Ernest Hemmingway "A Farewell to Arms" : Drenched in love

The season of rains is upon us. It’s the time of the year when the leaves get greener, the sky gets darker and street kids frolicking by the roadside look happier than ever.In no other country are these glittering arrows more anxiously awaited than in ours. Perhaps, it is the preceding heat, perhaps it is concern for the thirsty grain, or maybe it’s just that we consider rains a blessing. Whatever the reason, rainfall is a harbinger of happy tidings for most of us.Writers’ liaison with the rain has been an old and faithful one. Often as a picturesque, meaning-laden background, and mostly as a symbol — an omen — rains have served as handy literary devices for authors and poets in varying ages.Within the literary hall of fame, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and F Scott Fitzgerald are well known for their use of symbolism. But there are few that have used nature as a symbol more heavily than Ernest Hemmingway.The use of rain as a portent is most obvious in his masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms. Regarded as Hemmingway’s best artistic achievement, and certainly his greatest commercial success, A Farewell to Arms is the story of Frederic Henry, an American who enrols in the Italian army during the World War I, and falls in love with a British nurse Catherine Barkley. Hemmingway once referred to it as his version of Romeo and Juliet, which seems quite apt, considering the tragic fate of the protagonists’ love. Rain and mud are the two recurring motifs in the tale, and neither portends well for the people.Contrary to popular notions of rainfall being a bearer of good luck, for Hemmingway’s hero rain is nature’s alarm bell, bringing a sense of impending doom. It is a symbol of darker things to come.Right at the beginning, the soldier Henry tells the readers, “In the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain.” This ‘black rain’ is followed by an outbreak of cholera, killing seven thousand people.Later, it is raining when the Italian army begins its retreat, and the statement of one of the soldiers, “Tomorrow, maybe we drink rainwater,” turns into a sentence of doom, for the following day they meet their end. This symbolism is made very obvious by the heroine herself. “I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see myself dead in it,” she says to Henry. “And sometimes I see you dead in it.”That, eventually, turns out to be another tragic prediction. Towards the end of the novel, during Catherine’s operation, Henry looks out the window, to find that it is raining. In the next few minutes, Henry loses both his child and the love of his life, all the while in a backdrop of heavy rain. At the very end of the story, Henry leaves the hospital and heads back to his hotel “in the rain”.Hemmingway’s star-crossed lovers, much like Romeo and Juliet, unite only to be separated. The rain, of course, is the author’s implicit way of showing that nature and fate work in ways much beyond the understanding of man.