YOU

WANT ANTS??!!
The novel's wealth of medical detail calls our attention to our own vulnerability: We are all permanently at risk, trusting in doctors, medical and metaphorical, to preserve us in a world where we have little control. As with the ants on the burning log (327-28), one may die quick and early, or late and scarred; we are born into the world's hospital, each of us a terminal case. The Priest, Gino, Catherine, and Rinaldi do, however, live by the ideal of service, and the dramatic tension of the novel is largely based on Lt. Henry's wavering toward each ideal and eventual rejection of all four. Toward the Priest's ideal, Henry's attitude is at first one of sympathy but of rejection. He does not bait the Priest with the other priest-baiters early in the novel, but neither does he stay with the Priest when the other officers leave for the whore houses near by. Nor does he visit the high, cold, dry country, the Priest's home, where he is invited to go on his leave. Instead he goes to the large cities, the ironic "centres of culture and civilization," where he lives the life of sensation and feels "that this was all and all and all and not caring." After he is wounded and has found real love with Catherine, however, Lt. Henry comes closer to the Priest, so that when he returns to duty he can reject the priest-baiting of Rinaldi and instead of going to town and the whore house she can visit with the Priest. The implication apparently is that the love Henry has found in Catherine has somehow made him more sympathetic to the kind of selfless love that the Priest avows. By the end of the novel, however, Henry has thoroughly rejected the Priest and his ideal of service to God. He does, however, give that ideal a test. Where the Priest had earlier prayed for the end of the war "I believe and I pray that something will happen. I have felt it very close" Henry now prays that Catherine not die. Basic and repetitive in the prayer is, the implication of some necessary reciprocal relation between the same flaw; for he had seen, by pragmatic test, the inefficacy of prayer, and he had discerned that the priest's or Miss Watson's ideal of service was a one-way street with no advantage for the human individual. For Lt. Henry this lack of reciprocity makes for the image of a God who in his eternal selfishness is the origin of human selfishness, so that man in his selfishness most accurately reflects God. This concept of the divine selfishness is portrayed in Henry's remembrance, as Catherine is dying, of watching some ants burning on a log. Henry envisions the opportunity for him to be "a messiah and lift the log off the fire." Divinity, however, does not ease the pain of man's existence, and Henry does not save the ants. Instead, selfishly and in so doing he is reflecting the divine selfishness which is so antithetical to the Priest's ideal of service Henry throws "a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it." man and God: you do this for me and I'll do this for you. Thus Henry prays: "Oh, god, please don't let her die. I'll do anything for you if you won't let her die. . . . Please, please, please don't let her die . . . . I'll do anything you say if you don't make her die." Catherine, however, does die, just as, despite the Priest's prayers, the war continues. The implication is that the Priest's ideal of service lacks reciprocity, and the knowledge of its lack is not unique to Henry. Huck Finn had earlier, in the novel that Hemingway has said is the origin of all modern American literature, felt Even the parable of the ants, coming at the conclusion of the novel, must be assessed in terms of the narrative perspective which Hemingway employs. Here, too, the narrator is finally more discerning than when, vividly recalling Catherine's death, he tells of the ants who were either gratuitously killed or survived, "burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going" (p. 338). A more objective, earlier pro- nouncement modifies this parable. The narrator also knows that those who are broken without being killed

can mend, "and afterward many are strong at the broken places" (pp. 258-59). He knows this because he was himself broken by Catherine's death. But he has mended, as is shown by the control he exercises in telling his own story. As Rovit observes, we are not told how Frederic Henry learned to live with his loss because "the significant facts are in the narrative structure; they are there because the narrator Frederick has abstracted them from the actor Frederick's experience." Yet these facts of structure still show, as Rovit points out, that Frederic Henry has learned something of the nature of life, love and death. His final suffering is, consequently, neither completely overwhelming nor meaningless. He can later evaluate his experiences and judge just how much he has lost. Aware of his fate, he is not completely its victim.
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Indeed, most of the novel tends to focus most forcefully on human defeats: the cholera, soldiers who mutilate themselves, the terrible re-treat, the despair of the priest, the de-generation of Rinaldi, and the death of Catherine. Death is the great and final foe-inevitable and irrational. Significant to Hemingway is the manner of facing impersonal, irrational, naturalistic forces. Probably the most naturalistic-and ironic-symbol in the novel is the analogy of the ants in the last chapter. Hemingway prepares for the analogy as Frederic prepares for the oncoming death of Catherine: Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldo. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you. The ant analogy follows. Frederic remembers placing a log on the fire once and ants swarming out. He recalls the "messiah" thought that occurred to him. But instead of lifting the log off the fire, "I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in it before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants." Compare the tone of these adjacent paragraphs. The latter underlines a naturalistic element in the novel. The tin of water serves neither a protective nor destructive conscious purpose. It is only adjunct to the whiskey. The "messiah" thought is a passing one, not acted upon. The forces of ant destruction, death itself, come unreasonably, without malice, without meaning. But the earlier paragraph connotes an active, malevolent "they" who would break you if they could, the same "they" who succeed in breaking Catherine. In the same chapter she says to Frederic, "I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me. I know it now."

