SOURCE: Berman, Ronald. “Hemingway's Questions.” In Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and The Twenties, pp. 132-48. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Berman considers Hemingway's interest in and relationship to religion and philosophy, with particular attention to his novel A Farewell to Arms.

Throughout Hemingway's work is the evidence of his interest in both religious and secular dogma. “Soldier's Home” is about the social gospel of the early twenties; The Sun Also Rises deals not only with Catholicism but also with Robert Cohn's vague and wistful philosophy of self-change; A Farewell to Arms begins with the advice of a priest to Frederic Henry on the good life and ends with the denial of existential meanings. A Farewell to Arms may be said to debate the conflicted nature of things, raising questions that do not have answers.

By 1929, a matrix had been constructed for such questions. Bertrand Russell...