Name :Bhatt Riddhiben D.
riddhi28bhatt@gmail.com
Sem :2
Roll No. :15
PG year :2020-2022
PG Enrollment No. :3069206420200004
Paper Name :108 (The American Literature)
Topic Name :The Value of Human Life and Symbolism in For Whom the Bell Tolls
Submitted to :Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English
The Value of Human Life and Symbolism in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
✅Introduction:
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 to 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.
✅Who Was Ernest Hemingway? :
“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms, securing his lasting place in the literary canon.
Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.
Hemingway redefined 20th century literature from the time his pen touched the paper, and his influence is nearly the standard today. From his work at the Kansas City Star, he learned to “Use Short Sentences. Use short paragraphs,” thus putting an emphasis on compression, simplicity, and clarity. Certainly, he used these ideas from that day forth, as he was later quoted in saying, “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them." As illustrated in all of his works, Hemingway tossed aside the 19th century Victorian prose and reshaped it into a clear, clean, and straight-to-the-point prose which focuses on action rather than emotion.
The term “hard-boiled” is often used to describe Hemingway’s writing style, as it means “to be unfeeling, callous, coldhearted, cynical, rough, obdurate, unemotional, without sentiment.” To much of the reader’s amazement however, Hemingway is able to pack an indescribable amount of power, originality, excitement, and even emotion into the concise, action-driven prose. Thus, as only Hemingway himself can tell, it is quite accurate to say that only one-eighth of the iceberg is above the surface. He believes that eliminating the content that is apparent and the meaning that is obvious only strengthens your iceberg. As a result, each reader is able to comprehend Hemingway’s prose as they see fit; for each reader, there can be a completely different meaning altogether. It is this principle which has guided literature in an “ideal fashion” that earned Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."
✅The Value of Human Life in For Whom the Bells Tolls:
Many characters die during the course of the novel, and we see characters repeatedly question what can possibly justify killing another human being. Anselmo and Pablo represent two extremes with regard to this question. Anselmo hates killing people in all circumstances, although he will do so if he must. Pablo, on the other hand, accepts killing as a part of his life and ultimately demonstrates that he is willing to kill his own men just to take their horses. Robert Jordan’s position about killing falls somewhere between Anselmo’s and Pablo’s positions. Although Robert Jordan doesn’t like to think about killing, he has killed many people in the line of duty. His personal struggle with this question ends on a note of compromise. Although war can’t fully absolve him of guilt, and he has “no right to forget any of it,” Robert Jordan knows both that he must kill people as part of his duties in the war, and that dwelling on his guilt during wartime is not productive.
The question of when it is justifiable to kill a person becomes complicated when we read that several characters, including Andrés, Agustín, Rafael, and even Robert Jordan, admit to experiencing a rush of excitement while killing. Hemingway does not take a clear moral stance regarding when it is acceptable to take another person’s life. At times he even implies that killing can be exhilarating, which makes the morality of the war in For Whom the Bell Tolls even murkier.
Even though many of the characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls take a cynical view of human nature and feel fatigued by the war, the novel still holds out hope for romantic love. Even the worldly-wise Pilar, in her memories of Finito, reveals traces of a romantic, idealistic outlook on the world. Robert Jordan and Maria fall in love at first sight, and their love is grand and idealistic. Love endows Robert Jordan’s life with new meaning and gives him new reasons to fight in the wake of the disillusionment he feels for the Republican cause. He believes in love despite the fact that other people—notably Karkov, who subscribes to the “purely materialistic” philosophy fashionable with the Hotel Gaylord set—reject its existence. This new acceptance of ideal, romantic love is one of the most important ways in which Robert Jordan rejects abstract theories in favor of intuition and action over the course of the novel.
The victims of violence in the war are not the only ones to lose their innocence—the perpetrators lose their innocence too. The ruffians in Pablo’s hometown who participate in the massacre of the town Fascists have to face their inner brutality afterward. Anselmo has to suppress his aversion to killing human beings, and Lieutenant Berrendo has to quell his aversion to cutting heads off of corpses.
War even costs the innocence of people who aren’t involved in it directly. War journalists, writers, and we as readers of novels like For Whom the Bell Tolls have to abandon our innocent expectation that wars involve clean moral choices that distinguish us from the enemy. Hemingway shows in the novel that morality is subjective and conditional, and that the sides of right and wrong are almost never clear-cut. With no definite sides of right and wrong in For Whom the Bell Tolls, there is no sense of glorious victory in battle, no sense of triumph or satisfaction that good prevails and evil is defeated.
✅For Whom the Bell Tolls symbolism :
People as Animals, People as Hunters
There are lots of occasions in which a person is compared to a particular animal. Some of them include:
Fox: Pablo
Wolf: Pablo
Pablo calls himself a fox, referring to its caution and its cunning. Anselmo responds: "Yes, it is the principle of the fox when we need the wolf" (1.146). Pablo then responds with "I am more wolf than thee" (1.147). Presumably the relevant qualities of a wolf are its ferocity and fearlessness.