Comment [1]: Ben & Will I think this is the point you were exploring this morning after class.

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Frederic's culminating encounter with death is Catherine's own. Here his growing identification with both the cause and the effect of death reaches its greatest intensity, for he is the father of the child which kills her, and her death deprives him of all that he values in life. (". . . This was the price you paid for sleeping together," he learns. "This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.") His imagination, for merely held in check, now tortures him with the possibility of her death : And what if she should die? She won't die. People don't die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She won't die. She's just having a bad time. . . . Afterward we'd say what a bad time and Catherine would say it wasn't really so bad. But what if she should die? She can't die. Yes, but what if she should die? . . . She can't die. Why should she die? What reason is there for her to die? His reversal in response has been like the ants which he remembers in a fire at camp; he has suspended his imagination in a rush toward the center of the fire, and then in a sudden imaginative reaction he flees from it? only to fall into the fire at the end with no messiah to extricate him from the necessity. This is Henry's symbolic recognition of what, in the course of the novel, he has unconsciously learned: he sees that his appetite for life has made the realization of death inevitable and he is no longer able to free himself from its effects. Hemingway provides evidence of Frederic's continuously revising, interpreting consciousness when the narrator associates the death of his Hemingway provides evidence of Frederic's continuously revising, interpreting consciousness when the narrator associates the death of his son with his memory of ants that he

Comment [2]: Interesting idea here; I do like the notion that FH cannot ever completely move away from the idea of some malevolent quality in the cosmos yet on other occasions understanding the indifference of nature. Consider the difference between a malevolent nature and an indifferent nature.

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Comment [3]:

once carelessly killed. He details the ants' attempt to escape the fire that traps them, and then considers his own power to influence events. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. (328) The story of the ants provides experiential [practical; based on experience] evidence for Frederic's conclusion: "That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you" (327). But this evidence is not as significant as the association that Frederic Henry's consciousness has constructed. This crucial association occurs in the present, in the narrator's now; for Frederic, in juxtaposing the deaths of the ants and his son, offers no indication that the similarity between the two events occurred to him as he grieved for his son. Indeed, it is as if the resemblance between the ants on the one hand and his son, Catherine, and his comrades in battle on the other had only just struck him during the process of narration. This insight achieved by the creative, interpreting consciousness actually derives from a system of memories woven throughout the narrative, including the soldier with the rupture, who deliberately complicates his condition and finally wounds himself in the head, at Frederic's suggestion, to escape the front. In spite of all the soldier's efforts, he will undoubtedly go back to the line. Other doomed attempts at escape? the Caporetto retreat and the harrowing journey to Switzerland? appear prominently in the narrative with the sort of fine detail that characterizes the vivid memory of the ants, indicating that Frederic's consciousness has been weaving memories into a pattern that prepares him for and impels him toward recognition: "... They killed you in the end. You could count on that" (327). The crux of the book for most readers lies in Henry's philosophical awakening, or, at least, in his awareness of things other than himself. This awakening occurs for readers when Henry, as he does in the following passage, begins to think of the consequences of his actions: Once in camp I put a log on top the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the Centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. . . . I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. Frederic, during the parade his prayers and inner struggles at the hospital, come out he recognizes his responsibility for the deaths of announce Catherine and their son, though his recognition influence c has nothing to do with a broken vow to the Virgin (p. 327). Rather, his explanation can refer only to naturalistic the unnamed them who must control human affairs and to some godlike figure that kills ants on a burning log (p. 328). Not until later, when he narrates h language as well as in feeling, then, Frederic follows Stendhal's Fabrizio in his developing awareness of divine possibilities growing out of a profane knowledge of love as well as of war. Heming This pattern is dramatically completed for both as matrix protagonists in the way their full recognition of Arms is of divine love is precipitated by the death of secular passages ( love). Thereby they recognize their tragic responsibility for the assertion of self in profane love. Fabrizio carries out his nocturnal affair with necessity I Clelia despite her vow at the Farnese Tower never to see him again. Their child Sandrino is born, fiction. He ostensibly the son of the Marchese Crescenzi; can write Fabrizio, prevented from seeing his son and but that o jealous that the child will come to love another an imagined father, persuades Clelia to make the child appear world (p. to sicken and die so that he, Fabrizio, can sequester the child and rear him as his own. Although a meanini she feels repugnance at the plan, Clelia consents. Stendhal's But the child

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Comment [4]: This discussion takes the perspective of the narrative and the growing insights and understanding that seem to be emerging by sharing his story.

