In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Fredrick Henry portrays an ambulance driver for the Italian army during World War 1. Throughout the novel, Henry has problems and situations where he assumes he can just run away and escape reality. In A Farewell to Arms, Henry and Catherine use distractions in their environment to escape the horrors of reality. Fredrick Henry often times uses alcohol as a way to avoid or run away from his problems in which he should face head on. He drinks a lot of alcohol because while drinking, alcohol can make you forget what happens, temporarily. Reality will strike back again and your problems are still here. Miss Van Campen says, "Those are all brandy bottles, aren't they? I can't see them all, I said...I have had Italian …show more content…
Fredrick uses Catherine and her love as a way to distract him from his real problems. Henry doesn't actually love her. Henry says, "I did not care what I was getting into... 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" (30). Henry explicitly says he doesn't love Catherine and doesn't feel the same way about love as Catherine. Henry uses their "love" as an attempted escape from the horrors of reality. When in bed with Catherine, Henry compares her hair as tent. "I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed very still...I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls"(114). Henry uses Catherine's hair as a metaphoric tent to shield himself from his surroundings. This is how Henry uses Catherine as a mask to hide from his fears of