Abstract

The aim of this research paper is to demonstrate that Hemingway's work, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ to show commitment to representing the war literature in which he realistically depicts the war scenes and the crippling impact of violence upon the individuals. This research is qualitative research carried out within the framework of theory, fiction, and history. We have deeply and analytically studied the text and marked the relevant portions. After many close readings and intensive study of the text, the relevant textual evidence was located, marked, and extracted. In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway enthusiastically depicts the heroic actions of Robert Jordan, the American protagonist, fighting for the Spanish cause and the other loyalists who were engaged in resisting fascist aggression against the democratic setup.

Key Words

Ethos, War Literature, Ernest Hemingway, Novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls

Introduction

Invariably all of Hemingway's major novels deal with the theme of war, personal or/and national, psychological or physical, directly or indirectly. His personal involvement in the war as an ambulance driver and war correspondent gave him first-hand experience of what happened in wartime and how war affects the individual physically and psychologically. This being said, Hemingway's fiction illustrates with stark realism vivid scenes of war and its repercussions on the individual's life. His protagonists, it is absolutely true, are spirited human beings, charged with the passion of keeping up human dignity at any cost when it comes to living disgracefully or dying honorably. Death, to them, is not a dreadful thing; rather, they conceptualize death as the culmination of the struggle for the ultimate success; death is far better than humiliating life. They have no romanticized viewpoint of death, nor do they consider it any spiritual means of sublime life in the transcendental world. They confront death as it is inevitable to face it; dying is an inescapable reality; it can't be ignored; therefore, meeting death in an honorable way when the circumstances demand so is characteristic of Hemingway heroes. Committed to representing depoliticized vision of romance for war, his novels look through the travails of humanity and suggest a better future for mankind based upon values of broad humanity, tolerance, and respect. His fictional accounts of the adventures of these heroes are embedded in his personal life: his efforts, for example, to enlist in the army during world war-I and subsequent assignment of ambulance driver for the Red Cross provide material for the novel. He received wounds in the knee during the war. These experiences provided him with valuable material for his novels. Although he was seriously injured in the war yet, he carried a deeply injured person on his back to a safe place in the midst of heavy mortar fire. Backer sums up the episode "He remembered afterward how he had carried the final hundred yards. But he never made it delivered his man, and lost unconsciously." (Backer, 45)

He was admitted into hospital and treated where 237 shell fragments were removed from his knee that shows how daringly he had endured the pain. This episode serves the novelist to depict the heroes who undergo similar piercing pain without feeling disappointed or struck down by pain; rather, pain inspires them to accomplish the deed. Pain is only a minor obstacle in the way of reaching the ultimate goal. Success or failures do not matter in Hemingway's fiction; the reward of struggle is the sense of fulfillment and accomplishment of the deed arising out of the action. The idea of commitment to war is notably not often an idea adhered to by those who frequently write about violence, aggression, or diabolism present in human nature. It is especially in the distinct writings of Hemingway, Sassoon, and a few other writers who make the war and its ravages the subject of their war discourse. 




Aims and Objectives of the Study

i. The aim of this project is to demonstrate that Hemingway's works, both long and short fiction, show commitment to representing the war literature in which he realistically depicts the war scenes and the crippling impact of violence upon the individual.

ii. The object of this paper is to state that Hemingway's novels deal with war and violence and make a significant contribution to the development of the praxis of war literature.

iii. The study attempts to illustrate that the depiction of war and its traumatic effects upon the individuals not only generate a discussion upon the politics of war and its beneficiaries but also express Hemingway's stance on the necessary evil of war. 




Research Questions

i. How does Hemingway's fiction address, through the depiction of violence and death, the question of war and its impact on the human physique and psyche?

ii. What is war literature, and how far does Hemingway's novels, especially, For Whom The Bell Tolls, conform to the tenets of war literature?

iii. How far Hemingway's war protagonists are the spokesmen of his stance on war? And how does he resolve the critical problem of personal and national attitudes to war?




Significance of the Study

The present study is significant as it provides historically grounded information about the ethos of war as it is depicted in Hemingway's fiction and illustrates the devastating impact of war on the individual's psyche.

The study dedicates itself to analyzing the selected work of Hemingway in order to understand the psychological reasons behind an individual's partaking in war. It also discusses in detail Hemingway's personal involvement in the war, his changing views, and the global impact of his novels.

Furthermore, this project is important so far as it analyses Hemingway's novel from the perspective of war literature and investigates the causes behind the characters' involvement in the fateful encounters 

Research Methodology

i. This research is qualitative research carried out within the framework of theory, fiction, and history. It is premised upon an explanatory and interpretative analysis of the chosen text, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is an interpretation of war and its traumatic effects upon the individuals not only generate a discussion upon the politics of war and its beneficiaries but also express Hemingway's stance on the necessary evil of war. 

