll. (The first takes place in summertime, in Milan.) Immediately afterwards. Henry and Catherine find themselves in the Swiss Alps, with snow all around. Thus they have temporarily achieved a life of both purity (the mountains symbolize purity in this novel, versus the corruption of the lowland) and safety. These chapters positively radiate contentment.

Hemingway doesn't quite trust us to detect the rain/snow pattern of symbolism and understand its meaning; therefore he underlines the significance of precipitation in his book by having Catherine tell Henry that she sees them dead in the rain. And so the weather symbolism in A Farewell to Arms is perhaps unnecessarily obvious. Yet Hemingway's use of this literary device is hardly rote symbolism for its own sake. Rain and snow both drive his plot and maintain our interest, as we hold our breaths every time it rains in the novel, praying the survival of the characters.

I also conclude some representative use of the imagery of the snow by the author:

(a) The war is halted for the year by the arrival of the winter snow.

(b) The doctor uses “snow” to lessen the pain of Fredrick’s wound.

(c) The mountains of Switzerland, where Fredrick and Catherine hide from the war, are covered with snow.

6 Conclusion

Hemingway, one of the most outstanding American writers of the 20th century, has made great contribution to the world literature. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway becomes the spokesman of “the lost generation”.

In the novel A Farewell to Arms, love can be an antidote for the painful feelings of war, but it can not change the basic unforgiving hardness of the world. In an indifferent and uncaring universe, love between Henry and Catherine, though beautiful, is doomed to failure. Actually, the title of the novel is a pun “Arms” may refer to the weapons as well as the arms of a lover.

Henry not only makes his farewell to the war, but also to his love.

The author also gives an excellent description of nature in A Farewell to Arms. Under his ingenious arrangement, the weather conditions and changes of seasons are in perfect harmony with the progress of the war and the love between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Besides this small objects of the nature also become important images which are helpful in symbolizing the emotion of characters and disasters of the war—The rain, the symbol of death, pain and despair; the mountain, the symbol of happiness and love; the plain, the symbol of rotten life and messy war; and the snow, the symbol of peace and dream. As the main symbols of the story, the mountain and the plain, snow and rain are not isolated from each other. They combine and join together to form a great association and a sharp contrast. The mountain which is the country of the priest, a cold dry region, inhabited by love, produces a feeling of home. I t’s just associated with snow. The plain is the area of rain and fog, the region inhabited by Rinaldi, where there is no love or faith, only a pursuit of the flesh and the scientific techniques of medicine and of war. Through this contrast, a continual tension is presented between an ideal for which Frederic Henry searches and the reality of a universe based on death.

In a word, by using the devices of symbolism, Earnest Hemingway succeeds in reaching his goal of conveying the theme of the story that war is a tragedy—it not only destroys lives, but also destroys love, honor, morality and everything. In this novel, in conveying the effective theme which helps to make the novel an anti-war manifesto, the device of symbolism plays a very important role.

References

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论《永别了，武器》中象征手法对主题的深化

刘晓惠

[摘要]：海明威在《永别了，武器》一文中运用象征手法，赋予高山和平原，白雪与阴雨特定的象征含义，并通过对它们的描写，有力地表达了战争与爱情的主题。

[关键词]：海明威战争爱情象征手法