Pig/Swine: Pablo
Robert Jordan's preferred image for Pablo, he uses this one a lot. Usually with a profanity. It captures something about Pablo's unattractive, squinty face, his greed, and also his intelligence (in case you didn't know, pigs are smart…read Animal Farm).
Bull: Pablo
Pilar compares Pablo – the Pablo of days past, that is – to a bull for his "bull force" and "bull courage" (14. 24). Neither of them lasted.
Rabbit: Maria
Maria is Robert Jordan's "rabbit," usually "little rabbit." Any number of explanations is possible. Here are two: 1) A rabbit is cute, gentle, and cuddly, and somewhat defenseless, like Maria. 2) Rabbits mate a lot, like Maria.
Bulldog: Andrés
Andrés earned a reputation for biting bulls on the ear during bullbaiting in his hometown. No further explanation required.
Humans and Animals in General
It probably seems a bit random to list all of these animal comparisons. But a more general theme of the book (it didn't quite fit into the list of themes) is actually the relationship between human beings and animals. At various points somebody gets called "an animal," usually to the detriment of his/her humanity. At base, the idea is, many human beings are pretty solidly governed by their lower instincts – for food, for sex, and, most notably, for killing and blood – rather than more human capacities such as empathy, imagination, thoughtfulness. Most of the particular animal-person comparisons we mentioned also fit the bill.
Such a comparison is not uncommon. But in the extreme situation of war, that animal part of human beings, is given a unique opportunity for unrestrained release, especially the more bloodthirsty side. A couple representative tidbits:
"The gypsy wanted me to kill him last night. The gypsy is an animal." (9.178)
What an animal is a man in rage. (35. 6)
People as Hunters
It's also interesting to note another comparison made between war and hunting. We know that Anselmo and El Sordo, at least, are both enthusiastic hunters, and each compares the killing of war to the hunt at some point. The question is, if human beings are so like animals, how is killing them different than killing animals? To El Sordo, in the height of his bloodlust, it's not; the urge to kill and the pleasure in doing so are the same. As he waits for an enemy to approach, he thinks:
This is ten times better than the aspirin, he thought, and he waited, as happy as only a hunter can be happy. (27.91)
Alternately, in being a hunter, is El Sordo himself really no better than an animal? Anselmo offers a different perspective. While he loves to hunt, he finds that hunting is utterly incomparable to killing in a war, because human beings are not animals, and cannot be killed like them:
To me there is a great difference between the bear and the man and I do not believe the wizardry of the gypsies about the brotherhood with animals. No. I am against killing all men. (3.66)
The man-animal thing in For Whom the Bell Tolls is kind of a big deal. (Hint: Think about John Donne's shtick on human community in the epigraph again.) We could say a lot more about this, but that should be enough food for thought for now. If you're interested, though, explore the Quotes sections – there's some related material in both "Morality and Ethics" and "Warfare."
The Snow
It's kind of weird for it to snow in late May, don't you think? The snow in For Whom the Bell Tolls has a bit of an aura about it. It almost seems supernatural, and if you think that, you might find it interesting that the coming of the snow is first predicted by Pilar, the character that seems to have some kind of supernatural aspects to her, and that, without seeing it, she seems to sense the snow has stopped. When the snow stops, of course, it's bad news for El Sordo, who leaves tracks in it. It then looks for a while as if the mission itself is doomed, and it would have been, if Pablo hadn't shown up at the mission. So there's almost something fated about the snow, too.
Perhaps the snow is meant to show the lack of control human beings actually have, especially in a war situation. Even the best-laid plans are totally at the mercy of circumstance, as both Robert Jordan's mission and Golz's larger attack are. And here "circumstance" = snow. Depending on whether you're Pilar or Robert Jordan, you can either see that circumstance as Fate or as Chance.
One last thing about the snow. Ever go out on a snow day (if you're lucky enough to have snow days where you live) when it's still snowing and notice how snow has a tendency to stop everybody in their tracks and quiet the bustle of everyday busy work? The same thing applies to war: while it's snowing, at least, people stop fighting. Even though it proves disastrous for El Sordo, the snow is a moment of repose in the midst of the action. It's proof that nature goes on regardless of what those nasty little human beings with their guns are doing. Even in the midst of war, there's something deeper which is left unaffected:
In a snowstorm it always seemed, for a time, as if there were no enemies. In a snowstorm the wind would blow a gale; but it blew a white cleanness and the air was full of a driving whiteness and all things were changed and when the wind stopped there would be the stillness. This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it. (14.71)
✅Conclusion:
✅References :
- HEWSON, MARC. “A MATTER OF LOVE OR DEATH: HEMINGWAY'S DEVELOPING PSYCHOSEXUALITY IN ‘FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 36, no. 2, 2004, pp. 170–184. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29533634. Accessed 7 June 2021.
- Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. US: Scribner, 1968. 223
- Zuo, Yue. (2015). Analysis of the Themes and Artistic Features of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Advances in Literary Study. 03. 49-51. 10.4236/als.2015.32008.
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