My Impressions Having Read “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway

Authors have always been writing about war. Ernest Hemingway, an American writer of the twentieth century, was one of them. That is to say, his novel “For Whom The Bell Tolls” is held by critics nearly the greatest masterpiece on this topic. Its object is the fatal changes in people’s lives during four days of the Spanish Civil War.

War is as a circumstance under which the personalities of the characters, i.e. Robert Jordan, Anzelmo, Pablo, Pilar and Maria, who all llive in the same war camp, are laid bare. To begin, the main character, Robert Jordan, is a young American exploder who is ordered to blow up a bridge in the Spanish mountains. In fact, he used to work in an American university but, as Spain has already become his second motherland, Robert has joined the revolution against the fascists willingly. As follows, in the mountains he gets acquainted to an old man named Anzelmo who is to accompany Jordan tto the camp. As he realizes later, although Anzelmo is quite strong physically, he cannot fight as successfully as the young; nevertheless he is respected by everyone for his life experience and his useful pieces of advice. The first man RRobert meets in the camp is Pablo, the leader of the camp. He belongs to the “lost generation”, i.e. men who have survived during the First World War but have been mentally disturbed. As a result, Pablo is an alcohol addict. That is why, the actual boss in that camp is Pilar, his wife, as mentally she is a very strong woman, who is afraid neither to argue with any man, even Pablo, nor to be thought of as a cruel woman. Actually, she is not a brutal person at all. To cite an example, Pilar treats Maria (a young girl who has got to the camp after her escape from the fascists’ prison) as her own beloved daughter. Besides, MMaria is very pretty even though her hair has been cropped in jail and she has always been afraid of men but when she sees Robert she does not get scared. Moreover, she even falls in love with him at first sight. On the whole, all the people in the camp live like a family and Jordan becomes its newest member.

The story begins with the point where Anzelmo accompanies Robert to the war camp mastered by Pablo, who meets the nnewcomer in a rather unfriendly way – holding a carbine in his arms. Fortunately, soon the formal boss of the camp gets more amicable towards Jordan. In addition to this, the exploder is introduced to the rest of the people living there. To illustrate this, Robert gets acquainted to Pilar, Maria, the old gypsy Rafael and the guard Agustin. Apart from this, right after the sunset the young man goes up to the bridge he is to blow up and examines it: makes some necessary calculations and drawings. When he comes back to the camp everybody is having supper, so Robert joins them too. During the meal Jordan starts quarrelling with Pablo who is then forced to leave the cave, as the tension in the atmosphere becomes unbearable. No doubt, after this incident the young soldier gets nervous – he has been nearly ready to kill Pablo, and no one could blame him for that, – that is why he takes a bottle of cognac (he calls it “medicine”) out of his bag and drinks some of it. Therefore he calms down and starts talking to Maria and Pilar; he tells them about his father who has been shot for bbeing ...