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Comment [5]: I find this really interesting; the fact that there are all these systems of memories and one can find them woven throughout the narrative the reminiscence in the barn jumps to mind.

becomes really sick and dies, as does with the e; Clelia shortly afterward, in the arms of Fabrizio. how A Fai A few days after her death, Fabrizio gives up his property and retires to the Charterhouse, where is about w he dies within a year (II, 318-25). Frederic, during the parade his prayers and inner struggles at the hospital, come out 4 recognizes his responsibility for the deaths of announce Catherine and their son, though his recognition influence c has nothing to do with a broken vow to the Virgin Farewell tc (p. 327). Rather, his explanation can refer only to naturalistic the unnamed them who must control human affairs and to some godlike figure that kills ants on a burning log (p. 328). Not until later, when he does he recognize the cryptic king his destiny and arrive at the recog-ned by Fabrizio. When her death comes, she is croyante [French a person who has religious faith], and even Frederic's mind races "Dear God, don't let her die." But his experience of her death is expressed mainly through images of physical decay and desolation-the dog nosing among "coffee-grounds, dust and some dead flowers" (p. 325), the ants on the burning log; afterward "There's nothing to say" (p. 343). Despite her "courage" and their "nights," their lovers' dialogue on death is suspended, rather than concluded, on a note of disillusionment: 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. (p. 343) In this novel that Hemingway once thought of calling "A Sentimental Education," Frederic Henry learns that he is not immortal, that he needs Catherine beyond sexuality, that life is neither fair nor foul, and that there is little he can do about it. The surgeon, skillful or not, can only postpone, not abrogate death. As Frederic tells Catherine, one always feels trapped biologically. The novel's wealth of medical detail calls our attention to our own vulnerability: We are all permanently at risk, trusting in doctors, medical and metaphorical, to preserve us in a world where we have little control. As with the ants on the burning log (327-28), one may die quick and early, or late and scarred; we are born into the world's hospital, each of us a terminal case. In the end, with the death of Catherine, Frederick discovers that the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure. It is doomed because it is liable to all the accidents of a world in which human beings are like the ants running back and forth on a log burning in a campfire and in which death is, as Catherine says just before her own death, just a dirty trick. But this is not to deny the value of the effort, or to deny the value of the discipline, the code, the stoic endurance, the things that make it trueor half truethat nothing ever happens to the brave. This question of the characteristic discipline takes us back to the beginning of the book, and to the context from which Fredericks effort arises. We have already mentioned the contrast between the officers of the mess and the priest. It is a contrast between the man who is aware of the issue of meaning in life and those who are unaware of it, who give themselves over to the mere flow of accident, the contrast between the disciplined and the undisciplined. But the contrast is not merely between the priest and the officers. Fredericks friend, the surgeon Rinaldi, is another who is on the same side of the contrast as the priest. He may go to the brothel with his brother officers, he may even bait the priest a little, but his personal relationship with Frederick indicates his affiliations; he is one of the initiate. Furthermore, he has the discipline of his profession, and, as we have seen, in the Hemingway world, the discipline that seems to be merely technical, the style of the artist or the form of the athlete or bullfighter, may be an index to a moral value. Already, Rinaldi says, I am only happy when I am working. (Already the seeking of pleasure in sensation is inadequate for Rinaldi.) This point appears more sharply in the remarks about the doctor who first attends to Fredericks wounded leg. He is incompetent and does not wish to take the responsibility for a decision. Frederic, in a frenzy of waiting, pictures life as a cruel game: That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. (338)

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Comment [6]: Something happened in downloading this paragraph and much of it does seem indecipherable, but the highlighted bit is worth noting as it reinforces the same point being made in others.

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Comment [7]: Hmmmm!

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Comment [8]: While not strictly about ants I left this in because I thought it was useful.

