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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00254--10 Best Quotes by Earnest Hemming Way

10 Best Quotes by Earnest Hemming Way

1.       The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

2.       A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

3.       There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

4.       Courage is grace under pressure.

5.       Never mistake motion for action.

6.       Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

7.       A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

8.       All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

9.       You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.

10.   We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.