A Farewell to Arms: Rain and Water

From beginning to end, Ernest Hemingway floods his novel A Farewell to Arms with rain and other images of water, using them not only to set the scene but as symbols for both destruction and happiness. The rain seems to always be the messenger of grim news, the omen of destruction and death. Whatever momentary happiness Catherine and Henry are able to grasp is invaded by a rainstorm. However, Hemingway uses other images of water, such as rivers and lakes, to actually indicate joy and life. In this novel, Hemingway offers water to be both a symbol of death and ruin and a bearer of life and happiness, as this whole novel is the fight between love and war.

In the novel, rain serves as a powerful symbol of the inevitable disintegration of any type of pleasure or love in life. Just as rain floods a beautiful day and darkens a blue sky, it turns all that is joyful and even hopeful into a muddy misery. It is the emblem of sterility, the mark of a barren life doomed for destruction. Catherine instills the dismal weather with meaning while she and Henry are lying in bed listening to the storm outside. Catherine admits to Henry, as the rain is falling on the roof, that she has a fe

As the rain bears news of death for both Catherine and her baby, it verifies her belief in rain as a powerful and damaging force and Hemingway’s message of anything, especially love and happiness, as only temporary. After Catherine's death, Henry leaves the hospital and walks home in the rain. “But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” (332). During this moment, the falling rain validates Catherine's apprehensions and confirms one of the novel's main contentions: love, like anything else in the world—virtuous or wicked, blameless or deserving—cannot last. Love and joy are only brief and rain becomes the realization of mortality and finalization.

Some topics in this essay:
Catherine Henry, Henry Catherine, Ernest Hemingway, Farewell Arms, Catherine Henry’s, rain falling, Rain Water”, , sometimes dead, love war, ernest hemingway, images water, farewell arms, happiness rain, henry catherine,