Reflections On Reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

 I have not read nearly enough of the works of Ernest Hemingway over the years and I have made an attempt lately to correct that mistake.  I began by rereading "The Nick Adams Stories" recently and wrote about it on this blog.  I had read those stories years ago and I had also read some of Hemingway's other classic stories which have been included in anthologies through the years.  But I had sadly neglected reading his novels which were the primary motivators for his having been awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.  I have never heard a single serious student of great literature ever rationally belittle the fiction of Ernest Hemingway.  I do not believe that I ever shall.  Both those awards were granted to "The Old Man And The Sea", but I  have never heard any serious student of great literature disparage any of his other novels as having been any less worthy of the awards.  He was a phenomenal writer and is generally mentioned on that short list of America's greatest writers.  My version of that short list would include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Mark Twain and Pearl S. Buck.  While some of you might argue mildly against the inclusion of any of those people on such a list, most would not.  I do not intend to turn this blog post into a discussion of any writer, prize winner, or unawarded nominee.  But I do want to say that I have long wished it was possible to read the entire body of work of every winner of both the Nobel and the Pulitzer.  Each of them is deserving of that attention and study from any serious aficionado of great literature.  I do not expect to be able to complete that list in one lifetime but I am trying.  

Ernest Hemingway--Photo by Getty Images

To get to the point of this blog post, "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is generally an undisputed masterpiece and fully deserves that descriptor.  I have always known that it is a great novel.  I simply had never gotten around to reading it and I am sorry that I waited so long.  In my blog post about "The Nick Adams Stories", I stated that  "Nick Adams loved to fish, hunt, drink, and have sex and those are three of the areas of life in which Ernest Hemingway wrote at a level which few writers ever achieve."  There is little writing about fishing or hunting in "For Whom The Bell Tolls".  This is a novel about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War and the great majority of the writing is about war.  But there is also quite a bit of sexual writing which plays a key role in the character development in the novel and the relationship between the protagonist Robert Jordan and his Spanish girlfriend Maria.  That relationship only lasts about three days and yet, in many ways, it is the most important relationship in the lives of both characters.  There is also some discussion in the novel of hunting, but primarily the hunting of men in a war.  Fishing is only referred to in passing near the conclusion of the novel when the protagonist notices a trout rising to the surface of a stream over which he is preparing to dynamite a key bridge.  But those sections of the novel reinforce my opinion that the area of life in which Ernest Hemingway did his best writing are war, sex, hunting, and fishing.  

In this novel, Hemingway also addresses the issue of suicide even more directly and at more length than he did in "The Nick Adams Stories".  But very near the end of the novel, he has the protagonist Robert Jordan refuse to allow a compatriot to shoot him as he is too severely wounded to flee with his band of Spanish revolutionaries.  That is quite interesting in light of the fact that the author eventually chose to end his life via suicide by gunfire.  But his best writing in more than one book often addresses the issue of suicide, both the possibility of the suicide of a protagonist and historical suicide by one or more characters who were major players in the lives of those protagonists. It is generally conceded that when Hemingway discusses suicide in his novels he is reflecting both on his father's suicide and his own ever present consideration of the act to end his own life.  I must admit that I have never read a scholarly article about the issue of suicide in the writing of Ernest Hemingway but many professional and scholarly writers have attempted to analyze his literary ruminations on the issue as well as suicide as a familial issue in the Hemingway clan.  You can rest assured that enough has been written about Ernest Hemingway and suicide to fill more than a few books.  You can also rest assured that any book which begins with the quotation from John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." will also discuss death.  This is a novel about war and nearly all war novels are replete with death.  But this novel is about much more than death despite the fact that most of the members of the guerilla band of Robert Jordan are dead before the novel ends.

I would argue that this novel is a love story, perhaps two love stories, or even three.  There is the primary love story between Robert Jordan and Maria, who was a victim of war before the two even met.  There is also the love story between the other couple in the novel, the alcoholic guerrilla leader Pablo and his wife and co-leader, the loud, brash, dangerous, and somewhat masculine Pilar.  There is also the love story between all these Spanish partisans in Jordans guerrilla group and their homeland for which they have literally bet their lives.  This is a novel which no serious student of literature should ever neglect to read.  It is a masterpiece.