Critics
and literary scholars believe that this novel is against the war. In the novel,
one can see that there is destruction, fear, and disillusionment everywhere.
”War is not won by victory,” as the saying goes, and WWI was a terrible war
with no winners." Henry, the protagonist goes through the war's
disillusionment, pessimism, and tragedy but he also has a deep love, a
contradiction that ironically mirrors the troops' and civilians' sense of
meaninglessness and despair.
As
we see in the novel that characters hook up whores and drink alcohol in order
to get relief from the frustrating life caused by war. For Henry, love is also
a game when he meets and makes his sexual approach to Catherine Barkley. There
are slight changes that come when we turn the further pages of the novel that
when Henry is injured and has to spend time in the hospital, he undergoes a
little change. He becomes more active in the battle as a result of his release
from the battlefield, but he also realizes his deep love for Catherine.
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Henry
recognizes the close link between love and battle when he connects his
beloved's death:” Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you
syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that.
Stay around and they would kill you”
The
above brief but argumentative discussion vividly shows that A Farewell to Arms
is an anti-war work; the plot moves quickly from naive gameplay to the phases
of love and optimism, culminating in utter misery and the realization that no
one wins in a war. The novel's intense love story reinforces the message even
more by demonstrating the ironic resemblance, but also the disparity, between
the war and the message. The novel's central message is to create love, not
war.
