For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway - Term Paper Example

Client Responsibility and the Meaning Behind For Whom the Bell Tolls In Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a variety of themes along with various imagery take a brutal look at the construct of war. Hemmingway defines the difference between the noble thought of war and the ugly reality. He examines the ideas of death and sacrifice, touching on the concept of suicide as he attempts to make a difference between a selfish death by suicide and a sacrificial death of suicide. He uses the imagery of planes to exemplify the mechanical nature of modern war as death is depersonalized when a plane comes in to destroy without seeing the faces of the targets. With great hope, Hemmingway examines the responsibility of the ‘cause’ and how his hero must face his choices and accept his fate. Hemmingway looks at the existential aspect of war and hopes to define a higher purpose by virtue of sacrifice. The book For Whom the Bell Tolls is a personal commentary that foreshadows and reflects the past and future of Hemmingway’s life as it tells a tale of the grizzly side of war and the effects of the bloodshed as it changes and transforms lives. Death is one of the strongest themes within the pages of the novel. Suicide is the uglier side of that theme as the act is examined in conflict as the act of a coward and as the act of a man saving his nation. As Robert contemplates the idea of killing himself 1 Client Last Name before he is captured in order to avoid the inevitable torture for information, he is also in conflict with the suicide that his father committed and his feeling that this type of death symbolizes a cowards way out of life. However, the covert operation of blowing the bridge is a suicide mission that he commits to undertake, therefore he has already accepted his death without the hesitation of contemplating that to walk into a situation that will result in death is an act of suicide. The essence of the war is a continuation of the theme of death. Death is all around the characters in a macrocosm of the personal struggles they face as their own lives are constantly at risk. Each character contemplates their end throughout the novel and searches for meaning as the war creates terrible suffering that they must endure for their cause. As the issue of suicide blends in with the issue of death, the consideration of the identity within a construct that requires sacrificing one’s own life becomes a strong motivator for the plot as the end draws to a close with the acknowledged and impending death of Robert. The creation of the war by the novelist creates a personification that simplifies the war to the experiences that are beyond the political world and defined by the men who live the moments. As the war is described by words that elicit familiar scenes in literary versions of the experiences, the deathly environment is personalized and the politics are minimalized. The death of the central figure, with which such novels often end, the futility of the war, the confusion and pointlessness of the small-scale events described are all details of the revision of warfare, itself brought 2 Client Last Name about by the machine gun, the trench, the drawn out slaughters of the American Civil War and World War I. The natural world of rain and mud is the inevitable image of the slow wearing away of morale, the confusion and inability to move, let alone conquer, that is the standard narrative description of the new mass warfare of the conscripted masses. (Fisher) As the plot is revealed and its relevance to the war created, the experience of the men and women whose lives are at risk diminish the importance of the work they are doing by the compassion that is created for their fate. While their sacrifices remain laudable, the reader experiences the desire to remove them from harms way. The microcosmic look of war, without the ramifications of the cause of war creates a thematic harmony with the contemplations of death as the characters move forward to their respective fates. This contemplation of death and the attached them of suicide create a terrible foreshadow to the life of Ernest Hemmingway. The opinion of Robert that the suicidal death of his father was a cowardly act is a possible reflection of the way in which Hemmingway viewed the suicide of his own father. According to biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, in her book A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemmingway, Hemmingway “obscured his mother’s talents and personality by professing to hate her and to hold her responsible for his father’s 1928 suicide.” (pg 19) The insinuation that the blame of suicide lies with the one who commits the act is a powerful concept that impacts the past and future of Hemmingway himself. Hemmingway commits his own suicide in 1961, twenty years after writing this novel. Hemmingway uses imagery to create the horrors of war by the machinations of the modern war and the heavy, dense infusion of violence and death that is oppressive and 3 Client Last Name ominous. The strongest image in For Whom the Bell Tolls is the image of the machinery of war. The use of such imagery works to disassemble the romantic notions of war and to create a fear of combat. Heroism is not a truth, but is exemplified by the butchery that is the fleshy truth of war. The image of the dreaded machine is exampled most by the approach of the planes as they fill everyone with a sense of ominous loss. Their appearance is described as “"They move like mechanized doom"(Hemmingway), reinforcing the mechanical imagery that represents the horror of war. War becomes the effort of having the biggest gun, not the best cause or the most powerful sense of right. There is an aspect of the mystical that makes an appearance in the novel. Pilar is able to read palms and do other forms of psychic