Both authors address a ‘Classic’ human issue with abiding moral relevance: To what, or to whom, are we really committed?ĭonne’s Meditation XVII begins with another famous phrase, ‘No man is an island entire of itself’ words which have acquired their own proverbial, literary reputation. His story is a symbol of the individual finding himself or herself in and through collective consciousness and shared activity. Like a gifted analyst or advertising executive, Hemingway extrapolates a general point from a specific example. Many of these groups, like the Bando nacional (‘Nationalist faction’) and Bando sublevado (‘Rebel faction’), drew ideological inspiration and military support from Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and the leader of the German Nationalist Socialist Workers (or Nazi) party, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). ‘Republican’ militia looked to the Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero (1869-1946) and, later, Juan Negrína (1892-1956) in their fight against a composite force of right-leaning, fascist and ‘Nationalist’ factions under General Francisco Franco (1892-1975). The Second Spanish Civil War (1936-9), which artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) famously portrayed – and indicted – in his black and white study of the brutal bombing of the Basque town Guernica (1937), was made up of numerous guerrilla attacks of the kind Hemingway recounts. The novel’s tension, romance and political energy still capture the minds and hearts of many.
The novel ends with Anselmo dead, Maria, Pilar and Pablo escaping, and a maimed Jordan awaiting his fate at the hands of an advancing enemy.
The sacrificial love Jordan discovers for the cause and for Maria, a fellow guerrilla traumatised by rape and her parents’ murder, shines amid the bleak brutality of a (seemingly) futile assignment (from a Russian officer, Karkov) to detonate a strategic bridge near Segovia. The main characters – including Anselmo, an elderly guide who leads Jordan to a guerrilla camp Pablo, a vacillating guerrilla leader and, Pilar, his courageous, elderly wife who replaces her husband as the group’s leader – are part real, part fictional. It relates the exploits of Robert Jordan, a young American university teacher and dynamitist, who joins tens of thousands from outside Spain in defence of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-9). Based on Hemingway’s own experience as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, the novel is set in three nights on the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains (NW of Madrid). Like Donne’s poem, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a study in loyalty and our shared humanity.
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