I have not, unfortunately, read widely in literature, let alone the classics. It is something I wish I did more. I read Goethe's Faust a year ago and thought that was very good, but my literary scope has been pretty much limited to the Harry Potter series over the past couple years, though I am only on Book 5. I did try to get through Love in the Time of Cholera, but I only got half way. I went on the word of a friend and picked up one of Hemingway's.
I don't know if Farewell to Arms is even considered a "classic." My American Literature class in college may have touched on him a bit, but most likely not. The book is probably too provocative for the school. If it did, I was probably not paying attention because my American Lit. professor was especially boring. Any way, I have never felt so involved in the world of fictional characters. I love Harry Potter and I feel like I get pretty involved, but I have yet to experience the powerful emotion I felt after reading the last sentence of Farewell to Arms, "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." My immediate thought after reading the words "THE END" was, "I hate you, Hemingway. I hate you." I immediately texted my friend who recommended the book and wrote, "I hate Hemingway. I hate him. To hades with his rotten soul."
How could you not hate a man who writes this depressingly blunt portrait of reality: "Poor little kid. I wished the hell I'd been choked like that. No I didn't. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." It kind of reminded me of Donnie Darco said, something like, "in the end everyone dies alone."
Hemingway died alone. He killed himself, I think. I don't want to die alone, but I am alone. If I died today, I would die alone.
*Artwork from HERE