For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway | Characters, Summary, Analysis

For Whom the Bell Tolls was another war novel by Ernest Hemingway that was published in the year 1940. Unlike his other two war novels that were based on World War I, this story revolved around the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War that was fought from 1936 to 1939, many foreigners visited Spain to either help the government of the Second Spanish Republic supported by the Communist Soviet Union or the Nationalist faction which was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. America hadn’t entered the battlegrounds of World War II yet when this novel was published in 1940. The novel is divided into 43 chapters while it tells a story that happens for four days and three nights. The theme of this novel is again Love and War and the futility of war. The involvement of Americans and other foreigners in the Spanish Civil War was obvious as the Civil War was fought between two factions supported by different foreign powers. While the Republicans supported democracy and sided with the USSR, France, and Britain, the Nationalists sided with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The title of the novel was inspired by Metaphysical poet John Donne’s Meditation XVII (No Man is an Island) from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.

Hemingway used a part of Meditation 17 as an epigraph for his novel which says

“No man is an Island, entire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

In these lines, Donne referred to the funeral bells. He was seriously ill during the time he wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasion.

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