A Farewell to Arms is not a complicated book. Rather, it is a simple story well told, the plot of which could be summarized as follows: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. Ernest Hemingway conveyed this story chronologically, in a strictly linear fashion, with no flashback scenes whatsoever. In fact, the novel contains very little exposition at all. We never learn exactly where its narrator and protagonist, the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry, came from, or why he enlisted in the Italian army to begin with. (For that matter, we read chapter after chapter before even learning his name.) Nor do we discover much about his lover Catherine Barkley's past, other than the fact that her fiancé was killed in battle, in France.
There are no subplots, and the minor characters in A Farewell to Arms are minor indeed — for the simple fact that they are not needed. The power of this perennially popular book comes from the intensity of Frederic and Catherine's love for one another and from the power of the antagonistic forces that ultimately tear these two apart.
A Farewell to Arms is set against the historical and geographical background of World War I. Thus it contains numerous references to people and places, governments and fronts that Hemingway could safely assume his audience would recognize. In fact, certain basic information isn't alluded to in the book at all, as it was once common knowledge. (The book was published in 1929, only eleven years after the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended the war.) For a contemporary audience, however, making sense of these references can be difficult. The continuing popularity of A Farewell to Arms attests to the fact that enjoyment of the novel does not depend upon understanding its particular setting. Here, however, are some basics:
