Lecture 17 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part II
Overview
Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls by analyzing the contrast Robert Jordan draws between “distant homes” and the on-site environment of the Spanish Civil War. She juxtaposes his invocations of Paris and Missouri to the rooted communities of the guerillas, and reads analogies of racial and ethnic conflict--specifically, the references to the Moors in Spain and persecuted blacks in America--as a point of tension, an ironic commentary on the coexistence of the distant home and the on-site environment. She concludes with a reading of the American Civil War as a temporally distant home which Jordan tries to recuperate in the present moment of European conflict.