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
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00517--The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

                              

   The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

Plays	Summary
A Street Car Named Desire	Is concerned with the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and abnormality.  Blanche the protagonist of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America.  Sex takes the form of perversion.
The Summer and Smoke	Deals with unsuccessful love affair.  Alma is the central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form, John on the other hand is a sex profligate.  The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken.  The play stresses that love and sex are inseparable.
The Rose Tattoo	Is concerned with a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her husband.  The play points out that false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of sexual passion.  Sexuality suppressed reawakens with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak.  Here force of sexual passion gains domination.
Kingdom of Earth	Presents a true picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than anything else.  Spiritual satisfaction alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.  Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment.  To him sex  is the possible path, it is everything.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Dramatizes the feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception.  It portrays the deterioration of a young aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the oblivion that will bring peace.  The characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
Sweet Bird of Youth	Is concerned with the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life.  Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the central characters of the play.  Boss Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their happiness.  But the only way through which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making.  Love making is the only “dependable distraction”.
The Milk Train Does not Stop Here	Depicts the pain and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections.
Period of Adjustment	Williams pursues his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money.  Williams sincerely desires to help people rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so much in his own tormented history.

00257--Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

 Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

00256--The Road Not Taken------Robert Frost

 

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

                             

                                     Robert Frost

00215--What is Robert Frost’s attitude to Nature in “Birches”? [English Literature free notes]

Frost’s attitude is ambivalent.  He draws his theme from Nature and the countryside and seems to be imbibed with a deep love of Nature.  The rhythms of country life hold him spell bound. But he never gives us an artificial picture of country life seen from a library.  On the other hand, he describes Nature from his own experience.  He is a typical “country man” in his descriptions of Nature.  In “Birches” he recalls the favourite leisure time activity of rural New England children.  His boyhood delight in swinging on the birches suggests to him some of the fundamental problems about life.  Though the landscape is described with scientific accuracy, the human element is not brushed off too lightly.  The poet recalls the experiences of childhood and philosophizes on it; the concluding lines of the poem move towards an understanding and wisdom arrived at through a slow contemplation of a simple game.  Nature is thus, not a means of escape from the drab realities of life, but the source of joy and wisdom to Frost, the Poet. 

00209--Robert Frost///'"The Road Not Taken." summary

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN- SUMMARY

  "The Road Not Taken" is one of Frost's most characteristic meditative lyrics.  Among the major themes of Frost's poetry are his ambiguous relationship with nature, his interest in the paradoxes of life and his faith in human fortitude.  Some of these are touched upon in "The Road Not Taken."  The "road" here is, of course, the career or occupation that a man might choose to follow at a particular period of his life.  Frost was a farmer, a teacher and a journalist before he chose to become a professional poet.  Perhaps it is this choosing of a new "road" in his life that prompted the poem.  Life always offers us roads of different choices.  Our decision determines our future.

           One day as the poet was walking through a small forest he saw his road branching away into two directions.  It was autumn, the roads were covered with yellow leaves.   As he had to make a choice, the poet stood there for some time and took the road that was less used.  This means that the other road was much traveled by, meaning that it was a path of conventional career.  But he took the road which was less conventional, and therefore more adventurous.  The poet thought that he would travel along the other road some other day.  But when he thought that the way he took must lead to other ways, he knew that he could never come back to use the second road.  Years later he would tell his friends about those roads and how his choice had made all the difference.  But the poet does not clarify what the difference has been, whether it has been good or bad.  He leaves it in ambiguity.

            

Robert Frost

Superficially the poem describes a simple, common country scene in simple language.  But a closer look will reveal the deeper meaning it has.    Many of the characteristic features of Frost's poetry can be seen here.  The speculation on the untrodden path is natural to a poet like Frost who avoids the expression of romantic excitement about the experiences of life.  Frost employs a simple language and no decorative imagery.  But his interest in paradox and ambiguity makes the poem deeper than it looks at the first reading.