[a farewell to arms] forgive my ignorance but what the hell does henry’s role as a soldier even consist of?(rant)

Submitted by Massacre-_-lover t3_zz2a6x in books

Does He just”watch ambulances” and thats all the role he has in his post?he doesnt even drive them he just rides shotgun and does nothing else(save for binge drinking and…binge drinking).it doesn’t even sound like a real duty. I would appreciate some enlightenment.

Im three chapters into the third book and honestly the second book extremely bored me. The romance between henry and cat seems so fake and dry. First theres cat letting henry immediately do you know what to her on the second day they saw each other and probably the first time they properly spent time together.it just seems so forced and nonsensical.the plot on the other hand was something i found boring. Its just generic narration of the normal life of a lazy alcoholic lust driven “soldier” with no exciting ups or downs to it.

Am i missing something?

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Samael13 t1_j291twq wrote

Whether you're missing something is really subjective; Hemmingway isn't for everyone, and he's writing about a war that ended over 100 years ago and a lot of the book is heavy on subtext, so, maybe it's just not your thing?

To answer your more specific question: Henry is a medic/ambulance driver. A lot of that work was transporting people off the battlefield; here's an article about what that work looked like: http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/greatwar/exhibits/show/military/across_globe_across_diag/gendered-experiences

And, yes, he drinks a lot. The book depicts the banal horror of WWI, and what it does to people. As you can imagine, people living through a warzone are not notoriously happy, well-adjusted people.

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Massacre-_-lover OP t1_j292d1z wrote

Appreciate the explanation but What do you mean by subtext?

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ttraband t1_j293ut5 wrote

Subtext = under the words.

Many of the readers when the book came out would either have been in the war, lost people in the war, seen the effects of the war on those who came home, or seen the gaps in society left by those who were lost, or any combinations of those experiences. There is a lot that would not have to have been spelled out for that audience as soon as the setting was clearly communicated.

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gnatsaredancing t1_j295zf6 wrote

A lot of what he writes is more interesting as a metaphor for the war than as a straight up romance plot.

It's hard to say much without spoiling the book for you. But the great war... it destroyed people. It marked a turning point in how the world thought. Before, we were still traditional enough that men signed up for war, sometimes entire neighbourhoods or factory crews at once thinking they were going to bring honour to their countries and fight with chivalry.

Nobody could have imagined the meat grinder of WWI. It wasn't just that a lot of people died. So many people died and so many returned as physically and mentally mangled wrecks that our entire society was faced with the lie of how we saw ourselves.

This wasn't noble or chivalrous or defensible in any way. WWI was the industrialised slaughter of entire generations. The world would never be the same.

And that disillusionment is what you see in Henry. He displays self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviour throughout the novel as he fumbles with his love interest as he weighs the merits of the war against the alternatives. A farewell to arms has a very double meaning. The weapons soldiers arm themselves with, or the arms of lovers they say goodbye too.

You haven't read the rest of the book. But Hemingway is a writer who usually tries to do most of his storytelling in the things he intentionally leaves unsaid.

The problem is that the more time passes, the more removed we are from the experiences that fuel his novels. So his meaningful silences become less meaningful as his readers no longer automatically fill in the blanks or grasp the metaphors.

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gnatsaredancing t1_j294na9 wrote

Hemingway is one of those writers whose work is just ageing out of relevancy. He relies a lot on context that people no longer have.

World War 1 was such a world changing conflict that it's hard to imagine now. Not just the violence itself but the way it changed how people looked at the world.

This book is very much Hemingway trying to make sense of his own experiences of the Italian front and he'd be the first to admit that he struggled turning it into a coherent story. He wrote dozens of endings for the book and wasn't happy with any of them.

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whipfinish t1_j2cb731 wrote

Here let me patiently explain to you why the novel is actually...nah, fuck it. You're right, bro. Bad book. Hemingway deserves to be blown up while eating macaroni.

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