For Whom the Bell Tolls Essay
Uploaded by Gibran on Nov 04, 2002
There are moments in life that bring about a coalescence of emotions and ideas that are not only harmonious in nature, they’re great in significance as well. Time seems to stand still for these moments of harmony. And even if these moments are short-lived, their significance can last forever. Hemingway’s paragraph on page 379 is a paradigm of one of these moments.
The first facet to Hemingway’s masterfully orchestrated sequence of events is the Epigram that he chooses to start the novel with. The key idea in that Epigram is that there is interdependence among mankind and that the existence of one person isn’t possible without the existence of another, if one part of the organism is destroyed then the whole organism is destroyed. This concept is seen in the novel through the depiction of Pablo’s band and the way they depend upon each other and how their dependence on Jordan grows throughout the novel. When Robert Jordan first starts out with Pablo’s band, he is just another foreigner caught in a war. To them, at that point, he holds no real significance because they don’t see the bridge as a high priority. For all their purposes, they’d rather loot another train. But as the novel progresses Pablo’s band comes to recognize the fact that they need Jordan. They need Jordan to blow up the bridge, to accomplish something for “the cause” and he needs them to survive in the country. The paragraph on page 379 also reflects this form of thought. Robert Jordan wouldn’t be able to carry out his purpose in the novel if he didn’t have Maria. She allows him to live in the moment and suspend time while Jordan helps nurture the fragile state she‘s in. Without the paragraph on page 379, the reader wouldn’t know that Jordan and Maria have that mutual relationship of necessity. It’s mutual in necessity because Jordan wants to put off death as much as he can and Maria needs Jordan’s care and attention. Obviously she is coming from a very tumultuous past that had very negative effects on her, both physical and psychological. Physical because of what was done to her and psychological because she had to deal with the public humiliation of having her hair cut. But if Jordan had not fallen in love with Maria, then he would not have been able to slow time down and she...