For Whom the Bell Tolls

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"

For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber

Product Description
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

Download Description
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

To my young eyes, it was a good action story: Robert Jordan, the passionate American teacher joins a band of armed gypsies in the Spanish Civil War. He believes one man can make a difference. The whole novel covers just 68 hours, during which Jordan must find a way to blow up a key bridge behind enemy lines. In that short time, Jordan also falls in love with Maria, a beautiful Spanish woman who has been raped by enemy soldiers. The whole spectrum of literature was refracted through the prism of my youth: Good guys and bad guys, sex and blood, life and death. For me, just a boy, the journey from abstraction to clarity was only just beginning.

Re-reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at 42 (roughly the age Hemingway was when he published it), I have lost my ability to see things clearly in black and white. My vision is blurred by irony, as I note that two enemies, the moral killer Anselmo and the sympathetic fascist Lieutenant Berrendo, utter the very same prayer. For the first time, I see that the book opens with Robert Jordan lying on the "pine-needled floor of the forest" and closes as he feels his heart pounding against the "pine needle floor of the forest"; Jordan ends as he begins, perhaps having never really moved. I certainly could never have seen at 16 how dying well might be more consequential than living well. And somehow the light has changed in the past 26 years, so that I now truly understand how the earth can move.

As a teen, I missed another crucial element, even though Vietnam was still a seeping wound. Three pivotal days in Jordan's life force him to question his own role in a futile war. He wonders if dying for a political cause might be too wasteful, but he ultimately believes that dying to save another individual is a man's most heroic act.

The book's title is taken from John Donne's celebrated poem: "No man is an Iland ... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." It was not about loneliness and aloneness, as I once had thought, but about the seamless fabric of all life: What happens to one happens to all.

I am not blind to Hemingway's flaws. He was a good short writer, and what was short was almost always better. Pilar's tale on the mountainside has been widely acclaimed as the most powerful of Hemingway's prose. Her story within a story is nothing less than a contemporary myth.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" has also been regarded as Hemingway's capitulation to critics who barked that his innovative style was too lean, and as a consciously commercial exercise for which Hollywood might (and did) pay handsomely. Robert Jordan, in so many respects, was a tragic mythical hero in the vein of Achilles, Gawain and Samson. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" ranks as one of the great American war novels in a country that has always struggled with the concept of good and bad wars.


A book for all people and all ages   March 4, 2000
D. Roberts (Battle Creek, Michigan United States)
59 out of 65 found this review helpful

Usually, even with the best books, I would say that "this book is not for everyone." Not so with this novel. I truly believe that this book IS for everyone. Unlike so much other 20th century literature, one need not be well read to get something out of it.

The story is of two of man's most cherished and hated traditions: Love and War. The tragedy is that we have had so much of the latter and so little of the former. We see much of both in "For Whom The Bell Tolls." It is a tender story of two young people who just want to live a "normal" life together during the Spainish civil war, but who are prevented from doing thus due to their being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is incredulous to me that there were other reviewers who found this book "boring." I can only surmise that anyone who would find a novel such as this boring will not find anything "exciting" unless it has Arnold Scharzenegger swinging around a machine gun. But that, I believe, is the fault of the reader's lack of attention span and cannot be blamed on Hemingway.

The author writes that "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it." I would agree. Anyone else who agrees, and anyone who has a passion and zest for life should read this book. One of the best examples of American literature in the 20th century.


Not enough can be said   July 6, 2001
Rod Chase (Boston, MA)
42 out of 44 found this review helpful

There is no way to cover in 1000 words everything that this book has to offer. Centering around one man who must undertake one mission with the help of some guerillas in the Spanish Civil War, this book is in fact the deepest most complete work on war that has ever been written. Although, as I mentioned, the whole book is only about Robert Jordan blowing up a single bridge, the book widens in scope as it goes on allowing us to see the war from more and more angles, through more and more people, on both sides of the fight and of all rank and position. It drives homet the point that the title of the book suggests. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, the bell tolls for thee. This refers to the church bells that would be rung to announce a death and is part of a larger quote which begins familiarly enough, "No man is an island." Simply put, there is no such thing as isolationism, there is no way to not consider yourself a part of the human race. When you hear of someone!'s death, there is no need to wonder whose death it is, for whomever it was, they were a part of you, and so their death is in a way your death. Their jouney was your journey. Thus this book does not allow us to leave any vantage point of this war and this battle unturned, and every character relates and reacts to every other character, every action has a reaction, for no man is an island, as this beautifully crafted book points out time and again.


