>kills 2 men who tried to desert because he's an officer
>deserts himself shortly after
???
>kills 2 men who tried to desert because he's an officer. >deserts himself shortly after
>kills 2 men who tried to desert because he's an officer
>deserts himself shortly after
???
It's part of being macho. Like torturing unarmed prisoners. You wouldn't understand.
I really think that it's about a dude that is in so much denial about being totally in himself that doesn't even understand he's doing wrong shit and at the end he collects the bad karma
>I LARP being an officer for the Italian army just to frick the girls in the brothels and the anglo nurses
>oh I got the knee a bit fricked up by a mortar I'm such a hero and I am cured in a nice hospital in Milan and I managed to bring the anglo nurse along so I frick her every night
>spends rich grandpa's money living the good life
>I go back into the shit yay and I shoot two men bc they weren't acknowledging my officer status bc I'm not even Italian
>geee the Carabinieri are a bit rough they will surely execute me it's better stop LARPing I'm outta here tehee frick off Italy
>NOOOOOO WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO ME NOW I'VE BEEN SUCH A GOOD BOIIIII
I don't think you get just how fricking addled the guy is. The whole book is examples of compartmentalizing information so you don't have to deal with it. The guys who are deserting could be useful to him and HE doesn't believe all is lost yet, and it's also his right as an officer to kill them for it. Then as soon as he believes it's over, he deserts too. There's no question of whether or not it was ok to kill those guys or regret because now isn't the time for that. Hopefully it never will be.
The central romantic relationship is two people who are in complete denial about themselves and each other because dealing with their real feelings would be too hard. cat isn't ready to rethink her life after her boyfriend dies so she totally collapses her entire personality and puts it away so she can cope and indefinitely avoid her own feelings by caring for someone elses. In a way it's genuinely brave, but she's doing it selfishly to avoid something, not because she's a hero. Fred absolutely knows she's faking but it's inconvenient to see, so he completely ignores that too. Everything inconvenient goes away because the wartime onslaught of triage situations taught everyone to completely ignore shit that doesn't need to be dealt with right now. And it leaves them all as empty degraded husks to whom anything that exists can be completely disregarded but still nothing can be replaced.
Plus this event forces the comparison between him and the types of people he's evading later on for the reader.
I think you've misread Fred as a narrator. He's not looking for pity, even though of course it might look that way. The guy's just reporting things as he sees them. The fact that his material position for most of the book is relatively enviable AND that it's wasted on him because he's in a colorless world of amoral automatic survival is the point. I also don't see the angle where karma exists in this world, seems like kind of the whole point is that the war was one big pointless, inconsistent tragedy where noble men and shitheels died side by side for nothing and some cowards got caught running and others didn't and it was all down to luck. If anything, Cat dying giving birth to a dead kid was an allegory for how the war wound up destroying a generation and trust in all their institutions and also failed to produce anything for their trouble. And in order to deal with this Fred again decides not to deal with it at all and move on to the next pointless immediate distraction.
I like how you write anon :3
On a more serious note it's all vey interesting and correct, but I can oversee a narcissistic trait in Fred that obviously reflects the narcissistic trait of Hemingway.
Surely it's narcissism implanted on a very sensible and intelligent man, maybe with noble aspirations even, but still.
Fred has basically no valid motive for having joined the war: he's american, it's not his war. The book doesn't shed light on this. Probably it's just a desire for adventure. A bit vapid I'd say.
To put it bluntly it's a bit of "muh fire, blood, steel and pussy" that leaves a sour taste in the mouth the morning after.
This is much more clear for whom the bell tolls. Hemingway atleast partly joined the war efforts in Spain for self-validation, he seems to realize this himself. I don't think even he's a dumb enough macho guy to risk his life without real support for the cause though.
Well surely he was capable of introspection and to a degree was aware of that. I don't think a dumb macho could become a great writer after all.
I agree, i find Hemingways books to be very introspective, a lot of them negatively directed at himself and his macho persona. Sadly though a lot of people, especially here, dismiss Hemingway completely
I like him too anon :3
I don't disagree, but I also don't think it's just him. It seems to be the spirit of the time, and the exact attitude that A) led to the war, and B) led to its being such a crushing, identity-destroying experience for so many people. Somehow everyone had come to believe they alone were Gods Chosen Country and they'd all get medals and fairy tale endings for demonstrating their unique "vital spirit" (which of course was dead in every other degenerate culture on the continent).
It was a profoundly disgusting era, but there's still room to feel compassion for all the poor idiots who were groomed into porcelain soldiers (or princesses) and then just pointlessly smashed in their millions by incompetent, careless handlers, and ruthless engineering.
yeah makes sense
If Hemingway was so macho why was he afraid to write the word bl*wjob?
He wasn’t, the publishers censored him constantly. The copies you get today are just reproductions of the books at the time they were originally put out so they remain censored.
>torturing unarmed prisoners
so first he cut their arms of and then he taunted them about it in the title of his book? Hemingway was a real swine
there's a difference between killing someone for deserting and deserting because you're about to be summarily executed. I suspect you're being moronic on purpose
what if the original deserters though they would have been summarily executed?
Hey misunderstood what just desserts meant