00520--The Summary of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemingway

                   


  The Summary of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ 
                         
                                               by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), during his duty, was hit by an Austrian mortar in Italy and had to live in a Red-Cross hospital in Milan.  He fell in love with Agnes, who appears as the heroine in some Hemingway’s novels.  Then he decided to help the Republican in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.  He settled in Cuba and bought a small estate.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for his novel “The Old Man and the Sea”.  He committed suicide in 1961.

For Whom the Bell Toll’ was published in 1940.  When the Civil War broke out in Spain many intellectuals lent their support to the cause of the Spanish Republican Government.  Hemingway also volunteered.  This background of the Spanish Civil War is the locale of the novel. 

Robert Jordan, an American has joined the loyalist army during the Civil War, and he was asked to join the guerrilla bard in the mountain, near Segovia to blow up the strategic bridges.  He arrives at a cave, where the rebels are hiding, he finds them disorganized, and not keen to fight, as they have found a safe place, and the blowing of the bridge would jeopardise their security.  Jordan finds two characters for support, Pilar, the gypsy woman, and Anselmo, Pilar’s husband Pablo was a leader of the Republican.

Then in the cave, he found Maria and fell in love with her.  She is the daughter of the Republican Mayor, saw her parents killed and was raped by the Fascists.  Her close-cropped head is the symbol of her tortures.  She was rescued by the Band; her physical injuries were healed; but psychic would still torment her.  Pilar sends Maria to Jordan’s sleeping bag and their love-making heals her wounds.  Their intensity of love is unique because of mystic quality.

A fascist soldier comes and is shot dead by Jordan.  Pablo removes detonators from Jordan’s sack, and throws them  away in the stream.  However, Jordan succeeds in blowing the bridge, the army arrives and shoot at retreating guerrillas, Jordan’s horse is hit, he sustains a fractured thigh-bone. 

Maria has become a symbol of Spain for Jordan.  Despite her entreaties to run away, Jordan declines to go with the guerrillas.  In the end, Jordan s found lying on a slope with his machine-gun aimed at the Fascist leader.  Maria and the guerrilla band went away.

                                                            END
You may also like:
The Little Girl in the Rain
APJ Abdul Kalam's IGNITED MINDS

Labels

Addison (4) ADJECTIVES (1) ADVERBS (1) Agatha Christie (1) American Literature (6) APJ KALAM (1) Aristotle (9) Bacon (1) Bakhtin Mikhail (3) Barthes (8) Ben Jonson (7) Bernard Shaw (1) BERTRAND RUSSEL (1) Blake (1) Blogger's Corner (2) BOOK REVIEW (2) Books (2) Brahman (1) Charles Lamb (2) Chaucer (1) Coleridge (12) COMMUNICATION SKILLS (5) Confucius (1) Critical Thinking (3) Cultural Materialism (1) Daffodils (1) Deconstruction (3) Derrida (2) Doctor Faustus (5) Dr.Johnson (5) Drama (4) Dryden (14) Ecofeminism (1) Edmund Burke (1) EDWARD SAID (1) elegy (1) English Lit. Drama (7) English Lit. Essays (3) English Lit.Poetry (210) Ethics (5) F.R Lewis (4) Fanny Burney (1) Feminist criticism (9) Frantz Fanon (2) FREDRIC JAMESON (1) Freud (3) GADAMER (1) GAYATRI SPIVAK (1) General (4) GENETTE (1) GEORG LUKÁCS (1) GILLES DELEUZE (1) Gosson (1) GRAMMAR (8) gramsci (1) GREENBLATT (1) HAROLD BLOOM (1) Hemmingway (2) Henry James (1) Hillis Miller (2) HOMI K. BHABHA (1) Horace (3) I.A.Richards (6) Indian Philosophy (8) Indian Writing in English (2) John Rawls (1) Judaism (25) Kant (1) Keats (1) Knut Hamsun (1) Kristeva (2) Lacan (3) LINDA HUTCHEON (1) linguistics (4) LIONEL TRILLING (1) Literary criticism (191) literary terms (200) LOGIC (7) Longinus (4) LUCE IRIGARAY (1) lyric (1) Marlowe (4) Martin Luther King Jr. (1) Marxist criticism (3) Matthew Arnold (12) METAPHORS (1) MH Abram (2) Michael Drayton (1) MICHEL FOUCAULT (1) Milton (3) Modernism (1) Monroe C.Beardsley (2) Mulla Nasrudin Stories (190) MY POEMS (17) Narratology (1) New Criticism (2) NORTHROP FRYE (1) Norwegian Literature (1) Novel (1) Objective Types (8) OSHO TALES (3) PAUL DE MAN (1) PAUL RICOEUR (1) Petrarch (1) PHILOSOPHY (4) PHOTOS (9) PIERRE FÉLIX GUATTARI (1) Plato (5) Poetry (13) Pope (5) Post-Colonial Reading (2) Postcolonialism (3) Postmodernism (5) poststructuralism (8) Prepositions (4) Psychoanalytic criticism (4) PYTHAGORAS (1) QUEER THEORY (1) Quotes-Quotes (8) Robert Frost (7) ROMAN OSIPOVISCH JAKOBSON (1) Romantic criticism (20) Ruskin (1) SAKI (1) Samuel Daniel (1) Samuel Pepys (1) SANDRA GILBERT (1) Saussure (12) SCAM (1) Shakespeare (157) Shelley (2) SHORT STORY (1) Showalter (8) Sidney (5) SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1) SLAVOJ ZIZEK (1) SONNETS (159) spenser (3) STANLEY FISH (1) structuralism (14) Sunitha Krishnan (1) Surrealism (2) SUSAN GUBAR (1) Sydney (3) T.S.Eliot (10) TED TALK (1) Tennesse Williams (1) Tennyson (1) TERRY EAGLETON (1) The Big Bang Theory (3) Thomas Gray (1) tragedy (1) UGC-NET (10) Upanisads (1) Vedas (1) Vocabulary test (7) W.K.Wimsatt (2) WALTER BENJAMIN (1) Walter Pater (2) Willam Caxton (1) William Empson (2) WOLFGANG ISER (1) Wordsworth (14) എന്‍റെ കഥകള്‍ (2) തത്വചിന്ത (14) ബ്ലോഗ്ഗര്‍ എഴുതുന്നു (6) ഭഗവത്‌ഗീതാ ധ്യാനം (1)