My New Favorite Hemingway Novel - "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

For nearly 50 years my favorite Hemingway novel has been the one I was reading as an assignment for English class at age 15 while sitting next to my mother on a park bench on the shore of Lake Geneva during our family's one-week trip to Montreux, Switzerland, in October of 1973. I led a group of high school juniors through the reading of that novel in the spring of 2023 recently during a year I came out of retirement and taught at Denver Jewish Day School, and it brought memories of what had turned out to be one of my last shared significant experiences with my mother, though none of us imagined she and my father would perish in the crash of of our V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza just two years later, in October of 1975.

Teaching that novel to those Denver students was a deeply moving, emotionally charged experience for me, and I discussed those feelings with some of my fellow teachers in the "secular teachers lounge" at DJDS. J.B. Doze, the most senior faculty member, a life-time high school English teacher and U.S. army veteran with a master's degree from the University of Kansas, declared that he did not like Hemingway, a sentiment expressed a number of times over the years also by my late sister-in-law Linda Kenepaske, Esq., an avid reader of English and German novels. But I feel I remember my mother holding Hemingway in somewhat higher esteem, and I have always liked "Farewell to Arms," "The Old Man and the Sea," and a number of short stories by Hemingway as well.

One of the interesting faculty members at DJDS was a gentleman who had switched careers recently after success in business marketing, and was now a relatively new high school social studies teacher. When I first mentioned Hemingway, he thought of the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which he was aware of for its setting in the Spanish Civil War. The juniors in my English class had appreciated certain aspects of "Farewell to Arms" due to materials they had studied regarding World War 1 in his class. I kept in mind his mention of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and bought a used copy through an online thrift store, then carried it with me back to my home in Kansas.

It was a struggle choosing from among three novels I had selected to read or reread in my first months once again retired: "Almanac of the Dead," by Leslie Marmon Silko; "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (large-print edition), by Thomas Hardy; and Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Those are three of my all-time favorite authors.

I started each of them again, but the one that kept my interest most consistently was Hemingway's novel. It really is a quite compelling story.

While helping at the Denver school, I had the great fortune to bring my brother John Clark Scott Jr., a well-known conservator of art, to share insights from his profession with students in an art elective, and John and I were invited to the science/art teacher's home for a small dinner party. At that gathering, there was a retired school teacher whose main research interest was reading, and I was taken aback and somewhat aghast when she explained she always starts reading a new novel by skipping to the end and finding out first how the author concludes the story.

All of this brings me to the focus of the few words I am ready to write about my new "all-time favorite" Hemingway novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." I hope to have time to study and write much more about this novel, but right now, having read it from start to finish (and not skipping to the end first), a person familiar with the book may understand why I wish to draw your attention to Hemingway's narrative style and his surprising technique for concluding Robert Jordan's story (and life).

I guess we need a "spoiler alert," since there are likely to be a number of potential readers of my essay who have not yet read the entire novel themselves. I guess the only person who would not need a spoiler alert would be the reading theorist in Denver who always reads the endings first anyway.

I have not persisted in my re-reading of the large book by Leslie Marmon Silko, whose shorter "Ceremony" remains one of my favorite novels and is another one I have read deeply with high schoolers, this time the seniors at Kickapoo Nation School in Powhattan, Kansas, in the spring of 1984, my first K-12 teaching job.

But the first and only time I have read "Almanac of the Dead," which was in 1991 or 1992 in my free time outside of the teaching and research work I was doing at Chubu Daigaku in Kasugai, Japan, I really got involved in the reading experience and could appreciate the author's special skill in weaving together so many strands of characters and sub-plots: only to arrive at the last page and discover to my chagrin that many of those threads were left frayed and unresolved when the story just simply ended or petered out.

As I recall it, Marmon Silko uses a standard omniscient narrator in third-person voice to tell her stories. There are also lots of flashback sequences which create a deeper, more extensive context in which to understand more fully the events and experiences of her characters.