Hemingway's best: will outlast us all.   November 1, 1999
Mike Tucker (lanna053@hotmail.com) (Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand)
19 out of 25 found this review helpful

There is a Japanese proverb: "The Zen Master strikes the bullseye by not looking at the center of the target." Hemingway strikes the bullseye of his aesthetic in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS; in the process, he continues to transform our lives and the literature within them. Nothing any other writer of his generation wrote, and few of any generation, can compare to many of the sentences in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. Consider such jewels as El Sordo's reflection on life and death when he knows, for good and for sure, that he will not see another dawn: "Living was a hawk in the sky." Robert Jordan's reflections throughout the book give us insight, as other readers have noted in the reviews in Amazon.com, into Hemingway's philosophy but also into Hemingway's ability to create and develop a well-rounded, full-blooded, fully-dimensional man. Hemingway based Jordan on Robert Merriwell, an American guerrilla fighter in the war who disappeared in the Guadarrama mountains while on a mission behind the Fascist lines. Merriwell, like Jordan, was from Montana and formerly, a college Spanish professor. But "living was a hawk in the sky." Yes. Hemingway reminds us in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS that life is ever more precious for the dreams we dare, the love we share, and the lives we save (most importantly, our own). Jordan possesses none of the nihilism and preoccupation with the self of Hemingway's earlier protagonists. For anyone who thinks this novel does not relate to our so-called cynical age, I would urge them to take a trip to the Thai-Burmese border. My literature students in Northern Thailand said this was the one novel I assigned them--they read THE GREAT GATSBY, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, and MAN'S FATE--which they could deeply identify with.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS could've been over 1, 000 pages and it still would read as compelling, as intriguing, and as wise as it does in the original 471 page first edition. It speaks to the oppression of the human spirit, an oppression that continues to haunt mankind. It will speak, both as a testament to love and courage and hope and as a warning against indifference and selfishness and cowardice, for all time. Hemingway does in this novel what he continues to do in THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA: teach us that literature is at its best when it gives us life lessons, and not merely reflections on living. Viva Hemingway.


A Gripping, Sad, Interesting, and Worthwhile Story!   June 12, 2001
Brad Hartman (Westchester, NY)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful

This novel certainly deserves its billing as a "classic." The action takes place during the Spanish Civil War (of the 1930's), and the story follows a group of guerilla loyalists, who are fighting against Franco's fascist forces in the name of the Republic.

The entire novel only covers a span of three days, so the reader truly gets a sense of the time passing. Because of this, it feels as if the events are actually occurring as one is reading. Each moment is important, and there are few discontinuities in the story. Also, the novel is written in an interesting format where the climax doesn't occur until the final pages-this adds quite a bit of suspense. What really makes this book so excellent is the delicate combination of action and lull, and love and hate, which Hemingway builds into the story. There is a very beautiful (if only slightly unrealistic) love story carefully interwoven with murder, conspiracy, and disaster.

It is impossible not to deeply care for each individual in the story because there are few characters, and they are all extremely well developed. The reader can find a piece of somebody that he/she knows in every character. Hemingway also deals effectively with emotion. It is always easy to understand exactly what each person is feeling. With Robert Jordan, specifically, Hemingway uses a unique series of monologue-type passages so that the reader really can "get inside" Jordan's head. Somehow, Hemingway manages to do this while keeping out that uneasiness one gets when reading a play monologue. The novel has an anti-war feel to it, but it still contains several enthralling battle scenes. If only the love story were a bit more believable, this book could be truly fantastic. "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is definitely a worthwhile read right from the opening quote by John Donne all the way to the very last page.