The
novel opens with World
War I raging all over Europe. A young American student, studying architecture in Italy, offers his services to the Italian army. In Gorizia, he is wounded in the knee and is sent to recuperate in a hospital in Milan. He falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, lives with her, and she becomes pregnant. He returns to the front in Gorizia and is caught in the Italian retreat. In order to save his
life, he deserts his post and goes away to a hospital in Milan to take Catherine and go some place where they can start life anew. They go to Switzerland but cannot live happily, for a fresh
tragedy awaits them. Their eagerly awaited son is stillborn and Catherine who can never have a normal delivery, dies after a Caesarian operation.
The main theme of the novel is that war creates or makes a tragedy of everything. Therein, a person has to bid farewell to everything she cherishes in life. It revolves round the yawning, aching loneliness that exists in the midst of war, which ensures that one cannot even find solace in love. She has to pay a very high
price for wanting love, let alone achieving it, and most often death forms the most natural and suitable price one could pay. Though one has struggled hard, at the end of the reckoning, she is left with nothing.
The
mood of the novel is pessimistic. Tragedy lurks behind every action and, as such, robs it of meaning. Men and women, caught in the war, despair and move to bitterness and cynicism. Throughout the novel, a mood of continuous boredom,
disappointment, and apathy, generated from a sense of inevitability of fate, dominates. The somber mood in the novel, describing the horrors of war, turns tragic, as it details the problems of undergoing a Caesarian section. The mood throughout the novel is one of disappointment, dullness, and pain.