The Devil in Farewell to Arms and The Outsider In the past, we knew that literature spoke about life and that criticism concerned fiction - and everything was simple. We now know that fiction is about other fictions, that it is in fact a critique or a metaphor. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of something actually being about life, or even fiction, or anything at all. Criticism has taken away from us the very idea of ​​“proposal”. He taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it concerns everything it concerns itself. One of the fascinations of reading literature comes when we discover previously overlooked patterns in a work. We are pattern finders who deeply value discovering patterns in a text. And true to our calling, we noticed a pattern in and around A Farewell to Arms that, to our knowledge, no one has seen before. Although there are many editions of the novel and therefore the pagination is slightly different between editions, it is true that all editions have forty-one chapters spread across five books. Here's what we found out: if you multiply 41 by 5, you get 205. And now if you take the number of letters in Frédéric's name (8) and add it to the number of letters in Catherine's name ( 9), you get 17. 205 + 17 = 222. And if we assume that the duration of the events of the novel, counted correctly, is three years, then the pattern we discovered begins to emerge in the form of a figure on ground or lemon juice ink on a secret message when held over a candle. For what is the product of 222 and 3 if not the infamous 666 of Revelation 13:18? Now imagine our delight when we discovered a similar Model 666 in The Outsider. If you multiply the number of letters in Meursault's name by the number of letters in "Albert" by the number of letters in "Arabic", you get 216. Add to that the 6 in "Albert" and multiply by 3 (which is the number we obtain by dividing the number of chapters of the first part (6) by the number of books (2) that make up The Outsider) and surprise of surprises: the revealing meaning of the number “666” emerges once again.!