For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway and SparkNotes

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight,"... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586638300
• ISBN13: 9781586638306
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Sparknotes
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

I ordered For Whom The Bell Tolls and received the Sparknotes TWICE by mistake and never received th

Didn't read it.

Riveting and powerful, one of the ten best novels of the 20th century

For Whom the Bell Tolls is quite simply one of the best novels ever written. Honestly, I had relatively low expectations before reading it. I read A Farewell to Arms and found the terse, repetitive prose and stilted dialogue underwhelming. For Whom the Bell Tolls is superior to A Farewell to Arms in every way. This is a complex novel with some of the most memorable characters in modern literature. This mesmerizing novel neither glorifies war, not does it vilify it. Hemmingway's detached prose is world weary, exposing both sides of the conflict, allowing us to see that war, inevitable and futile, is never simple. Characters on both sides of the conflict struggle with their own fears and regrets. Both sides commit, and are subjected to, the atrocities and horrors of war. As different as each side may think they are from the other, in the end, they are all human and are not as different as they think. For Whom the Bell Tolls is riveting and powerful, easily one of the ten best novels of the 20th century. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

A powerful tale of the Spanish Civil War

Set during the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American who is serving as a demolitions expert for the Republican cause. The novel follows his experiences with a band of guerrilla fighters as he undertakes a mission to blow up a strategic bridge. The whole novel, except for some flashbacks and reminiscences of various characters, covers just a few days. Although the novel focuses on a small number of characters in a fairly compressed time period, Hemingway attains a real epic feel with this book. The novel is fairly lengthy (471 pages in the 2003 Scribner edition), but I found it to be a swift read--indeed, often difficult to put down. There is much that is noteworthy about this novel. It offers a compelling perspective on war from the viewpoint of guerrilla forces, rather than conventional forces (interested readers might want to check out Mao Tse-Tung's "On Guerrilla Warfare" for some theoretical and historical perspective). The novel also deals with the phenomenon of ideologically committed foreign forces in Spain's Fascist-versus-Republican conflict. Hemingway deals with the issues of love and sex in a combat zone, as well as with the roles of women in a guerrilla force. Other significant issues include loyalty, leadership, communications, military hardware, the impact of weather and terrain, and the connection between guerrilla and conventional forces. Particularly interesting is Hemingway's portrait of Robert Jordan as a technically and tactically skilled guerrilla fighter, and as a leader of guerrilla fighters. Thus the book should interest not just lovers of literature, but also serious military professionals and students of the history of warfare. Hemingway offers a grim and graphic look at the brutality of 20th century warfare. War is not glamorized or sanitized, and atrocities are described in unflinching detail. The characters explore the ethics of killing in war. As the story progresses, Hemingway skillfully peels back the layers of Jordan and other characters to reveal their psychological wounds. But the book is not all about pain and violence. In the midst of war Hemingway finds the joy and beauty that keep his characters going. He also incorporates storytelling as a powerful motif in the book; his characters share stories with each other, recall missing untold stories, or resist a story too hard to bear. In Hemingway's world storytelling is as essential a human activity as eating, fighting, and lovemaking. Hemingway's writing appeals to all the senses as he creates some vivid scenes. He demonstrates his mastery of the art of fiction; he continually makes interesting choices and creates some really striking and beautiful passages. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is an exceptionally haunting work of literature; I consider this rich and rewarding text to be an essential volume in the canon of war fiction. For intriguing companion texts that al

Still haunted by Hemingway

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" was the first Hemingway I ever read. I was a high school kid in the early 1970s, working on my campus newspaper, newly graduated from Jack London but not yet ready for Jack Kerouac. To my young eyes, it was a good action story: Robert Jordan, the passionate American teacher joins a band of armed gypsies in the Spanish Civil War. He believes one man can make a difference. The whole novel covers just 68 hours, during which Jordan must find a way to blow up a key bridge behind enemy lines. In that short time, Jordan also falls in love with Maria, a beautiful Spanish woman who has been raped by enemy soldiers. The whole spectrum of literature was refracted through the prism of my youth: Good guys and bad guys, sex and blood, life and death. For me, just a boy, the journey from abstraction to clarity was only just beginning.Re-reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at 42 (roughly the age Hemingway was when he published it), I have lost my ability to see things clearly in black and white. My vision is blurred by irony, as I note that two enemies, the moral killer Anselmo and the sympathetic fascist Lieutenant Berrendo, utter the very same prayer. For the first time, I see that the book opens with Robert Jordan lying on the "pine-needled floor of the forest" and closes as he feels his heart pounding against the "pine needle floor of the forest"; Jordan ends as he begins, perhaps having never really moved. I certainly could never have seen at 16 how dying well might be more consequential than living well. And somehow the light has changed in the past 26 years, so that I now truly understand how the earth can move.As a teen, I missed another crucial element, even though Vietnam was still a seeping wound. Three pivotal days in Jordan's life force him to question his own role in a futile war. He wonders if dying for a political cause might be too wasteful, but he ultimately believes that dying to save another individual is a man's most heroic act. The book's title is taken from John Donne's celebrated poem: "No man is an Iland ... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." It was not about loneliness and aloneness, as I once had thought, but about the seamless fabric of all life: What happens to one happens to all. I am not blind to Hemingway's flaws. He was a good short writer, and what was short was almost always better. Pilar's tale on the mountainside has been widely acclaimed as the most powerful of Hemingway's prose. Her story within a story is nothing less than a contemporary myth."For Whom the Bell Tolls" has also been regarded as Hemingway's capitulation to critics who barked that his innovative style was too lean, and as a consciously commercial exercise for which Hollywood might (and did) pay handsomely. Robert Jordan, in so many respects, was a tragic mythical hero in the vein of Achilles, Gawain and Samson. "For Whom the Bell Tolls

A book for all people and all ages

Usually, even with the best books, I would say that "this book is not for everyone." Not so with this novel. I truly believe that this book IS for everyone. Unlike so much other 20th century literature, one need not be well read to get something out of it. The story is of two of man's most cherished and hated traditions: Love and War. The tragedy is that we have had so much of the latter and so little of the former. We see much of both in "For Whom The Bell Tolls." It is a tender story of two young people who just want to live a "normal" life together during the Spainish civil war, but who are prevented from doing thus due to their being in the wrong place at the wrong time.It is incredulous to me that there were other reviewers who found this book "boring." I can only surmise that anyone who would find a novel such as this boring will not find anything "exciting" unless it has Arnold Scharzenegger swinging around a machine gun. But that, I believe, is the fault of the reader's lack of attention span and cannot be blamed on Hemingway.The author writes that "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it." I would agree. Anyone else who agrees, and anyone who has a passion and zest for life should read this book. One of the best examples of American literature in the 20th century.