As the research, by its very qualitative nature, required intensive study of the text to figure out and collect relevant evidence to support our argument, we have deeply and analytically studied the text and marked the relevant portions. After many close readings and intensive study of the text, the relevant textual evidence was located, marked, and extracted. After the extraction of the data, it was meticulously sorted out and carefully categorized. Finally, war literature perspectives of the novel are applied to analyze the data to address our research questions. Finally, detailed conclusions are drawn from the critical discussions.

Literature Review

Hemingway, who covered many conflicts, without a doubt brushed with death commonly. He was even fixated on the shadow of death; however, he got away from it consistently. Among all types of craftsmanship, the old Greek misfortune is by all accounts the workmanship, which can carry the best satisfaction to people. Hemingway significantly gets the point. He is acceptable at focusing on and portraying passing, and he has a solid, exceptional feeling of death. Indeed, Hemingway's life and works are intently attached with death. Hemingway's works, particularly his brief tales, are loaded up with killing, blood, and demise. Hemingway holds the perspective that demise is unavoidable and is the greatest and most alarming reality. It has a sort of gigantic and secretive force that can deny individuals of their lives, freedoms, and everything in a second. Passing is a sort of time everlasting, while love, fellowship, and life are only trash. Subsequently, men shouldn't be inebriated with the fantasy of progress; satisfaction and culmination, for death, would deny them of their lives whenever. So Hemingway recounts this inclination through an assortment of abstract figures. 

In Indian Camp, Hemingway connects incredible significance with the impact of the stunning occasions on the young man, Nick, who saw them. For the occasion, the occasions don't appear to have an extraordinary impact on the local kid; however, it is vital that Nick transforms into a gravely scarred and anxious young fellow. He has encountered the most common way of pondering reality and passing. In this brief tale, Nick consistently witnesses blood, wretchedness, incident, and passing. So he inquired, "for what reason did he commit suicide, Daddy?' 'Do numerous men commit suicide, Daddy?" (Chen, ed. 1989, p.69) 

In the Killers, Nick encounters one more type of death. He is stunned and perplexed by Anderson's quiet and refusal to escape from the executioners. "I will escape this town," Nick said, "I can't tolerate thinking about him holding up in the room and realizing he will get it. It's excessively accursed dreadful." (Chen, ed. 1989, p.222) what Nick feels unfit to bear isn't simply the fear, yet additionally Anderson's unapproachable and impassive reactions, which lets him know that there is no chance to get out whenever one is engaged with the inconvenience. Lamentably, the world is brimming with inconveniences. 

In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway communicated his translation of death through Henry. "The world breaks everybody, and a while later, many are solid at the messed up places. Yet, those that it won't break it kill. It kills the excellent and the exceptionally delicate and the extremely valiant fairly. In case you are none of those, you can be certain that it will kill you as well, yet there will be no unique rush." (Hemingway, 1992, p.73) 

Based on Hemingway's life and works, his feeling of death came to fruition during the 1920s, and the topic of death saturates his works. Taking into account this, the world is a major combat zone, bull-battling field, and boxing field, which is brimming with fights and battle, blood and fire, pitilessness and wickedness, trouble and passing, while life is defenseless, irrelevant, and loaded up with rout and misery. In any case, these previously mentioned perspectives are not far-reaching in understanding his feeling of death. Hemingway's uniqueness lies during the time spent adjusting his perspective from repulsiveness to quiet until separation. As he would like to think, it is satisfying and agreeable to feel the repulsiveness of death and later to accomplish separation of death. 

Everybody is ill-fated to death. It is an everlasting and vulnerable normal law. Hemingway consistently makes endeavors to set demise to the side, and fleetingness disregards the sadness and disturbance even with death, which empowers him to accomplish a sort of a moral or profound triumph. Thus, Hemingway's feeling of death incorporates not just the itemized and striking depiction of death and repulsiveness yet, in addition, a stylish movement denied of battle and profound triumph. In the First World War, he conveyed an oblivious officer on his back to the guide station regardless of his own genuine wounds. Once en route toward the west of Africa, his significant other's vein was parted. He sent her to the medical clinic just to track down that the specialist had gone out fishing. Right now, his better half's heartbeat was more vulnerable and more fragile. The assistant encouraged Hemingway to say the last Good-Bye to his significant other; however, he rejected. Hemingway chose to work himself. With the assistance of the understudy, he tracked down the wrecked vein and cleaned it, then, at that point, directed the blood bonding to his significant other. Finally, his significant other was brought around. 

In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomb, the hero appreciates bliss. Short as it was, yet without a doubt, it existed. "You realize I don't think I'd at any point been anxious about anything once more." (Chen, ed. 1989, p. 25) Francis has turned into a tough man. He bites the dust without laments. To Hemingway, men should take an inspirational perspective despite death rather than a negative one. Nobody can escape from death, yet his soul can be separated.

Ernest Hemingway, the leading exponent of American literature, produced a number of novels and a volume of short stories, which not only brought him worldwide fame but also earned him the most prestigious noble prize for literature. He brought into light in these novels the problems related to war and presented protagonists who bear a close resemblance to their author and raised strong voices in favor of sanity condemning the use of reckless power and authority that perpetrated untold miseries upon the masses. He lived in times, that is, the 20th century, that was rife with bloodshed, violence, pain, political rivalry, and hostility, and, hence, he could not remain aloof from the repercussions of the extensive use of power. What particularly gives authenticity and credibility to his works is the fact of his personal involvement in World Wars One and two as well as the Spanish civil war. Whatever of war and its terrible effects he depicts in his novels hold great significance in war literature. He was a versatile figure; as an adventurer and fiction writer, his life provided him with stuff for the construction of his novels. His participation in the wars, first-hand experience of the warrior ethos, fatal wounds he received in the war, and direct interaction with the warring factions lend his work incredibly realistic quality, and the reader finds himself in the thick of the battle. The viewpoint he gives in the fiction is not that of an imaginative writer fancying war between the imaginary countries and peoples but of a stark realist whose sharp observations and vivid description reconstruct the scenario. It is, therefore, not incorrect to say that Hemingway's life and works are inseparable. The subject matter of his fiction comes from his varied life experiences, both as an adventurer and war participant. The inseparability of his life from the works gives them a semi-autobiographical value; that is why his protagonists have often been interpreted in the light of his own life. Though he artistically maintains a distance from his protagonists by inventing a narrator, there have been consistently critical efforts concentrated upon conflating the author with the characters. There is, however, a strong tendency in Hemingway fiction to project the images of bloodshed, violence, and death that is the corollary of war. His views about war, it is important to understand, evolved and transformed during his lifelong commitment to literature. He remained a dynamic and ever-changing person in the face of miserable death and honorable life. Critics have found the relationship between the writer and the protagonists and based upon the fair degree of resemblance between the two generalized Hemingway's assertions on war. This dissertation is an attempt to illustrate how the author's viewpoint underwent changes during his lifetime and how his works became the site of reference to trace this evolution of thought. He gave to the world literature a series of unforgettable characters, vivid and brilliant, presented in a style that is characterized by succinctness and brevity aimed at a direct transcription of the character and actions. The study of his prominent novels, including Farewell to Arms, Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, clearly illustrates Hemingway's commitment to articulating his thoughts about war and humanism. With an uncompromising stance about the need of demonstrating indomitable resolution and willpower to stand the pain in the way of achieving human dignity, his novels are statements of humanitarian zeal for the better future of mankind, the future that is premised upon peace and prosperity, not violence, death, and terror. He realized early in his writing career that the monster of World Wars had left the people battered, frustrated, disillusioned, and hopeless of the future, and they were in need of a moral direction that he believed was the function of the artist to perform, but it is important to understand that he was neither a propagandist nor an explicit moralist, rather he provided the "lost generations" with moral code that emanates from the lived conditions of the characters, and that put them on the path of survival with grace in a world of bloodshed, violence, and massacre. Since Hemingway himself had suffered a lot from the wars, both physically and psychologically, these sufferings helped him express artistically in his novel the viewpoint about war, death, and humanism. There is a striking similarity between Hemingway and his protagonists in terms of sufferings they undergo as a result of involving in destructive action. These protagonists always live in a violent world, get wounded in the war, become psychologically depressed, and suffer from insomnia, frustration, and a lingering sense of the futility of life. It was this brooding sense of absurdity that made Hemingway think of the modern American generation in terms of "lost generations." In the absence of moral and religious values that once held the people together, the present generations went completely degenerated and spent their lives in drinking, sex, wandering, and hunting, etc. Hemingway's novels clearly illustrate this direction of modernity as the characters of these novels are seen indulging unscrupulously in drinking, gambling, sex. Since Hemingway had a lifelong commitment to representing the war-stricken generations whose lives were futile, his fiction implicitly attempts to provide a sense of purpose and meaningfulness by providing them such protagonists who display certain moral values and personal codes that inspire the generations to depend upon their personal merits to make their lives worth living. A systematic reading of his novels reveals that his ideas about war kept on changing throughout his career. This transformation of ideas was inspired by what he experienced during the war. Even when he depicts the heroes confronting death and violence fighting bravely against the odds of life, never submitting before the cruelties of fate, he never compromises a bond of humanitarian values and stresses upon dying gracefully.

