FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
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.
Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of
American literature.
Hemingway maintained permanent residences in
Key West, Florida (in the 1930s) and in
Cuba (in the 1940s and 1950s). He almost died in 1954 after plane crashes on successive days, with injuries leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959 he bought a
house in Ketchum, Idaho where, in mid-1961, he died by
suicide with a shotgun.
* PHYSIOGNOMIC SIMILARITIES OF HEMINGWAY AS A WRITER
A great deal has been written about Hemingway's distinctive style. In fact, the two great stylists of twentieth-century American literature are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the styles of the two writers are so vastly different that there can be no comparison. For example, their styles have become so famous and so individually unique that yearly contests award prizes to people who write the best parodies of their styles. The parodies of Hemingway's writing style are perhaps the more fun to read because of Hemingway's ultimate simplicity and because he so often used the same style and the same themes in much of his work.
From the beginning of his writing career in the 1920s, Hemingway's writing style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, a typical Hemingway novel or short story is written in simple, direct, unadorned prose. Possibly, the style developed because of his early journalistic training. The reality, however, is this: Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories and sketches, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other. Colons clogged the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers to throw up their hands in exasperation. And then came Hemingway.
An excellent example of Hemingway's style is found in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In this story, there is no maudlin sentimentality; the plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. Focusing on an old man and two waiters, Hemingway says as little as possible. He lets the characters speak, and, from them, we discover the inner loneliness of two of the men and the callous prejudices of the other. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, his writing style was singled out as one of his foremost achievements. The committee recognized his "forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration."
Hemingway has often been described as a master of dialogue; in story after story, novel after novel, readers and critics have remarked, "This is the way that these characters would really talk." Yet, a close examination of his dialogue reveals that this is rarely the way people really speak. The effect is accomplished, rather, by calculated emphasis and repetition that makes us remember what has been said.
Perhaps some of the best of Hemingway's much-celebrated use of dialogue occurs in "Hills Like White Elephants." When the story opens, two characters — a man and a woman — are sitting at a table. We finally learn that the girl's nickname is "Jig." Eventually we learn that they are in the cafe of a train station in Spain. But Hemingway tells us nothing about them — or about their past or about their future. There is no description of them. We don't know their ages. We know virtually nothing about them. The only information that we have about them is what we learn from their dialogue; thus this story must be read very carefully.
This spare, carefully honed and polished writing style of Hemingway was by no means spontaneous. When he worked as a journalist, he learned to report facts crisply and succinctly. He was also an obsessive revisionist. It is reported that he wrote and rewrote all, or portions, of The Old Man and the Sea more than two hundred times before he was ready to release it for publication.
Hemingway took great pains with his work; he revised tirelessly. "A writer's style," he said, "should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous." Hemingway more than fulfilled his own requirements for good writing. His words are simple and vigorous, burnished and uniquely brilliant.
* COMPARISON BETWEEN "TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT" AND "FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS".
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
* LANGUAGE -
To Have and Have Not is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1937 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The book follows Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. To Have and Have Not was Hemingway's second novel set in the United States, after The Torrents of Spring.
Written sporadically between 1935 and 1937, and revised as he traveled back and forth from Spain during the
Spanish Civil War, the novel portrays Key West and
Cuba in the 1930s, and provides a social commentary on that time and place. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers described the novel as heavily influenced by the
Marxist ideology Hemingway was exposed to by his support of the
Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War while he was writing it. The work got a mixed critical reception.
The novel had its origins in two short stories published earlier in periodicals by Hemingway ("One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return") which make up the opening chapters, and a novella, written later, which makes up about two-thirds of the book. The narrative is told from multiple viewpoints, at different times, by different characters, and the characters' names are frequently supplied under the chapter headings to indicate who is narrating that chapter.
* NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE -
A great deal has been written about Hemingway's distinctive style. In fact, the two great stylists of twentieth-century American literature are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the styles of the two writers are so vastly different that there can be no comparison. For example, their styles have become so famous and so individually unique that yearly contests award prizes to people who write the best parodies of their styles. The parodies of Hemingway's writing style are perhaps the more fun to read because of Hemingway's ultimate simplicity and because he so often used the same style and the same themes in much of his work.
From almost the beginning of his writing career, Hemingway's distinctive style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, his style is simple, direct, and unadorned, probably as a result of his early newspaper training. He avoids the adjective whenever possible, but because he is a master at transmitting emotion without the flowery prose of his Victorian novelist predecessors, the effect is far more telling. In Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway, from "Contexts of Criticism" by Harry Levin (Harvard University Press, 1957), the critic says: "Hemingway puts his emphasis on nouns because, among other parts of speech, they come closest to things. Stringing them along by means of conjunctions, he approximates the actual flow of experience."
A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
* CHARACTERIZATION -
Harry Morgan is, in many respects, the most existential of Hemingway’s male protagonists. At forty-two, he is a noble savage, battered but unbowed—at least, in the eyes of Helen Gordon, the novelist’s wife. Actually, there is some truth to this view, but, beyond this superficial picture, he is the tough guy made hero, the survivor who is too much of a loner for his own good. He has a wife and children, he has friends and acquaintances, and he has known many women in the past, yet he is so ingrained with the essential aloneness of the human condition that he achieves his truest moments of being when he is battling alone.
