Use Of Rain In Ernest Hemingway's 'A Farewell To Arms'

Jonathan Testa

Graber

AP Lit; Period 1

29 September 2015

Hope Among Death “Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby” (Hughes). Langston Hughes, a famous poet, described rain as peaceful and beautiful like most other writers would. However Ernest Hemingway, author of A Farewell to Arms, was not like most writers. The novel follows Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley who fall in love in the midst of World War I in the Italian Army. However there are other things that follow them as well. Deadly rain creepily and ominously follows while hopeful snow is also present. Ernest Hemingway, in A Farewell to Arms, uses the leitmotifs of rain and snow radically different from popular use, in order to convey to the

After a beautiful day with some friends, Frederic and Catherine return home to rain. As they go to bed, Catherine makes a shocking confession. She says, “I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it. And sometimes I see you dead in it” (126). One of the things Hemingway uses rain for is to foreshadow impending doom. Not only is what Catherine said extremely weird and scary, it also foreshadows her tragic death. She also says this because this is how she views the war. She is scared that Frederic will die in the war and because of his death she will emotionally die alongside him. She goes on to say how she wishes she was not scared of the rain (126). I think this demonstrates the idea that rain, or death, is inescapable and as much as we may want to live on, we cannot. Everyone will die sooner or later. One person that suddenly dies is one of Frederic’s army friends, Aymo. Aymo actually foreshadows his own death when he says “We drink it now. To-morrow maybe we drink rainwater” (191). Once again Hemingway is using rain to foreshadow death and to show the reader how