What Is The Significance Of The Ending In A Farewell To Arms?

Question

As a Hemingway fan, that final line in A Farewell to Arms left me feeling totally gutted. I've read analysis about his bleak, tragic worldview but still feel raw about Catherine's fate and Frederic's empty survival.

Smurfette · Answer

In structuring the end of this novel, Hemingway is up to his usual tricks of reinforcing the core thesis of the book that life offers no meaning, no justice, just random and senseless tragedy. The vacant and lonely march of the protagonista through the rain to the blank isolation of nothingness effectively negates any notion of a hero’s journey or special treatment in this mortal coil. Compelling conclusions that remain with us long after we finish reading a novel can be quite a wonderful thing and I must offer up this very recent read, The Final Goodbye, a web novel, a long and quietly powerful separation story told almost entirely through the protagonist’s interior monologue. Rather than simply describe the ‘events’ of the separation of the protagonist to his loved one, he methodically dismantles their shared life within the pages of this novel and the emptiness left after he has delineated the perimeters of their dissolution feels so strongly a part of the protagonist that it reads so intensely personally.

Edwin · Answer

When I finished reading ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway, I felt like I had been hit in the face with a wake-up call. The novel was such a rollercoaster of emotions. Love, war, and conflict between human desire and the unsympathetic world that we live in. After finishing the novel I was struck by the change of Henry from a very accepting and open-minded soldier in the earlier part of the novel to a broken, devastated man after his loss of Catherine.

The ending of the novel with the loss of Catherine seems to me to point out a much deeper observation on the author’s part than the inevitable sorrow in love. He is also pointing out the constant nature of war and its unrelenting nature on humanity. This must be why Henry loves Catherine so fiercely. And even in loving her so much, he can lose her. The way the novel leads up to this ending is so profound and is left so hopefully that it feels earned and real. As for why people react so differently to this ending, some of my friends were outraged by it, while others seemed to find beauty in the raw emotion of the novel. I find it so fascinating that there could be such different reactions to it. I have so much to engage with in this novel.

Jack · Answer

Aww. 'A Farewell to Arms' ends on such a sad note. Catherine's death and then Henry's solitude after having all that love with Catherine is really sad. I especially felt sad because Henry's section is so contrast to the rest of the book. Life can change in an instant and Henry shows that in his helplessness after losing the love of his life. And as always, Hemingway's little insight about life and his few words really drive home the sadness of the situation. I think we can all relate to that helpless feeling at some time or another. It's really a bleak look at love and life.

Zoe · Answer

The end of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is as devastating as it is powerful. The ending of this novel portrays the futility of war, which is portrayed through Henry’s experiences in World War I. This ending really highlights the loss in the novel and how it can affect people in many ways. Many people can relate to the ending of this novel because there are many people who have been through similar struggles with love and loss.

What I found most interesting, though, was how the author went from this incredibly passionate and exciting love affair to this very desolate, cold place. It seemed to me that their experience of life was so similarly structured to our own that it resonated on a much deeper level than the simple story of their love. His portrayal of loss and how humans can be affected by it in so many different ways is very beautiful to me and is something that will stick with me for a long time after I finish reading the book.

The novel was often discussed in readings and conversations with friends after finishing it. The ending even brought up discussions about fate and free will. Are we destiny’s children or do we have the choice to decide our own lives? It’s certainly something to think about once you have completed the emotional rollercoaster that is A Farewell to Arms. The heaviness of it all is one of the reasons why Hemingway’s work is so successful and why his writing is so precise in order to transmit the weight of life’s finalities.

Nathan · Answer

I was particularly struck by the ending of A Farewell to Arms. Henry comes to a realization of great sadness after Catherine’s death and everything in the book has been leading up to this point. Although the book is somewhat tragic, the way in which Hemingway has portrayed Catherine and Henry’s love is sweet. It is only transient which makes the ending all the more heart wrenching. The book is about war, love and loss. The way in which Hemingway has represented these three things is real and at times uncontrollable. It creates a sense of a unity of fate and love which is beautiful yet despairing.

