Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (themes, motifs, symbols)
literature. As the neat columns of men begin to crumble, so too do the soldiers' nerves, minds, and
capacity for rational thought and moral judgment. Henry's shooting of the engineer for refusing to help
free the car from the mud shocks the reader for two reasons: first, the violent outburst seems at odds with
Henry's coolly detached character; second, the incident occurs in a setting that robs it of its moral import
--the complicity of Henry's fellow soldiers legitimizes the killing. The murder of the engineer seems
justifiable because it is an inevitable by-product of the spiraling violence and disorder of the war.
Nevertheless, the novel cannot be said to condemn the war; A Farewell to Arms is hardly the work
of a pacifist. Instead, just as the innocent engineer's death is an inevitability of war, so is war the inevitable
outcome of a cruel, senseless world. Hemingway suggests that war is nothing more than the dark,
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