I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. Frederic himself expresses this on several occasions, for example in Book Three, when he says,
Everything that Frederic Henry learned in his teenage years, the world he grew up in and its complex value system based on such values as honor and dignity, has fallen apart. There is, however, more to this book: When looking at the world in which the protagonist finds himself, it becomes clear that it is one in which people are lacking proper, stable values.
This is right insofar as the novel deals with the young American Frederic Henry who, while being involved in the war on the side of the Italian Army, falls in love with a beautiful British nurse, Catherine Barkley. Since it was published in the late 1920s, Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms has mostly been read as a love story against the background of the First World War (Brooks 81 Matthews 77 Ross 90 Smith 78).
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