revelation. Robert Jordan is doubtful and when he confronts Pilar with this she says, “Because thou re a miracle of deafness… It is not that thou are stupid. Thou are simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist“ (Hemmingway). This idea that there are things that are emitting a sound but cannot be heard relates to the them of death within the book. The mystical quality of death in contrast to the violent, fleshy ideas of how death is accomplished, brings a sense of wonder to the small glimmer of hope that an after-life might bring to a world that is mad with a terror that cannot be silenced. The character of Pilar represents that of dying hope. She has some age on her, is described as being “a middle-aged gypsy woman, ugly and intelligent, who reads Jordan’s fate in his face and in his palm” (Wagner-Martin) Her purpose is a struggle that is at the 4 Client Last Name heart of the novel. “It is also Pilar’s attempt to remain connected to life and purpose at a time when her own lover, the band’s drunken leader, Pablo, has nearly given up the battle against the fascists for a life of relative ease, drinking wine and cherishing the horses he has stolen from them.” (Wagner-Martin) This vital need for connection is relevant to the need for all of the players to be connected to the importance of the cause. Without that connection, it is difficult to define the purpose for the act of war. The theme of responsibility is ever present throughout the novel. “Therefore, side by side with political involvement, there always existed a tendency by intellectuals, and a pressure by intellectual communities, to remain in the ivory tower.” (Keren, Sylvan) As the characters of the novel take on the responsibility thrust upon them by war, they do not theorize on there sense of duty to their cause. The characters act upon what must be done to accomplish their goals, despite the horror that accompanies their participation in the war. The acceptance of their fate in order to further their cause is a sense of responsibility that pervades the story and imbues the non-heroic destruction with a heroic acceptance of eventuality. When Jordan brings the mission to the guerrilla fighters that he is to blow up the bridge, it is obvious that Jordan will not be coming back from that mission. He accepts the responsibility of it despite its portents and acknowledges the responsibility that will accompany the mission. This sense of responsibility is challenged in the guerrilla camp. The Republican leader, Pablo, is not interested in his mission. He is hesitant to commit his resources to such a covert operation and resists the idea of accomplishing this goal. 5 Client Last Name Robert’s resolve is further tested as he meets and falls in love with Maria, through whom he re-discovers a joy for life. As he experiences the resistance of Pablo and the love for Maria, he experiences a sense of regret and questions his purpose within the tragedy that is the war. Through the recognition of what Maria has suffered, he sees the cruel senselessness that overwhelms the purpose and his point of view wavers under the harsh reality of the consequences of the fight. As this begins to blend with the theme of the machinations of the war, an idea that the real lesson is a return to the humanity that is being lost within the confines of a war that is not fought face to face. "We must teach them. We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity" (Hemmingway). The details of the war become lost in the suffering and the existential questions become relevant within the hope of the characters. Much of the novel can be seen as a personal commentary for Hemmingway. His view of Jordan is critically positive. “It is really a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s ideal man: heroic, graceful in the face of death, enduring, macho, and, more than any of the other characteristics, a rugged individual.” (Fisher). Hemmingway takes the opportunity to comment personally on war after having to work journalistically. His aims are very personal in that he can comment on what he sees as a poor representation of the truth of war when a nobility and grace is granted without the apparition of the horrors that affect the lives of those who live them. This sense of existentialism that defines much of the action within the novel is a 6 Client Last Name pervasive theme that keeps a rolling sense of motion. What must be done is done because to not do so would be to make life not worth living. Existentialism can be defined by: The sense that we define ourselves by our actions more than our inner essence, that the rules or code by which we live have meaning, that an individual has the power to shape and define their reality even when faced with the harshest of circumstances, and that it is far more important to be noble in actions than it is to be noble in the heart or soul. A core assumption here is that there is no “higher meaning” to life and so how we live our lives becomes the definition of its meaning. (Themes in Hemmingway) In this way, Hemmingway is commenting on the nature of heroism. In a search for a higher meaning in life he appears to come up short and so therefore assigns the idea the a heroic act is the higher meaning and is done simply because without it life has abandoned meaning. The novel is a literary work of art that is critically accepted as one of Hemmingway‘s finest works. “For Whom the Bell Tolls is held together by the rigid economy of the form and the tightly interlocking relationship of events occurring over a period of a few days.” (Trogdon) The narrative is done in the third person limited omniscient with liberal periods of Robert Jordan’s viewpoint taking precedence in the form of relaying his thoughts. In a departure from his normal method of staying focused on the protagonist through to the end of the novel, Hemmingway takes an approach that split’s the action of the plot