I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge, you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.
This passage stuck with me. Through most of the novel, I wondered if Frederic and Catherine really loved each other—or, at least, whether each loved the other at the same time. I thought that maybe they were lonely and scared and just wanted to love and comfort someone. She seemed to doubt his sincerity, and he seemed to be either keeping his distance or trying to persuade himself she was something more than she was. Then, by the end, their love—which of course is borne of loneliness and fear—becomes painfully real.
Catherine may be crazy, but she is a great and complicated character. She knew all along that their relationship was doomed.
I held her close against me and could feel her heart beating and her lips opened and her head went back against my hand and then she was crying on my shoulder.
"Oh, darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying. "You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."
And one of my favorite Hemingway passages is this exchange between Catherine and Frederic:
"We won't fight."
"We mustn't. Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us."
"They won't get us," I said. "Because you're too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave."
"They die of course."
"But only once."
"I don't know. Who said that?"
"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?"
"Of course. Who said it?"
"I don't know."
"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."
Note: A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929.
