first off I’M SO GLAD TO BE FREE FROM HEMINGWAY. it sucks bc i REALLY enjoyed The Sun Also Rises but this was not it. good lord.
anyway. i don’t have anything that profound to say, but i find it VERY interesting how the novel ends. Henry and Catherine have this sort of nice life together, and then it all comes crashing down when Catherine goes into labour. the baby is already dead and Catherine proceeds to die not long after, leaving Henry alone in the world. it’s a real bleak ending, genuinely. i don’t think that was a fate Catherine deserved.
however.
there’s something to be said about the fact that Hemingway set up this idealistic life for Henry aside from the war and then yanked the rug out from under him. it’s not fully projection of his own life, but Hemingway also imagined an idealistic life with this woman he was in love with. who, funnily, was a nurse who worked on his wounds. in Milan. during the war. and that idealistic life he wanted was taken away when Agnes (the nurse he was in love with) got engaged to someone else and left him.
i dunno, i think looking at how the book ends through the eyes of Hemingway eternally hurting over this lost romance (literally, read how the rest of his marriages go, he was scarred from not being able to pursue a more serious relationship with Agnes) contextualises it a lot. like “of course you would write this ending for your sort of self insert character, why should he get to lead a happy life when you yourself aren’t able to find a way to do so”.
i’m really tired rn so words aren’t working as well as i want them to but basically i just think viewing this as a mirror into what was going on in Hemingway’s own mind is fun
Hemingway is the embodiment of “I didn’t get to be happy so NOBODY gets to be happy” like a five-year-old, except five-year-olds eventually forget why they’re unhappy and go back to playing with blocks.
The Hemingway self-insert is so real, and I am definitely buying into this conspiracy that this ending reflects his own life. Supposedly, Hemingway and the nurse Agnes were in love, but they cut it off when he returned to America. A failed long-distance relationship, if you will. So, now I’m wondering, if he and Agnes did get married, is this what he thought would happen in the end?
Catherine definitely didn’t deserve to die. I actually didn’t know a lot about Hemingway’s background, so this is very interesting to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made that ending because he didn’t get to end up with the nurse that he fell in love with.