into two as it focuses on both the preparations for the impending attack and on the journey that Andres must make to get a message across enemy lines. In that the novel is an opportunity for Hemmingway to express his views about the 7 Client Last Name Spanish Civil War, there is a surprising section that relates the experience of a couple Franco’s men. By using their experiences, Hemmingway is able to express the futility of war as it is equally an exercise in the ridiculous as both sides are forced to commit atrocious acts over issues that are not particularly personal to most of the soldiers. In a surprising move, the two soldiers are presented in a compassionate light and the reader is given a larger view from the more focused view that has been represented by the Republican guerrillas. Another way in which Hemmingway is able to make a personal expression is in his love for Spain and how he uses the women of the story to express the beauty that he feels expresses the essence of the country. “Personified this time in the women of the novel, both Pilar and Maria, the spirit of the sensual Spanish stoicism flowered to give him what was perhaps his best realized book.” (Wagner- Martin). However, the characters of the women are not very developed. There is a sense that Maria is an object without depth of experience. Although her history is brutal, having been raped by the fascist enemy, her head shaved to humiliate her and her parents killed, she doesn’t seem to have been affected to a great degree by these horrible experiences and is sexually expressive in her pursuit of Robert. She is devoted to Robert, without any shadow of her violent attack haunting their relationship which is typical of Hemmingway’s writing and his view of women. His work rarely reaches a depth in character for the women he writes about and he tends to create them in idealized terms. One of the most controversial issues that surrounds the novel is built upon the 8 Client Last Name creative license used in writing about actual events. There are substantial claims that Hemmingway did not report the facts of the events in a true manner. “These indictments belong to the species of normative, empiricist, criticism that seeks to impose an extra-aesthetic model or standard of property which claims that its access to an empirical ’real’ can judge whether the work is adequate to what it reflects.” (San Juan) However, if there was some distortion of the facts, the point of the work was to relay the emotional content of the time. It is the object of the story, not to tell a historically accurate tale, but to relay how the events and the fallout from the events effected the participants. It is not how, when, and where the battle took place, but it is concentrated on who. The fictional ’who’ of the story reflect the actual experiences that Hemmingway had in the war. His emotional content became the content of the novel. What the text performs is a transformative labor on an ensemble of representations, images, tonalities, so that by generating a formed, sensuous concreteness, ‘structures of feeling’, which distance and foreground their own constituents, the text would be able to reveal the complex relations of various ideologies so their grounding in history (interlocked modes of production, conjunctions of stratified social formations) which is their condition of possibility. (San Juan) The way in which the emotional impact of war is expressed is more important than the historical accuracy as Hemmingway seeks to write a story that is a snapshot of a story that has a long truth behind a development of sympathetic content. The development of the story For Whom the Bell Tolls allowed Hemmingway to express opinions and emotions that had been suppressed during his time as a journalist. 9 Client’s Last Name It is his search for meaning behind the specter of war that drives the story of the journey of Robert Jordan. His story is filled with heroism that is tainted by existentialist truths, and with questions that evoke the conflict between fighting for a cause and fighting for existence. His journey explores the real meaning behind the horrors of war and how the cruelty of man can ever be justified by the concept of a righteous cause. It is the hope that a cause is righteous that survives the meaningless loss that must be endured. However, this is put into question as Hemmingway explores the meaning of love when fate will separate that love. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a critically acclaimed piece of literature that explores the meaning of death and suicide, love and life, and of the costs war and peace. As the reader is taken through the story, the issues of life that are most relevant to all human existence take on a natural conflict that must be ultimately heroically resolved. While the historical accuracy might not be pure, the intent to relay the emotional impact of a war-torn country is achieved with great success. The meaning behind the novel is that each individual must fight a battle to maintain a life that has truth - even when that truth requires a sacrifice. 10 Client’s Last Name Works Cited Fisher, Phillip. Hard Facts: Setting the Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Hemmingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Tandem Libraries, 1968. Keren, Michael and Sylvan, Donald A. International Intervention: Sovereignty Versus Responsibility. London: Frank Cass and Co., 2002. 12 December 2008. San Juan, Epifanio. Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. 15 December 2008. “Themes in Hemingways Fictional Work”. 21 July 2008. Books-Swik. 15 December 2008. Trogdon, Robert W. Ernest Hemmingway: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1975. 14 December 2008. Wagner-Martin, Linda. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemmingway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 15 December 2008 11 Read More