Not only did Hemingway suffer physically during wars and other enterprises, but he also experienced psychological pains that he transformed into his fiction. His heroes are, to a lesser or greater

extent, the spokesperson of his notions about life, war, and humanity. War left a terrible impact upon his personality and made him patient with severe insomnia; that is why it is said about him that he had to keep lights on for a longer time so that he could sleep. Such was the psychological effect upon him that he could not extricate himself from these terrors throughout his life. Horrors of war that devastated the social and cultural values of the Euro-American world made individual life absurd, meaningless, and futile. Hemingway's personal life, as well as his heroes, conforms to these living conditions of his age. But Hemingway, being the spokesman of his generation, felt the responsibility of eliminating the irredeemable sense of isolation and frustration felt by the post-war generations. Hence, his heroes, in one way or the other, demonstrate rare courage and commitment to keep alive the noble values of life. They remain loyal to their purpose, do not yield before the powerful adversaries, suffer intensely without grumbling on their fate, compromise their interests over broader human values, and finally win moral victories. For long literature has been used to promote romantic ideas about war, but in modern times, as in the 20th century, the war had broad intolerable suffering and tribulation for humanity. Writers like Hemingway felt the need to dispel the hold of previous ideas. They wrote fiction that describes the psychological implications of war and the terrible impact on the innocent masses vividly. Hemingway's personal life is a point of reference here. He showed that war was not always a romantic ideal and that the warrior was an ordinary person who was many times compelled to act against his will in order to keep alive the romantic ideals of wars and fulfill the expectations of the people back home. The Sun Also Rises is one such novel by Hemingway in which the member of the lost generation while way their lives in drinking, dancing, whoring, and wandering in order to communicate their frustration. They have nothing serious in their life to live for. The institution of marriage that was once sacred and was the guarantee of happy family life has given way to free sex. Traditionalism has been replaced with hedonism. With no sense of morality or religion, these people waste away their lives in activities that provide them sexual pleasures. They have money and mean to live adventurous, though futile life. Therefore, they live in hotels, camps and prefer promiscuity. Hemingway represented with stark realism the lives of young post-war generations who were called "the lost generations." He used this term as a trope in his novels and short stories, and it can be borne out from the perusal of his works that his characters have been constructed out of the conceptualization of the modes of living of the lost generation. Hemingway holds the view that death is unavoidable so should be confronted boldly, without any fear of extinction. It does not mean that he had Christian belief in the eternity of soul or the existence of world hereafter where the Christians will be judged according to their good or bad deeds and accordingly sent heaven or hell. Instead, he propagated the philosophy of living with self-honor without any mystified hope of regeneration in some other world. His idea of death was based on a common-sense theory that death was a mysterious power that deprived people of their lives, rights, and joys and everything they have in a moment .death is a permanent and inescapable reality, so it should be fearlessly embraced. Love, friendship, fraternity, and pleasures of life are all transient only death is permanent. Therefore, people should not have romantic ideas and dreams or success, happiness, and consummation, for death would deprive them of all these illusions. Those who are intoxicated with the dream of power and success will only meet frustration and disillusionment. In order to express these ideas, Hemingway has projected a variety of characters in his fiction.

Analysis of the Novel: For Whom the Bell Tolls as War Literature

Conclusion

Hemingway had an unfaltering commitment to the future of humanity, which he believed was at stake in the Spanish Civil War in Spain, and the similar Wars were being fought in the other parts of the wing where fascists in different forms were wiping out the denotative values. In For Whom Belle Tolls, Hemingway enthusiastically depicts the heroic actions of R.Jordan, the American protagonist, fighting for the Spanish cause and the other loyalists who were engaged in resisting fascist aggression against the democratic setup. Whereas the novelist was out and out enemy of the fascist regime and their policies because of their dictatorial mindset, he was also critical of the loyalists mindless killing of fascists for their barbaric atrocity; the antifascist hero was facing deep conflict about whether they should exterminate the fascist for their atrocities or avoid killing the human beings. They wanted to save humanity from the hands of fascists but at the same time were hesitant of committing the same acts of savagery for which they hated the fascists. They believed, "All mankind is one volume; any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Hemingway was definitely divided in his views and political stance. As a witness in the novel, he remains ambivalent and does not support the loyalists unequivocally; that is why his political viewpoint in the Spanish Civil War was questioned due to his ambivalent attitude in the novel. However, Hemingway's political stance depicted in the novel was the consequence of his deep concern for his humanity. On the one hand, he denounced the untold atrocities committed by fascists and saw the necessity of killing the fascists in order to win the war; on the other hand, being sensitive and democratic-republican, he considered murdering a person sin against whole humanity; therefore, he stood divided about exterminating fascist. The close reading of the novel reveals that Hemingway did not favor the loyalist and criticized both sides for their lack of humanitarian as well as democratic vision. His vision of war and warring factions is that neither of them was absolutely good or absolutely evil; that is why he did not consider either of them fully justified in their actions. He was, first and foremost, a humanist and a democrat, and this is the reason why he raised his voice against any form of aggression and violence against democracy and humanity anywhere in the world. 

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