Word: jordaning
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...hero of the book, a young American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the Spanish Loyalists, is an agonizing study in schizophrenia. He is working at a job--blowing up a bridge behind the Fascist lines with the help of a guerrilla band--which he knows will result in his death and probably that of some of his helpers. Constantly he berates, wheedles, consoles and prods--himself. Under the inhuman, cracking pressure of events, his personality is more and more dangerously split, and is healed at the final page only by the certainty of his death and separation from...
Schizophrenia is an occupational sickness of civilized men in wartime. Here is a relentless, rending case history of it, really a case history of every free mind that is aware of the present retrogression of Europe. Essentially, Robert Jordan is a psychological week, and his story is only more poignant because on the surface he is a normal, healthy, and super-courageous young man. He loves, as only a Heminway hero can, at both extremes of romance and grossness. He organizes, he leads, he inspires the little group of Spanish peasants who are helping him. But to keep his precarious...
...Whom the Bell Tolls" is, incidentally, a thrilling story--Gary Cooper will fit well into the role of Robert Jordan. The dialogue is surprisingly effective, translated almost literally, as it is, from the Spanish. The picture of war-wracked Spain has an authentic air--there are heroes, villains, and likewise bunglers on both sides. Several brilliant "set pieces" dot the pages of the book: an unbearably bloody and terrifying description of the start of the Revolution in a small village, a nauseous discourse on the "smell of death," and three exciting love episodes. But it is the spiritually tortured character...
...secret rendezvous in Scotland, there told him he had documentary evidence that Germany was preparing war against England. "Would you like to go to the Admiralty?" asked Asquith. Churchill went to his room, opened the Bible at random, read: "Hear, O Israel, thou art to pass over Jordan this day. ..." He took...
...greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come if they blow up the bridge. Jordan goes through with it because he is intellectually convinced that he is helping to defeat fascism. Pilar goes through with it because she is part of the revolution and cannot stop. Pablo's strong instinct to live makes him desert at the last moment and destroy the detonator. Then he, too, realizes in his own way that "no man is an iland." He cannot stand the loneliness of desertion, returns to help...