Lecture 17 - Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part II [October 27, 2011] |
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.
Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls