Characterism In Frederic Henry's A Farewell To Arms

A person developing is not when someone changes their hair color to a crazy shade or when they change their style. It is when a person develops deep inside of them, that individual will learn new things about themselves. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry develops in three main categories; friends, love, and war. During the war, Lt.Henry gains and loses friends, meets his love, and learns new things about himself due to his work in the war.
In the beginning of the book, Lt.Henry is friends with many of his warmates including the Priest, Lt.Rinaldi, and Major. Lt.Rinaldi and Lt.Henry are close friends, which you can tell by how they tell each other about their personal lives and their nicknames they have for each other. “Only during their last meeting, for example, does his great friend and roommate Rinaldi address him by name as “Federico” and “Fred.” These nicknames (like the “Rinin” Frederic uses for Rinaldi) suggest how close these two “war brothers”are” (Wiener 58).

You see new things and that is what happens to Lt.Henry. When he joins the war, he does not know why he enlisted in the Italian army or what he is fighting for (Wiener 59). Frederic often talks about the war with his warmates, but when he gets hospitalized, he reads the newspaper and asks his barber for information about the war, (Hemingway 90). Once, he returns to the war, the readers witness him shoot a sergeant and then later escapes his death. He runs away from the war after all that and whe when he gets to Milan, he avoids reading any papers on the war or talking about it, “ ‘Don’t talk about the war,’ ” (Hemingway 245). At the end, after Catherine is dying, he decides to read the paper again, “I was not thinking at all but read the paper of the man opposite me” (Hemingway 329). Catherine showed him how bad the war was, so once she was dying, he went back to reading and keeping an eye on the war, like he did before he met