Book Club Guide

A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway · 1929 · Classics

Key themes

War as bureaucratic and random, not heroic
Love in the shadow of death — and death in the shadow of love
Retreat as the only honest response to the war

About this book

American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley during the First World War in Italy. Their love story plays out against the background of military defeat and retreat. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel is his most romantically devastating — a war novel in which the war is not the worst thing that happens.

Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms drew on Hemingway's own experience on the Italian front in 1918. It sold 80,000 copies in four months — an extraordinary success for the time.

Discussion questions

Henry's retreat from the Italian campaign is both literal and moral. What does the famous passage about 'made-up words' — honour, glory, courage — say about what the war has done to language?
Catherine Barkley has been both celebrated as a romantic ideal and criticised as a fantasy. Which reading do you find more convincing — and what does the novel's presentation of her say about Hemingway's limits?
The ending is devastating and arbitrary. How does Hemingway resist making it meaningful — and is this restraint more or less affecting than a conventionally emotional ending would be?
The novel is partly autobiographical — Hemingway was wounded in Italy and fell in love with his nurse. How does knowing this affect your reading of Henry and Catherine?
A Farewell to Arms appeared in 1929, the same year as All Quiet on the Western Front. What do these two very different novels agree on — and where do they diverge in their view of the war?