Madi Wolitski · Answer

I just wanted to read everyone’s takes on this. To me, the ending was so bleak and even felt cheap in its attempt to impress in the same way that Hemingway tries to be tough. I feel like I am in the minority on this, though, so I will just lurk and read everyone else’s thoughts on this.

mayuunice · Answer

Man, the ending of that book still sits in my memory bank years after I read it. Occasionally it surfaces when it’s raining outside, but that’s about it. It’s one of those few books which lingers. I haven’t the cerebral capacity to go into the great depth of analysis that such a book deserves. It just sticks.

lizasayeed238 · Answer

Reading the end of the novel by the author of Arynawee was like a shock to the system. Throughout the entire novel, I got lost in the lovers’ love as a refuge from the awfulness that surrounded them. But the awfulness of the ending follows the readers back to the rest of the novel, casting a shadow over everything they read before. In other words, the question of whether the two lovers were ever really safe or if they were just blinded by their love becomes a major theme. Did they have a profound and real connection, or were they two traumatized people hanging onto each other for dear life in a treacherous world? The ending is significant because it resists declaring the lovers’ romance pure and triumphant in the face of the catastrophe that befalls them. Instead, the novel presents their love as a beautiful but doomed resistance to entropy. Their love is desperate and fragile in memory because of the tragedy of the end of the book. That is to say, their love’s tragedy redefines their love before the tragedy in profound and influential ways.

Chari Corchado Boja · Answer

Reading through the summaries and analyses of Part Five of A Farewell to Arms, I was surprised that many of the readers saw Fred as passive at the end of the novel. I do not see how he could be considered passive while walking away from his home and from the love of his life. All of his active verbs – fighting a war, fleeing a war, building a life, begging for help from doctors, praying to a God he does not believe in – have all been used up by the end of the novel. The ending of the novel is significant because it depicts a state of being beyond simple struggle. Instead, the reader sees the long, hard endurance of a man who has been stripped of all his agency and is left in a hopeless, suppressive state of being. The ending is more profound than simply passive, because it is the stillness at the end of the last fight of life that Fred has to give. His defeat is complete and to call him passive would be a misunderstanding of his total defeat.

Jonathan · Answer

I re-read A Farewell to Arms last night for a third time. The ending is so incredibly tragic and powerful in its own right, but in completing Hemingway’s philosophy of grace, it is so much more. Catherine’s death is not just an accident. It is another brutal realization of the universe’s indifference that Frederic has been trying to avoid throughout the novel. The war is a huge, monstrous, killing machine. He escapes that and finds the same sense of meaningless, senseless, cruel indifference to human life in the tranquil, peace-filled environment of a Swiss hospital. The last line of the novel, “After a while I looked at her. She was still. A smile on her face. I took her in my arms.” The last section of the novel, where he walks back to the hotel through the rain is the embodiment of stoicism. It is not that he does not feel anything. He must feel something so powerful and so empty that words cannot even begin to express it. All he can do is describe the simplest, most mundane details of the physical world around him. He is not a hero searching for meaning in his tragic loss. He is simply a human being who must go on living in a meaningless world. The only significance of the novel is the resounding sense of nothingness it leaves the reader with. That was what Hemingway was trying to convey about the world after a huge and devastating war.

This book is the ultimate example of how less can mean so much more in terms of expressing human emotions, and consequently, amplifies the devastation even more.

Khai Shin · Answer

From a structural standpoint the ending of Theatre is a perfect, devastating circle. We read of autumn, death and cholera in the army at the opening of the novel. The death of Catherine in a sterile hospital room brings no comfort to Frederic, and he walks out into the rain, once again cleansed but with no peace. Frederic had attempted to build a world with Catherine that was the opposite of war, a world that was structured, private and full of love. Instead he had found that war was not the chaos that he had experienced in Catherine’s arms, for in fact chaos is the rule, and it is arms of love, of comfort, of sanctuary that he has to say goodbye to. The ending of The Theatre of the Blind thus becomes the final word on the Writer’s code: he is a nihilist of the highest order, yet what he expounds is with dignity.

What Is The Significance Of The Ending In A Farewell To Arms?

11 Answers

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