It was a fact of pre- and early-modern warfare that fighting became impossible when it snowed. To these men, civilization and sex are one and the same, but the priest is offering the narrator a different, more spiritual, way of living. 'Let him go to centres of culture and civilization.' Another officer then offers the addresses of whorehouses in Naples. The officers scoff at this suggestion: 'He doesn't want to see peasants,' one says. The two dynamics intersect when the priest invites the narrator to visit his mountain hometown while on leave. In this chapter, the writer introduces another dichotomy paralleling that of the mountains versus the plains: the church and the brothel. The Italian officers recommend that the narrator spend his forthcoming leave in a variety of low-lying Italian towns and cities, while the priest suggests he travel to the mountains. During dinner in the officers' mess, on the night of winter's first snowfall, the narrator's fellow officers taunt the priest, their chaplain - though, significantly, the narrator himself does not join in the baiting. Now Hemingway begins to introduce his cast of characters. Allied with Britain, France, and Russia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, Italy is responsible for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting the Germans in their fight against Britain and France on the war's western front, and Russia in the east. Weather Symbolism in A Farewell to ArmsĪ year passes, one in which there were 'many victories.' As a result, the side of the narrator (still identified only as 'we') advances across a river and occupies a captured enemy town, Gorizia.Įvidently it is World War I, and the action in this chapter takes place in the Alps around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia.

A farewell to arms book cover