Above all, Harry Morgan is a pragmatist, subordinating everything else to survival. The irony is that, in the end, he does not even survive. Yet he does not feel sorry for himself. It almost does not matter that he dies a brutal and painful death. What else could he expect? He has no illusions about the cards dealt by life. He takes what he gets and does the best he can. His mate, Albert, comments: “Since he was a boy, he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.” When Morgan dies, he tries to explain to the Coast Guard men, “A man . . . ain’t got no . . . hasn’t got can’t really . . . isn’t any way out.”
The women in this novel are portrayed as either “whores” or “earth mothers.” Although Marie Morgan has in her past been a prostitute, she is pictured as a sympathetic and profound character. Married to Harry Morgan for many years, with three daughters, she has gone to fat, but she is seen as a pure, decent human being, a woman filled with love, who nurtures and takes care of her man. The novel concludes with her Molly Bloom-like interior monologue, as she tries to figure out how she will endure without Harry. She, too, faces the trials in her life with an existential stoicism. Somehow, she tells herself, she will get through the pain, and live through the days. There is no choice.
Contrasting to Marie Morgan is Helen Gordon, who, although beautiful and rich, is seen as a neurotic slut who delights in treating her husband viciously. Although on the surface highly civilized, under this glossy veneer, she has no more morals than the lowest prostitute.
Richard Gordon, the successful novelist who represents the “haves” of the world, was based on Hemingway’s onetime friend John Dos Passos. Gordon is portrayed as a second-rate writer whose success is based on having the currently popular social convictions. He is shown as being blind to the real world, eagerly warping reality to fit his preconceived notions. He is so weak that he is vulnerable to Helen’s taunting, yet he is lionized as a great man by tourists who discover him in the bars where he regularly gets drunk.
Morgan’s mate, Albert Tracy, Albert’s wife with her loose dentures, and poor old Eddy, the rummy who sometimes works for Morgan, are representative of the poor but honest “have nots” of the world. They are sketched somewhat more completely than most of the “haves,” who are hardly more than outlines, but they, too, fall short of the full characterizations that Hemingway usually created in his books. Albert and Eddy merely want to get by, to earn a little cash, and live to see another day. They want so little, but cannot even have that.
* POINT OF VIEW -
Ernest Hemingway‘s story of a fisherman/sailor/smuggler trying to make ends meet, To Have and Have Not, is particularly well-suited to a discussion of Depression-era literature. Set in the cities and waters of Cuba and South Florida in the early 1930s, the novel delves into not just the psyche of one man struggling to survive through hard times, but also the angst of a world in which the already-thin line between good and evil is blurred beyond recognition. The characters Hemingway represented run the gamut from wealthy socialites to drunken locals and crooked officials. The choices they make because of a society which has abandoned its faith in traditional morals are often not really choices at all, but merely the only apparent avenues of survival.
There are more than a few direct references to the 1930s in the novel. At one point Harry Morgan mentions listening to Gracie Allen on the radio while he recuperates from an adventure at sea. Prohibition gave Morgan the lucrative ability to smuggle alcohol into the United States and its 1933 repeal greatly lessened one of his main sources of income. South Floridian government’s perceived attempts to, “starve [them] out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town,” are typical of a society trying to create income and deal with poverty in the 1930s.
Harry Morgan’s fear of his family’s starving when he can no longer put food on the table is similar to those of many out-of-work Americans in the Depression. Compare Harry’s statement, “I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry,” with Jeeter Lester’s comments in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road: “My children all blame me because God sees fit to make me poverty-ridden … They and Ma is all the time cussing me because we ain’t got nothing to eat … I can’t make no money, because there ain’t nobody wanting work done.” Jeeter turns to thievery because of his hunger, just as Harry Morgan turns to bootlegging and smuggling.
Hemingway deals with racism against blacks and other minorities as well. The character with whom Harry makes a liquor run early in the book is black. Although Harry addresses the man by his name, Wesley, the narrator refers to him only as, “the nigger,” or, “the negro.” There was money to be made in smuggling illegal immigrants into America in the 1930s, and the Chinese immigrants that Harry is talked into smuggling to America are referred to in a derogatory fashion as “Chinamen” and “Chinks” and they are said to have a foul smell. Morgan makes a point of trying to get rid of their odor before he lands his boat. The pains and deaths of minorities, considered sub-human, are marginalized in the story, not by the author but by the other characters.
Hemingway’s experimantations with the novel form are also notable features typical of early twentieth century literature. To Have and Have Not breaks from the traditional five act dramatic plot sequence of setting, rising action, climax, closing action, and summary. The author, who had lived in Paris, Spain, Mid-Western America, South Florida, and Cuba, wasn’t satisfied with presenting the novel from one point-of-view. No one character narrates the story. The book’s ending is not contained by the standards of time and spatial continuity. Hemingway utilized and sometimes invented these new literary devices to try to push the American novel beyond its limits. Like his contemporary, James Agee, he was creating something which wasn’t supposed to be thought of as art.
* FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS -
* LANGUAGE -
The use of the formal "thee," "thou," and "thy" in Hemingway's novel may serve three purposes. First, Hemingway meant his dialogue to be a direct translation from Spanish, since the novel is set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In Spanish, the pronoun you has two forms, the formal usted and the familiar tú. Throughout the novel, Hemingway uses odd translations and, of course, censors the profanity which is common in the dialogue of the Spanish characters (he simply replaces the profanity with words such as "obscenity" and "muck").
Second, Hemingway uses these formalities to suggest the camaraderie of the characters who are fighting for a cause they are willing to die for. Rather than referring to each other as señor, señora or señorita, the characters refer to each other on equal terms as thee and thou. It is similar to the communist term comrade which is also a term of equality. The rebels during the civil war were attempting to bring freedom and equality to Spain, in contrast to their fascist opponents.
Third, the terms may be an allusion to religious symbolism and the Bible. Patrick Cheney, in his article "Hemingway and Christian Epic: The Bible in For Whom the Bell Tolls" argues that the novel is replete with Christian imagery, including the constant use of the biblical "thee" and "thou" (of course, these words were first used in the English translation, the King James Bible). An example of this imagery and symbolism is the description of El Sordo's death and the implication that he is a martyr for the cause of the Spanish Republic. He dies on a hill and in a direct reference to Jesus Christ (who was crucified on Calvary Hill), Robert Jordan says,
If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die on it would not have cheered him any for, in the moment he was passing through, men are not impressed by what has happened to other men in similar circumstance...
* NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE -
Ernest Hemingway was a writer whose style was very different to that of most writers in his time. Instead of using more drawn out, overly descriptive writing, his stories were more of a “get to the point” style. Hemingway’s style came from his background as a journalist, where he was taught to make stories short and informative, as most articles in newspapers are.
Instead of using 20 pages to describe one person’s odor or something along those lines, Hemingway would finish an entire story in a small amount of space. But what set him apart from the rest was his ability to use the fewest words with maximum information. Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers exasperation. And then came Hemingway to set the trend. An excellent example of Hemingway’s style is found in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” whose plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, his writing style was singled out as one of his foremost achievements. The committee recognized his
“forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”
This spare, carefully honed and polished writing style of Hemingway was spontaneous but he had learned to report facts crisply and succinctly as a journalist. Another aspect of Hemingway’s style was his use of atmosphere. When you read a story by Hemingway, you feel like you were in the setting, seeing what the characters saw, and feeling as the characters felt. In the novella “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway writes about an old fisherman who goes out into the sea in search of fish. The story is about 15% dialogue and 85% of the old man alone in the sea. Being an obsessive revisionist, Hemingway has been reported to have revised and rewritten all or portions of ‘The Old man and the Sea’ more than two hundred times. His words are simple and uniquely brilliant. So Hemingway said that a writer’s style should be:
“direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous”
CHARACTERIZATION
Swearing is one of the major ways in which characters are given color, and personality. It defines Pilar and Agustín, and the more cynical way 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). Every so often, a character will also break into a regional dialect, as Anselmo does when he curses Pablo out at the very beginning of the book.
POINT OF VIEW
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.
Pilar provides the most compelling and comprehensive stories of Finito’s fears in bullfighting and of Pablo and his men as they beat the Fascists to death in a drunken rage. Hemingway enhance thematic focus. Pilar’s stories of struggle and heroism make their mission more poignant and place it in an historical context. Jordan‘s flashbacks to a time when his ideals were not tempered by the reality of war highlight his growing sense of disillusionment. His dreams of a future with Maria in Madrid add a bittersweet touch to his present predicament. Michael Reynolds says about ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ that:
“Without drawing undue attention to his artistry, Hemingway has written a collection of short stories embedded in a framing novel.”
Hemingway is a master of dialogues. Hemingway’s most important contribution to the art of narration is perhaps his dialogue wherein the authorial comment is absolutely minimum as exemplified by the short story, ‘The Killers’. When Goerge says, ‘What are you looking at?’ Max looked at George. ‘Nothing’…‘The hell you were. You were looking at me.’ In ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, he captured the vital Spanish idiom through English as in, ‘the mujer of Pablo’. There are very few adjectives and adverbs in Hemingway style.
These are replaced by the simple word ‘Said’. Certainly, he was influenced by Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain and thus his style reflects simplicity of expression. Although his style has shifted from casual to mature but in the typical Hemingway Style, the greatest burden is carried forward by the nouns and the simplest verbs. But at all times, his style perfectly suits to his theme and subject matter. His style is also symbolic. For Whom the Bell Tolls the bridge stands for many things simultaneously. His style seems, in fact, to gain from association and connotation rather than denotation. The sea in The Old Man and the Sea, can stand for life, the world in which one meets one’s friends and adversaries:
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone…”
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