An analysis of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls Essay

An analysis of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
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October 17, 2020
A journalist, short-story writer, novelist, outdoorsman, traveler, sportsman, and all-around daredevil. Born July 21, 1899, Ernest Hemingway is popularly known for his "lean, hard, athletic narrative" prose. He is known for a vast, virile figure and a pervasive and inescapable force of personality. Hemingway is famous for many works, such as the 1926 novel In Our Time, the 1927 novel The Sun Also Rises, and the 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.
The subject of this analysis will be Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the narrative of which takes place within the times of the Spanish Civil War.
The novel was published after the fresh conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. The war itself was the talk of the town and on the lips of every American who read the papers. Thus, the novel takes a narrative stance where it assumes the reader knew the Spanish Civil War's details between the Second Spanish Republic or the Republican faction and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union-supported Nationalist faction.
It was the preliminary theatre or "dress rehearsal" for World War 2, where the supporting powers would finally go toe to toe against each other in one of the most destructive and devastating periods of human history.
The Setting of the Novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of American volunteer Robert Jordan assigned to the Republican faction's guerrilla forces during the Spanish Civil War. He is an explosive and ordnances expert, also called a "dynamiter," and was primarily assigned to the attack of the city of Segovia, mainly to destroy a bridge there.
Throughout the novel, the narrative unfolds into one of struggle, emphasizing elements of death, mortality, camaraderie in the face of adversity, single-minded grit, and the kind that it takes to survive fighting on the ground during a civil war. The protagonist, Robert Jordan, loses his innocence as a young American volunteer and experiences the horrors of war and conflict. He loses close friends, sees people die, and ponders about life in Spain, as well as its similarities, parallels, and stark differences with life back home.
The Portrayal of the Conflict
As earlier mentioned, Hemingway narrates the happenings during the Spanish Civil War as bleak, rough, and demanding. The loss of life and innocence is a central theme of the novel, with the protagonist Robert Jordan often resorting to his bottle of absinthe, a hallucinogenic alcohol drink that amplifies his senses to enjoy better life's pleasures food, sex, music, and much more.
The war is a harrowing conflict, the beautifully-depicted backdrops of 1930s Spain crisscrossed and pock-marked with the flight of planes of war overhead and the angry buzz and churn of large ironclad vehicles on their ways to the front lines or wherever their command point them. There is a stark contrast between the pristineness of Spain in its lush and natural glory and the distinct human footprint of conflict and struggle which rapes its environs—all in the name of a civil war, a power struggle, a theater of pawns being manipulated by powers larger than them, powers which woul...