In "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Hemingway mostly uses a stream-of-consciousness third-person narrator who is omniscient only about the thoughts of the protagonist, Robert Jordan, so the story is primarily told from Jordan's perspective; except for lengthy stretches of reported speech of other characters, especially Pilar's vivid stories which prompt Jordan to think to himself, "If that woman could only write....God, how she could tell a story. She's better than Quevedo....I wish I could write well enough to write that story..."

There is also an interesting device introduced by Hemingway, reminiscent of the single event in the ancient Beowulf tale in which the narration suddenly shifts and Grendel's consciousness is revealed as he grabs what he expects is just the arm of another human to devour, but has an OMG moment as he realizes it is attached to a much more powerful force, the hero Beowulf, and then narration shifts back again to traditional third-person omniscience (Gardner built his novel "Grendel" based on that one momentary shift to the monster's thoughts from the Beowulf legend).

In Hemingway's tale, the primary interest of the reader is drawn to the experience and thoughts of Robert Jordan, and straightforward omniscience in scenes where he is not present, such as in chapter 27 when Sordo's band having been tracked through the snow and surrounded by fascist troops--while Jordan, Pilar, Primitivo, and the others can hear the sounds of shooting and firing of cannons, from a distance, but are helpless to intervene directly-- the band's conversations and movements are reported by the narrator, along with Sordo's stream of consciousness, as he and his men hunker down behind a boulder which has become their only fortress.

Sordo shoots five shots into a dead horse, managing to persuade the enemy troops that perhaps everyone on the other side of the boulder has committed suicide in desperation. The Spanish fascists begin yelling obscene insults at the revolutionary Republicans, who remain silent. Suddenly the narrator's perspective shifts over to the fascists and conversations between a Captain Mora and a Lieutenant Berrendo, as they discuss whether to walk across and check on the status of Sordo and his men, or to wait for reinforcements to arrive before taking any chances, and Mora is shot at point-blank range when he struts over to demonstrate he is right.

There are at least two other aspects of the narration in this Hemingway novel that have impressed me as a reader. First, as a Spanish-language enthusiast myself, I really like how Hemingway intersperses Spanish statements, phrases, and interjections, usually followed by English translations unless the Spanish words are either extremely common or are obscenities. In some cases, his characters will be reported as saying something like "obscenity your mother," which it seems to me is Hemingway observing literary decorum. He also frequently uses Spanish-like grammar and phrasing to keep the reader aware that all the characters in this story are communicating with each other in Spanish.

Another aspect of the narrative voice in which the protagonist Jordan's inner thoughts are continuously revealed to the reader is the way the narrator switches back and forth among "he" (more objective thoughts), "I" (moments of subjective introspection), and "you" (as if Jordan is telling himself something). This is only slightly reminiscent of the famous "you" second-person narrator in "Aura," the short story by Carlos Fuentes.

I am also reminded of Miguel de Unamuno's "Niebla," in which a character addresses himself to the author directly insisting that he not end the story.

And it is the ending of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" that I wish to speak to briefly here, with hopes that, given by God's grace enough time in the days, weeks, months, and years remaining in my life to take on such projects, I may be able to research in great depth and explore more fully this matter. There on page 507 of chapter 43 in my 1968 Charles Scribner's Sons edition, a gravely injured Robert Jordan, who has succeeded in his assigned mission of blowing up a bridge to impede transportation of fascist troops and vehicles, is using his remaining vitality to stay partially hidden "with his two elbows in the pine needles and the muzzle of the submachine gun resting against the trunk of the pine tree," as the same Lieutenant Berrendo (who took the lives of Sordo and his four compatriots in an earlier scene), unaware of Jordan's presence, rides on a horse closer and closer. There the protagonist "was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow..."

In Hemingway's telling of the story, there is a lot of emphasis on death and dying, and how we live when our awareness of the transitory nature of life is enhanced by experience, age, and acquired wisdom. I have not shared the final sentence of Hemingway's conclusion to this novel, but will only state here myself that in a story sustained mainly by the protagonist's stream of consciousness, that character's death was exquisitely rendered.