For Whom The Bell Tolls

Thinking Activity : 2 : For Whom The Bell Tolls 

Hello Friends !

In this blog I am going to write about two novels by Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and The Sea.The American author Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His machine-like style was precise and austere, but he also had a deft and gentle turn of phrase which gave his work its own peculiar beauty and power. He was a master of the action genre, but he also wrote passionately about love and life, war and work. Though Hemingway is often seen as the archetypal American writer, many of his books have a European air. Hemingway certainly experienced Europe – he drove ambulances in Italy in the First World War, worked as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War, and lived alongside other modernist artists and writers in Paris in the 1920s – and his love for these countries, especially Spain, and their culture permeates his work.

Hemingway's use of language

For Whom the Bell Tolls 

The Old Man and The Sea

Among all Hemingway’s works, The Old Man and the Sea is the most typical one to his unique language style. Its 

language is simple and natural, and has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness. This is because Hemingway 

always manages to choose words concrete, specific, more commonly found, more Anglo-Saxon, casual and 

conversational. He seldom uses adjectives and abstract nouns, and avoids complicated syntax. Hemingway’s strength 

lies in his short sentences and very specific details. His short sentences are powerfully loaded with the tension, which he 

sees in life. Where he does not use a simple and short sentence, he connects the various parts of the sentence in a 

straightforward and sequential way, often linked by “and”. In his task of creating real people, Hemingway uses dialogue 

as an effective device. Here is an example chosen from The Old Man and the Sea:

“What do you have to eat?” the boy asked. 

“No, I will eat at home; do you want me to make the fire?” 

“No, I will make it later on, or I may eat the rice cold.” 

Here we can see that such interpolations as “he said” have frequently been omitted and the words are very colloquial. 

Thus the speech comes to the reader as if he were listening. Hemingway has captured the immediacy of dialogue 

skillfully and has made the economical speech connotative. But it is good to note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate 

and artificial, and is never as natural as it seems to be. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, in some specific moments, in 

order to stand out by contrast and to describe an important turning point or climax, the style is made a little different: He took all his pain and what was left of his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over on 

to his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff, and started to pass the boat, 

long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water. The language in this one-sentence 

paragraph is different from other parts of the novel. Kenneth Graham has commented that the sentence builds up its 

parts in a carefully laborious sequence—“all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride”. It 

emulates the movement of the exhausted marlin and the physical strain of the old man. And it mounts to a heavy 

crescendo in the very un-prosaic inversion of adjectives—“long, deep, wide”—ending in the virtually poetic cadence, 

“interminable in the water.”

Hemingway's Narrative Technique

For the Whom Bell Tolls 

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

The Old Man and The Sea

The point of view used in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea is omniscient third person as the narrator is able to tell what and how the main characters think. In this way, a reader may obtain more subjective view from the narrator. As mentioned in the summary (click here to read), the old man is the main character of the story. The distance between the narrator and the old man helps create the solitude felt by the latter. What is more noteworthy is that though the old man is called Santiago, this Christian name appears only four times throughout the story.

The reason for the narrator to call him constantly the old man has probably something to do with his dignity. On three occasions, the name Santiago is said to be called by the boy Manolin. On the first two occasions, the boy attempts to persuade the old man to take him to the adventurous sail. For the third time, his name appeared when he is fighting alone with the marlin. His left hand is injured after the battle. The sun is soon set, and he tried to give solace to himself while recalling the moment he had beaten a man in arm wrestling. Then comes the comment of the narrator:

Hemingway's Characters

For Whom the Bell Tolls 

1) Physical Appearance

Physical appearances often give us an immediate clue to "what lies beneath" in this book. When we meet Pablo, for example, we learn from the description that he's grizzled, scarred, a bit oddly shaped, with close-set narrow eyes, and has a somewhat hostile look on his face. A shady, unpleasant character.

Pilar is monumentally large, strong and thick, with a warm brown face that looks like a "model for a granite monument." Her looks reflect her courage, strength, good humor, and larger-than life vitality.

Robert Jordan has a physique which suits his restraint, his toughness, and his weathering by the war: he's tall, lean and muscular – presumably rather chiseled – with rough, sun-streaked hair and skin burnt by the sun and wind. Plus those sharpened, clear eyes.

Maria's eyes, on the other hand, are "hungry, young, and wanting." A head of cropped hair, which people seem to agree mars her beauty, testifies to the horrible events of her past which still haunts her.

Speech and Dialogue

"That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?" (3: 127) Thanks for that, Agustín – can we even call that a sentence? There are several potty-mouths in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a lot of interesting cusses, though Hemingway never writes them out: he always replaces them with "obscenity" or "unnameable" or whatnot (a few times, he does let very foul words in untranslated Spanish).

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.

Action

If somebody steals your detonators and runs away with them, thereby screwing your mission over and dooming you and your friends to die, chances are he's a jerk. If, even after he returns, he kills the people he's recruited to help him, he's still a jerk, though he's a jerk on your side.

The actions of characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls reveal a lot about them. As it's a war novel, the most common traits revealed by action are bravery and brutality: Pilar's bravery is evident from her standing up to Pablo and willingness to go ahead with the mission, as well as her military performance, while Pablo's brutality is shockingly clear from her story about the fascist massacre in their town. Resolve is another big one: Anselmo's the guy who stays put in the snowstorm, even when it gets really bad, because he doesn't want to disobey Robert Jordan. If you want courtesy, think of El Sordo's bringing a bottle of whiskey specially for Robert Jordan from La Granja, this in the middle of a war.

The Old Man and and The Sea

Personification

With the old man being alone on the sea and all, a lot of characterization of animals is done, not of people. And a great tool for such characterization is the use of personification. The old man talks about jellyfish, turtles, birds, and, most important, the marlin, as if they were people. He gives them thought processes, even personalities. And all of his comments on the animals tell us more about him, which counts as a characterization tool in its own right, which is kind of nifty.

Direct Characterization

Hemingway doesn’t beat around the bush. How do we know the old man is proud? Because he says that the old man suffered "no loss of true pride." How do we know Manolin loves Santiago? Because he says "the boy loved him."

Physical Characterization

We get some pretty intense descriptions of the old man’s gaunt, emaciated body. Hemingway never lets us forget the one key fact that this guy is old and not in top-notch fish-fighting condition. That, of course, makes him that much more impressive for winning the battle against the marlin. So, oddly enough, the description of the old man’s physical shortcomings serves to highlight his strengths.

Speech and Dialogue

Yes, the old man talks to himself. No, he isn’t crazy. And in case you don’t believe us, he tells you that himself. He just doesn’t have a radio or a newspaper or an iPhone, so he finds companionship in himself and in the creatures around him. This reminds us that the old man is "strange," in the sense of "alienated," and that he is forced to do his battle in isolation from others.

His Point of View

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The narrative is written in a detached, journalistic style that focuses on what the characters can see, hear, or smell. This description is often restricted to what Robert Jordan can see or hear. On a few occasions, most notably when introducing Pablo confiding to his horse and introducing Karkov’s rescue of Andrés and Gomez in prison, the narrator comments on the unfolding action.

The Old Man and The Sea:

Sometimes the narrator describes the characters and events objectively, that is, as they would appear to an outside observer. However, the narrator frequently provides details about Santiago’s inner thoughts and dreams.

Thank you...