Juxtaposition of Rain And Plot in A Farewell to Arms
Uploaded by sls465 on Apr 18, 2007
Juxtaposition of Rain And Plot in "A Farewell to Arms"
In "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway juxtaposes strong weather symbolism with the emotions and events of the characters in the story. The book has a theme of constant internal struggle between the protagonist and his perception of his reality world versus his fictitious one. This theme is expanded upon and clarified by the author, by the use of weather, particularly rain. Rain is the bringer of misfortune and destruction. Everyone who dies dies during a rainstorm or in some way the caused by the rain. Whenever something terrible happens to the main characters or the war worsens it is always accompanied by a storm and rain. Weather plays an important role in setting the tone and mood of the story by juxtaposing it with the factual events in the story.
At the beginning of the story the destruction the rain brings is literal. The rain brings the cholera which kills thousands of people. This first introduction of rain sets the tone for the weather in the rest of the book. By chapter 19 Catherine even senses the evilness of the rain and even fears it. She tells Fredric “I don’t know, darling. I’ve always been afraid of the rain…I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it…And sometimes I see you dead in it,” this foreshadows the fate of the characters to come (126). Rain is such an obvious transitional image that, when it is mentioned the reader automatically knows something dreadful soon follows. At the beginning of chapter 22, Fredric observes “it turned cold that night and the next day it was raining…it rained very hard and I was wet when I came in” (142). Fredric is drenched in rainwater; he is soaked in the bringer of destruction, thus the next morning he wakes up and feels “sick (and) nauseated” (142). Fredric finds out he has jaundice. Not only was the rain foretelling the coming of bad news but it almost seems as though it was the cause of it. It is raining outside the night Fredric and Catherine spend the night at the hotel in Milan. It is here where Catherine says she feels “like a whore” (152). The reason she feels so much like a...