Objects on a Table: Anxiety and Still Life in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

In A Farewell to Arms, informed by his study of modern painting, Hemingway creates a highly-coded visual text where objects frequently speak volumes. Hemingway's repeated focus on objects, especially in certain passages framed as still-life compositions, performs as a strategy for revealing characters' hidden desires, motivations, and anxieties. Specifically, Hemingway uses an array of still-life structures as a distancing strategy that allows the narrator, Frederic Henry, to both mask and reveal his emotional turmoil surrounding the death of Catherine Barkley. At the novel's conclusion, she becomes the narrative's most treasured "object on a table."