her child. Hemingway was probably very confused about religion and sin and somehow felt or feared that people would or should be punished for enjoying life's pleasures. Probably, the strongest reason for writing about Catherine Barkley's death and the death of her child was Hemingway's belief that death comes to everyone; it was inevitable. Death ends life before you have a chance to learn and live. He writes, in A Farewell to Arms, "They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. ... they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." Hemingway, even in high school, wrote stories which showed that people should expect the unexpected. His stories offended and angered the principal of his school. I think that Hemingway liked shocking and annoying people; he was certainly rebellious. If he would have written an ending where Miss Barkley and her child had lived, it would have been too easy and common; Hemingway was certainly not like everyone else, and he seemed to be proud of that fact. Even the fact that Hemingway wrote curses and had a lot of sex in his books shows that he liked to shock people. When his publisher asked that he change some words and make his books more acceptable to people, Hemingway refused, then was forced to compromise. I think that the major difference between Hemingway and Henry was that Henry was a likable and normal person while Hemingway was strange and very difficult. Hemingway liked doing things his way and either people had to accept him the way he was or too bad for them. I think that Hemingway probably did not even like himself and that was one reason that he couldn't really like other people. Hemingway seemed to use people only for his own pleasure, and maybe he wanted to think that he was like Henry who was a nicer person. In the book, Twentieth Century Interpretations of ...
