The Sun Also Rises & For Whom the Bell Tolls

The theme of the books will establish the thesis of the study, and that theme will be articulated along the lines established by Wirt Williams in The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway. The thesis of the study will be that Hemingway's works in general, and these two novels specifically, are tragic tales, and that this tragic outlook influences every aspect of Hemingway's writing.

The Sun Also Rises has as its setting the Europe of the early 1920s. The time is one in which the world was finding its bearings after the First World War, and a time in which the Americans in the novel are seeking to find themselves in a foreign land, having left their native country for various reasons of dissatisfaction and disillusion. Some critics have argued that Hemingway's novel was meant to be a depiction of the "lost generation" of young post-World War I Americans looking for themselves in a setting stripped of its spiritual meaning and of any values in which the world believed before the war. As Baker writes, ". . . There can be no doubt that, with his brilliant dramatization of the moral predicament of a small group of Jazz Age D.P.'s, Hemingway

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s own eyes by handing Brett to her bullfighter and taking a humiliating beating from his philosophical and tonal antagonist, Robert" (Williams 46). Jake's tragedy, then, is found in his inability to stop loving Brett even when that love is self-destructive. The tragedy of Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls is a man whose tragedy is a more proud one. Robert is a man who takes action at a crucial point in his life, an action which inevitably will mean a violent death, and in taking such an action he redeems himself, at least in his own eyes. As he awaits the Fascist soldiers in his place of ambush, he thinks to himself of the time he will be winning for his friends and of the redemption he will be winning for himself: "And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make---" (Bell 470). Within Hemingway's tragic vision, however, there is a gentler sense of the beauty of life, which Robert expresses as he readies to kill and die: "He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles . .
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Approximate Word count = 2681
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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