The Ending of Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

 

Hemingway struggled with the ending of  A Farewell to Arms. By his count he wrote 39 of them “before I was satisfied.” A 2012 edition presents 47 endings of the book. The endings range from two-three lines to few pages. Some of these are known as s: (1) The Nada Ending, (2) The Fitzgerald Ending, (3) The Religious Ending, (4) The Live-Baby Ending, (5) The Morning After Ending, (6) The Funeral Ending etc.

"The Nada Ending" is represented by three fragmentary attempts to express Henry's sense of being-and-nothingness after Catherine's death. His mind is stunned and produces only a negative response, a form of nada. He senses that everything is gone —all their love—and will never be again. The bluntest of the three attempts simply states that there is nothing left to the story and that all the narrator can promise is that we all die.


F. Scott Fitzgerald advised Hemingway editorially on a number of matters in A Farewell to Arms. He so admired one passage in the book that he noted it in the typescript as being "One of the most beautiful pages in all English literature” and suggested Hemingway to end the book with that. The passage referred to is that in which Henry, in Chapter XXXIV, contemplates how the world "kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially" and concludes "If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“The Religious Ending,” notices the “wisdom of the priest . . . who has always loved God and so is happy . . . [and asks] but how much is wisdom and how much is luck to be . . . born that way?” No one, the narrator concludes, can take God away from the priest, and thus the priest is happy. With such a conclusion the priest would have emerged as the supreme mentor of this Bildungsroman, not Rinaldi, Count Greffi, or even Catherine.

In “The Live-Baby Ending” Frederic and Catherine's child lives, instead of dying as it does in the novel. In this version Henry finds it difficult to talk about the boy without feeling bitter toward him: “I could tell about the boy . . . [but] he does not belong in this story”.

“The Morning-After Ending” prolongs Frederic Henry’s suffering by tracing his steps to the hotel where he finally and fitfully falls asleep and awakens to the realization that nothing will ever be the same again.

In “The Funeral Ending” Henry says that he could tell about his meeting with the undertaker and "the business of burial in a foreign country," but, the implication is, as the sentence trails off, he will not.


The art wisdom implicit in the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms is critically revealed in Henry James's statement of the central problem of ending novels, which he made in the preface to Roderick Hudson-. "He [the writer] is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely ignore it." As the variant endings here examined indicate, Hemingway struggled mightily with the problem of breaking and yet not breaking continuity in his narrative design.

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