Hello Beautiful People,
I am Riddhi Bhatt. And today I am coming with something interesting .You know...what is our today's blog ? This thinking activity task is For Whom the Bell Tolls is assigned by Our Prof. Heenaba Zala at English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called . So, let’s start friends.But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…
In this blog I am going to write about two novels by Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations.In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).
Use of Narrative Technique in Hemingway’s Novel :
For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous”
For Hemingway, point of view is important. ‘For Whom Bell Tolls’ presents the narrative through an omniscient point of view that continually shifts back and forth between the characters. In this way, Hemingway can effectively chronicle the effect of the war on the men and women involved.The narrator shifts from Anselmo’s struggles in the snow during his watch to Pilar’s story about Pablo’s execution of Fascists and El Sordo’s lonely death to help readers more clearly visualize their experiences. Against the backdrop of the group’s attempt to blow up the bridge, each character tells his or her story: Maria tells of her parents’ murder and her rape; Jordan shares what he learned about the true politics of war at Gaylord’s in Madrid.
A Farewell to Arms:
A Farewell to Arms is not a complicated book. Rather, it is a simple story well told.Ernest Hemingway conveyed this story chronologically, in a strictly linear fashion, with no flashback scenes whatsoever. In fact, the novel contains very little exposition at all. We never learn exactly where its narrator and protagonist, the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry, came from, or why he enlisted in the Italian army to begin with. (For that matter, we read chapter after chapter before even learning his name.) Nor do we discover much about his lover Catherine Barkley's past, other than the fact that her fiancé was killed in battle, in France.
Actually, it is the very combination of love and war that makes this book so potent and memorable. Regarding the woman he loves, the hero of Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls tells himself "You had better love her very hard, and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and continuity." Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms could say the same thing of his affair with Catherine Barkley. Because they meet in a time and place in which every day could be their last together, Frederic and Catherine must wring every drop of intimacy and passion from their relationship. (Notice how soon Catherine begins to speak of love, and how soon — especially considering the conservative mores of the time in which the book is set — they sleep together.) The result is an affair — and a story — almost unbearable in its intensity.
Use of Language in Hemingway’s Novel :
For Whom the Bell Tolls:
The prose style and dialogue in Hemingway's novel have been the source of controversy and some negative critical reaction.Thus, Hemingway uses "thou", archaic in English, to communicate the important difference in Spanish between the "familiar" pronoun "tú" and the "formal" "usted".Additionally, much of the dialogue in the novel is an implied direct translation from Spanish, producing an often strained English equivalent.n another odd stylistic variance, Hemingway referred to foul language (used with some frequency by different characters in the novel) with "unprintable" and "obscenity" and substitutes "muck" for fuck in the dialogue and thoughts of the characters although foul language is used freely in Spanish.
A Farewell to Arms:
The characters in A Farewell to Arms struggle for understanding through effective communication, and we struggle right along with them. The novel shows that in times of war this struggle is intensified. Effective communication can mean the difference between life and death on the battlefield. Pages and pages of stunning dialogue bring communication down to a very personal level. And, because it’s Hemingway, what’s not spoken or directly communicated is as important as what we are directly told. This Modernist classic, and Hemingway’s style in general, continues to influence literary, journalistic, and even personal modes of communication.
For Whom the Bell Tolls:
1)Speech and Dialogue
"That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?" (3: 127) Thanks for that, Agustín – can we even call that a sentence? There are several potty-mouths in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a lot of interesting cusses, though Hemingway never writes them out: he always replaces them with "obscenity" or "unnameable" or whatnot (a few times, he does let very foul words in untranslated Spanish).
Robert Jordan swears also contrasts him with his more exuberantly obscene Spanish friends. Love of cursing in general is meant to be characteristically Spanish.Hemingway also lends that "Spanish-ness" to his characters' language by using really awkward straight translations into English: lots of thee's and thou's, and words which mean something different in normal English than Spanish (for example, "molest," which means bother in Spanish and is a much more everyday word).
2)Actions
The actions of characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls reveal a lot about them. As it's a war novel, the most common traits revealed by action are bravery and brutality: Pilar's bravery is evident from her standing up to Pablo and willingness to go ahead with the mission, as well as her military performance, while Pablo's brutality is shockingly clear from her story about the fascist massacre in their town. Resolve is another big one: Anselmo's the guy who stays put in the snowstorm, even when it gets really bad, because he doesn't want to disobey Robert Jordan. If you want courtesy, think of El Sordo's bringing a bottle of whiskey specially for Robert Jordan from La Granja, this in the middle of a war.
3)Direct Characterization
Anselmo, on the other hand, is always a "very good man" (at one point even the narrator just straight up says it), and El Sordo's a courageous, trustworthy, and all around capital guy. By the end of the second chapter, we know from other characters that Pilar is brave, barbarous, and at times very gentle. About Robert Jordan himself, the narrator does give us some important direct descriptions, telling us right at the outset, for example, that he doesn't really value his own life and that his devotion to his cause is strong.Through Robert Jordan's reactions and the commentary of other members of the band about each other, we get plenty of direct information. Robert Jordan thinks Pablo is a bad egg the moment he sees him, and tells us so, and every other character basically says the same.
4)Physical Appearance
Physical appearances often give us an immediate clue to "what lies beneath" in this book. When we meet Pablo, for example, we learn from the description that he's grizzled, scarred, a bit oddly shaped, with close-set narrow eyes, and has a somewhat hostile look on his face. A shady, unpleasant character.
A Farewell to Arms:
Critics usually describe Hemingway’s style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words; they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer’s punches–combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. Take the following passage: We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on somebody’s staff? No. He was. It was all balls.
The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway’s and his haracters’–beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can’t be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like “patriotism,” so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete, the tangible: “hot red wine with spices, cold air that numbs your nose. ” A simple “good” becomes higher praise than another writer’s string of decorative adjectives
Point of View of Hemingway’s Novel:
For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Our narrator in For Whom the Bell Tolls is like a little beastie which can dwell in anybody's head, but only one person at a time. The vast majority (and we mean vast majority) of the time, our perspective is that of the central character, Robert Jordan. We get to know him much better than we do any of the others, most of whom we learn about when they tell their stories to him. This frame of reference means that most of what happens in the book is seen through the eyes of an outsider who's trying to be on the inside: an American enchanted with Spain who's fighting for the Spanish Republicans, and an operative trying to integrate himself into a group of people he's just met, but must build trust with quickly.
Finally, the narration is "limited omniscient" – at some intervals, we get to go inside other character's heads too: Anselmo, Pilar, Maria, Andrés, El Sordo, Karkov, even Comrade Marty's (an interesting place). That gives us a little more perspective, and variety, than we would have if we were stuck in Roberto's cranium all the time.
A Farewell to Arms:
On the surface, Frederic Henry is the quintessential unreliable narrator. He’s always boozing, he’s going through severe trauma, and he admits to lying to other characters in the novel, while at the same time supposedly telling us how he really feels. Does Shmoop believe him? Yes and no, as we discuss in his "Character Analysis." Each reader is called upon to assess Frederic’s reliability, and each reader will respond differently. Still, there a couple of key aspects of Frederic Henry’s narrative voice that can take us a long way in analyzing his reliability, and in discovering what makes this novel tick.
So…what is it? It’s a memory, and a memorial to Catherine, the baby, and all the others dead he talks about. It can also be thought of as confession. Why do you think Frederic is always trying to get the priest to come up to his room and talk? Because he respects him and likes him, of course, and because he wants to ask him questions. But, he also wants to confess. Frederic doesn’t directly say he feels guilty about things, but his desire to talk to the priest is symbolic of confession.
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