Robert Jordan's (and Ernest Hemingway's) 'True Book': Myths and Moral Quandaries in For Whom the Bell Tolls

Several times in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonist Robert Jordan thinks about the "true book" he will write after the Spanish Civil War (SCW) ends. The immediate answers are textual and can be found in Jordan's experiences as a partizan and in what he's le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The Hemingway review 2017-03, Vol.36 (2), p.42-64
Main Author:	Cohen, Milton A
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1900-1999 Ambiguity American literature Analysis Authors Criticism and interpretation English Literature Espionage Fiction For Whom the Bell Tolls Good & evil Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961) Jordan, Robert (character) Literary criticism moral dilemma Morality Myth mythification Nonfiction novel Novels Politics Spanish Civil War Truth Twentieth Century Values/Morality War Works writer Writers Writing
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Summary:	Several times in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonist Robert Jordan thinks about the "true book" he will write after the Spanish Civil War (SCW) ends. The immediate answers are textual and can be found in Jordan's experiences as a partizan and in what he's learned about the war in his close dealings with the Soviets, who were covertly running it and who strongly influenced the Republican government.1 But historical and biographical contexts are equally important because Jordan is a projection of his author, and the novel aims to correct misrepresentations and replace myths about the war and the Loyalists with disillusioning truths- misrepresentations the author not only knew about but repeated and defended in his journalism and previous fiction and drama about the war. Hemingway also aimed at another kind of truth in the novel: the truths of moral ambiguity in military action. [...]before we turn to Jordan's experiences, we must briefly consider Hemingway's. When Hemingway began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls on 15 February 1939, Barcelona had already fallen to Franco's forces, and six weeks later the SCW itself ended with the fall of Madrid. [...]unlike his earlier writing about the war-the 31 news dispatches for NANA (Watson, Introduction 4), the 18 magazine articles for Ken and other magazines, the 5 short stories and the play The Fifth Column-nearly all of this new novel came into being when the war was over, when whatever he chose to reveal about it could no longer damage the...
ISSN:	0276-3362 1548-4815 1548-4815