"Destruction and Happiness through Rain and Water-.
From beginning to end, Ernest Hemingway floods his novel A Farewell to Arms with rain and other images of water, using them not only to set the scene but as symbols for both destruction and happiness. The rain seems to always be the messenger of grim news, the omen of destruction and death. Whatever momentary happiness Catherine and Henry are able to grasp is invaded by a rainstorm. However, Hemingway uses other images of water, such as rivers and lakes, to actually indicate joy and life. In this novel, Hemingway offers water to be both a symbol of death and ruin and a bearer of life and happiness, as this whole novel is the fight between love and war.
In the novel, rain serves as a powerful symbol of the inevitable disintegration of any type of pleasure or love in life. Just as rain floods a beautiful day and darkens a blue sky, it turns all that is joyful and even hopeful into a muddy misery. It is the emblem of sterility, the mark of a barren life doomed for destruction. Catherine instills the dismal weather with meaning while she and Henry are lying in bed listening to the storm outside. Catherine admits to Henry, as the rain is falling on the roof, that she has a fear of the rain, as it has a tendency to ruin things for lovers. "It's very hard on loving I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it And sometimes I see you dead it in outside it kept on raining- (Hemingway 126). Although no meteorological phenomenon holds such power, Catherine's fear proves to be prophetic, as doom does eventually greet them. .
As the rain signifies infertility, Catherine's baby is doomed by the showers of rain that soak all of the cheerful portraits of pregnancy and immerse their dreams of a beautiful family life in loss and fatality. As Catherine dresses, Henry notices her body that is beginning to curve with child, but his thoughts are drenched with the pouring rain outside, foreshadowing the baby's inescapable death.
