This story by Ernest Hemingway is frequently regarded as his best, but I preferred A Farewell to Arms.
From Amazon:
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
…spoilers ahead!
Throughout this novel, we usually follow the thoughts and experiences of American Robert Jordan, who is a member of an international coalition that opposes the fascist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
Robert ends up working with a guerrilla leader named Pablo who has become reluctant to lead forces into something that would endanger himself and his band. Jordan is behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge and needs their help. In the camp, he meets and falls in love with Maria, a girl whose life has been completely destroyed by the Fascists. Her parents were executed and she was brutally raped. Jordan is suddenly revitalized by Maria. He wants to bring her back to his home and marry her when the war is over.
After another band of guerrillas is killed by the fascist soldiers, the leader of Jordan’s guerrilla band, Pablo, tries to sabotage the operation. After witnessing Jordan’s commitment to his mission, Pablo eventually comes around and the bridge is destroyed, but Jordan is maimed and has no choice but to let the others go on while he lies on the ground, determined to take out as many of the fascists as he can before his inevitable death.
This story took about 175 pages to be interesting, at least to me. I’m a fan of Hemingway’s usual style of simple, sparse prose and short, declarative sentences, but this book wasn’t written that way. The descriptions were long. There wasn’t much dialogue and there was a lot more punctuation than usual. There were big blocks of text that I wasn’t expecting. After that, the story picked up, but then something else happened to me.
Unlike in Hemingway’s other stories, after reading about the death of El Sordo – the leader of the other guerrilla band – I suddenly knew how this book was going to end, with Robert Jordan’s death mirroring that of El Sordo. I hate it when this happens to me. Since I turned 19, I’ve suddenly become rather good at predicting how things are going to go – either I know what events are going to take place, or I figure out the twist early, or whatever. And I can’t un-ring the bell. Once I figure it out, there’s no real way to ignore it, and it takes away some of the enjoyment. I can still enjoy that it’s done well, but the lack of surprise takes a bit of the shine off of the whole thing.
That’s what happened here. So once I knew that Robert Jordan was going to die, I had a lot of trouble getting through the story, partly because I knew what would happen and partly because it wasn’t written in the way I was expecting, which I love.
Death was a huge theme in this book. Robert Jordan knows he will not survive blowing up the bridge, seemingly throughout most of the book, and most of the characters contemplate their own deaths. There’s a lot of friendship in the face of death – it builds camaraderie between the characters in the story, knowing that they could all possibly die at any moment. All the men prepare to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
Suicide is also a theme in this novel. Most of the men would prefer the quick death of suicide to being tortured for information if they were captured. Since they’d be executed eventually anyway, they’d prefer to make it quick. Some of the men carry cyanide tablets with them; it might be something else, but I can’t remember what. Robert Jordan also prefers suicide to torture, but he struggles with it, because his father, who he views as a coward, committed suicide. Consequently, he aims to die in his last ambush against the fascists, which will come after he is maimed and unable to travel.
Suicide recurs a lot in Hemingway’s stories. Obviously, Hemingway committed suicide himself in 1961. His father also committed suicide. In fact, it seems like just about everyone in Hemingway’s family committed suicide. At least three other members of his family besides him and his father took their own lives.
Imagery also plays a role in the novel. Automatic weapons – the way they look and particularly the way they sound – take over and are very prominent. Planes that drop bombs are dreaded more than anything else. The best soldier doesn’t win, the one with the biggest guns and best weapons win. It destroys the romantic notion of war – that it’s a sportsman-like competition with honor and rules. Like in A Farewell to Arms, disillusionment becomes a theme. Maria’s parents were heroes, but were brutally executed against the wall of a slaughterhouse along with a lot of other people in front of her, and she was then gang raped. There is no real glory for the soldiers in the field; it only comes in official dispatches that are disconnected from the people on the ground.
There is also frequent imagery of soil and earth. We leave Robert Jordan with his heart beating against his chest on a bed of pine needles, he sleeps with Maria and they feel the Earth move, etc…
There is some negative critical reaction to the novel, stemming out of Hemingway’s use of the Spanish language in the book. I haven’t taken a Spanish class in quite some time, but I did know some of it wasn’t accurate. Wikipedia lists that Hemingway uses archaisms, transliterations, and false friends to convey what’s being said. Because dialogue seems to be a literal translation from the Spanish language into English (that’s the only explanation I can come up with for some of awkward language), the words thee and thou are used to distinguish the formal Spanish (tú is “you” in the familiar Spanish, usted is the formal “you”). Thee/thou is used to convey the usted form. It’s clunky writing.
There’s also swearing in the novel, and while it is used freely in Spanish, it’s translated due to censorship as “obscenity” or “muck.” As Wikipedia reminded me, me cago en la leche occurs throughout the novel, which is translated by Hemingway as “I obscenity in the milk.” By the way, in my internet wanderings learning about this story, I learned that the Wikipedia entry for Spanish profanity is extremely detailed, in case anyone was wondering.
Anyway, in spite of the fact that it could be rather slow and I knew the ending before it happened, and even though I prefer other Hemingway works, I did enjoy For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was a great cultural study of what was going on during the Spanish Civil War (for example, Hemingway, through Jordan, notes that both anarchist and communist factions were both fighting to control the Republican cause implying that this meant it was doomed from the start). I came to love Robert Jordan and experienced real sadness knowing his death was coming. It felt real, and I’d highly recommend it as a moving story about courage, love, and friendship in the face of death.
Finally, for anyone wondering, the title of this story is in reference to a poem by John Donne, an English poet, lawyer, and priest who lived between 1572 and 1631.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.“
words in scarlet ink 