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Finally, the united lovers who regard themselves as a married couple (although they have not been married in a civil ceremony) find their resort when they flee to Switzerland. It is in an environment far away from the war where Henry can dedicate to a relationship and forget about the war: “The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college. But I knew from the papers that they were still fighting in the mountains because the snow would not come”. (291). However, after a difficult escape from the grim masculine world at the front, he is not granted a paradise with Catherine Barkley, which is foreshadowed by the narrator. By depicting a change in nature, Hemingway consciously stresses the lovers’ harmony that is about to change, a harmony that is so ideal that it cannot last for a long time: “The weather became quite warm and it was like spring. We wished we were back in the mountains but the spring weather lasted only a few days and then the cold rawness of the breaking-up of winter came again” (310).

After the death of his child and the only love he has ever had, the hero is left completely alone in the rain (332). Similar to the beginning of the novel, where he marched through rain (4), he has returned to a male-centered world and a nihilistic attitude. With the death of Catherine, Henry is inevitably reborn as an existential hero who has lost everything (Killinger 104). “There isn’t anything […]” (Hemingway 315), Henry tells a dog that is looking for food in the cans, and thus echoes his own fate as a lost man.

Hemingway skillfully depicts the journey of his hero Frederic Henry who breaks away from the front and its male world in order to become a devoted lover in the couple’s resort in Switzerland. Interestingly, the author does not merely separate the two contrasting worlds but provides ambivalent portrayals of male dominance. Although Henry escapes from the front, he does not get rid of various male stereotypes, nor does he