Then he recalls a moment from his youth when he had a chance to save some ants from dying. The ants were trapped on a log that had been thrown onto a fire. Each strategy for survival was doomed; the only difference was the timing and manner of each ants demise. Frederic briefly considered his chance to act as the ants saviour but chose not to act, or to act, but in his own self-interest. He emptied his tin cup of water onto the log so that he could refill it with whisky. The steam produced by the dousing clearly did not save the ants but possibly prolonged their deaths. This passage encapsulates the stark view of life associated with naturalism and modernism. It bitterly illustrates the futility of effort or intervention in the face of forces too huge to alter or control. The hopes for the future that Frederic and Catherine hold, that all people hold, the good intentions and the effortsall these are useless against the flow of natural forces. A little later Frederic Henry bitterly compares the human predicament first to a game and then to a swarm of ants on a log in a campfire. Both are homely and unbookish metaphors such as would naturally occur to any young American male at a comparable time. Living now seems to be a war-like game, played for keeps, where to be tagged out is to die. Here again, there is a moral implication in the idea of being caught off base trying to steal third, say, when the infield situation and the number of outs make it wiser to stay on second. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. One trouble, of course, is that the player rarely has time enough to learn by long experience; his fatal error may come in the second half of the first inning, which is about as far as Catherine seems likely to go. Even those who survive long enough to learn the rules may be killed through the operation of chance or the accidents of the game. Death may, in short, come gratuitously [being done without apparent reason, cause or justification] without the slightest reference to the rules. It is plainly a gratuitous death which comes to the ants on the burning log in Frederics remembered campfire. Some immediately die in flame, as Catherine is now dying. Others, like Lieutenant Henry, who has survived a trench-mortar explosion, will manage to get away, their bodies permanently scarred, their future course uncertainexcept that they will die in the end. Still others, unharmed, will swarm on the still cool end of the log until the fire at last reaches them. If a Hardyan President of the Immortals [see the note in red below if you want more information about this comment] takes any notice of them, He does little enough for their relief. He is like Frederic Henry pouring water on the burning campfire lognot to save the ants but only to empty a cup. Catherines suffering and death prove nothing except that she should not have become pregnant. But she had to become pregnant in order to find out that becoming pregnant was unwise. Death is a penalty for ignorance of the rules: it is also a fact which has nothing to do with rule or reason. Death is the fire which, in conclusion, burns us all, and it may singe us along the way. Frederic Henrys ruminations simply go to show that if he and Catherine seem star-crossed, it is only because Catherine is biologically double-crossed, Europe is war-crossed, and life is death-crossed.
**This reference is at the close of Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles. A tired and unimpassioned tone suggests the narrators weariness with the ways of the world, as if quite familiar with the fact that life always unfolds in this way. Nothing great is achieved by this finale: the two figures of Liza-Lu and Angel went on at the end, just as life itself will go on. Ignorance rules, rather than understanding: the dUrberville ancestors who cause the tragedy are not even moved from their slumber, blithely unaffected by the agony and death of one of their own line. Tesss tale has not been a climactic unfolding, but a rather humdrum affair that perhaps happens all the time. In this sense, there is great irony in Hardys reference to the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, since we feel tragedy should be more impassioned, like the Prometheus Bound referred to here. Prometheus dared to steal fire from the gods for the benefit of men, thus improving human life, but he was punished by eternal agony sent by the president of the gods. Aeschyluss view of that divine justice was ironicjust as Hardys justice is placed in ironic quotation markssince it seemed deeply unjust to punish Prometheus so severely. Our judgment of Prometheuss crime matters immensely. Yet Tesss suffering, by contrast, seems simply a game or sport, as if nothing important is at stake. It is hard to know whether Tess has brought any benefits to anyone, though Angels life has been changed and Liza-Lu may grow up to be like her sister. In any case, Hardy hints that Tesss life may have a mythical and tragic importance like that of Prometheus, but it is up to us to judge how ironic this justice is, or what her lifes importance might be.

ants metaphor Frederic Henry, facing the death of Catherine Barkley near the end of A Farewell to Arms, remembers a time when he put a log, full of ants, onto a campfire. The ants swarmed over the log, trying to escape. Frederic remembers thinking that he could be a messiah and rescue the ants, but, instead, he throws a cup of water on the log so he can make a fresh drink of whisky and water. He remembers thinking that the

water probably only steamed the ants. He remembers this experience when he realizes that Catherine is going to die, and he begins thinking about fate, that they will always kill you in the end. He compares the they of Catherines fate to his own messiah role with the ants. I enjoyed putting this together on re-establishing my own interpretation of his reverie on the ants. The passage cannot be read in isolation and its juxtaposition with Catherines death must provide a strong indication of its meaning. So, what do you think the ants are all about?

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Comment [9]: This is from the Cliff Notes that I sent you. Interesting to compare the depth and breadth of discussion about this scene to this simple explanation.