For Whom The Bell Tolls
“It is like a merry-go-round, Robert Jordan thought. Not a merry-go-round that travels fast, and with a calliope for music… This is like a wheel that goes up and around… It is a vast wheel, set at an angle, and each time it goes around and is back to where it starts. There are no prizes either, he thought, and no one would choose to ride this wheel. You ride it each time and make the turn with no intention ever to have mounted.”
Hemingway directs the pace of For Whom The Bell Tolls like a bull-dozer leveling a wooded field—there’s an occasional deviation from the course, but context is never lost: Robert Jordan must destroy a bridge. Jordan suspects this mission will be his last and Hemingway does his part to convince the reader that he’s right. War planes are described as “wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks” that “do not move like sharks… They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.” Similarly, a lone hawk, hunting over a meadow becomes insignificant in comparison to “the big afternoon clouds… coming… over the mountains.” Death is approaching and Jordan realizes the merry-go-round he’s on will only take him to meet it sooner.
While Hemingway is building a box around Jordan’s life and applying pressure to the walls, he introduces Maria, a love interest and in doing so establishes the main conflict of the novel: Robert Jordan wants to live, but only has a few hours to do so.
This forces a confrontation with the question of whether “it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years?” On this question, Hemingway seems to suggest it’s the frequency and intensity of our experiences that define a full life. For instance, Jordan at one point reflects that “he would like to spend some time with Maria. That was the simplest expression of it. He would like to spend a long, long time with her.” This comes off as empty and bland—limited by his ability to verbalize the relative intensity of certain experiences over others. While Hemingway spends little real estate on this declaration, he dedicates significant effort to conveying the intensity of a delicate moment:
“From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze…”
Later he explains “living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing.”
Life consists of occurrences—most fleeting, some memorable, and a few intense—surrounded by the vastness of death. To live, one should seek to maximize the density of meaningful experience with the time they have remaining. As Jordan reflects, “I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
In four days, Robert Jordan completes a cycle on the merry-go-round. He is born, lives, and perishes.