The Devil in Farewell to Arms and The Outsider Once we knew that literature was about life and criticism was about fiction–and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metaphor. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being about life, really, or even about fiction, or finally about anything. Criticism has taken the very idea of “aboutness” away from us. It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it is about anything it is about itself.
One of the fascinations of reading literature comes when we discover in a work patterns that have heretofore been overlooked. We are the pattern finders who get deep enjoyment from the discovery of patterns in a text. And true to the calling we have noticed a pattern in and around A Farewell to Arms which, to our knowledge, no one has seen before. Although there are many editions of the novel, and as a result the pagination is slightly different in various editions, it is the case that all editions have forty-one chapters to be found in five books.
Here is what we have discovered: if you multiply 41 by 5 you get 205. And now if you take the number of letters in Frederic’s name (8) and add that to the number of letters in Catherine’s name (9) you get 17. 205 + 17 = 222. And if you grant that the time of the events in the novel, counted properly, is three years, then the pattern we have discovered starts to emerge as figure on ground or as lemon juice ink on a secret message when held over a candle. For what is the product of 222 and 3 but the infamous 666 of Revelations 13:18?
Imagine now our delight when we discovered a similar 666 pattern in The Outsider. If you multiply the number of letters in Meursault’s name times the number of letters in `Albert’ times the number of letters in `Arab’ you get 216. Add to that the 6 of `Albert’ and multiply by 3 (which is the number one gets when dividing the number of chapters in Part one (6) by the number of books (2) that make up The Outsider) and surprise of surprises: the meaning revealing number `666′ once again emerges!
Clearly, when seen in this light, these two novels take on new meaning, and this pattern discovery provides a conclusive way to counter all earlier critics who have failed to see this talisman of interpretation, this key to understanding the complexities of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Camus’s The Outsider. `666′ offers a key to understanding in that it clearly refers us back to the text which these texts are “playing” with and are in some way about, if “aboutness” is a viable concept and if they are about anything at all.
