SOURCE: “Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms Pronominal Shifts and Metaphorical Slippage,” in Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts, State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 66-89.

In the following essay, Stoltzfus presents a complex analysis of the use of language in A Farewell to Arms, with particular reference to the way in which Hemingway's use of metaphor and shifting pronoun references masks the primal story of Frederic's (and the author's) unconscious separation anxiety.

The realization of perfect love is a fruit not of nature but of grace—that is to say, the fruit of an intersubjective agreement imposing its harmony on the divided nature that supports it.

—Jacques Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis”

Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he...