For Whom the Bell Tolls

MadArchitect · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 3:03 pm Post subject: For Whom the Bell Tolls

This forum could use a little activity, and since I've just finished up Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls", I thought I'd fish around for some comments. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?

I found the story very interesting -- Robert Jordan is a young American professor serving as a demolitions expert in Revolutionary Spain. He's sent on a routine but impractical mission to explode a bridge in advance of a major offensive, and the majority of the novel follows his interaction with the local guerilla band with whom he must work. The characters were well-drawn as well, and one of the chief pleasures of the book is the way in which it fills in each character's background, along and along.

Yet one flaw, I think, is the length of the novel. You can take that complaint with a grain of salt -- I've said in other contexts that I prefer novels to be brief, and I tend to estimate the necessary length of a story far shorter than most people would. But just shy of 500 pages is long for a story that only covers three days and three nights, even with intermittant flashbacks. Hemingway might have cut some of the gristle here and there, in particular the rather long stream-of-consciousness passages that reveal the interior space of the main character. At times, this internal dialogue is fairly redundant, and I can't help but feel that the book would have made a far more elegant story at the more manageable size of three-hundred pages.

marti1900 · Senior Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 354 Gender:

I have never cared much for Hemingway, misogynists not being my cup of tea, and the thing I liked best about this novel was the use of John Donne's poem:

No man is an island
No man stands alone
Each man's joy is my joy
Each man's sorrow is my own
Do not send and ask,
For whom the bells toll
They toll for you. ~ John Donne

Marti in Mexico

Wishwas · Almost a regular Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 45 Gender:

Yes, that's a great poem. The exact wording is

For whom the bell tolls a poem
(No man is an island) by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

tarav · Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject: Re: For Whom the Bell Tolls

I like the Metallica song with that name!


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