Mourning and Melancholia in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell...

Mourning and Melancholia in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) begins with a quotation from John Donne’s â€Å"Meditation XVII.† With this epigraph, Hemingway identifies the source of his title and defines the connections achieved between human beings through mourning.: Donne’s argument begins, â€Å"No man is an island,† and it concludes with an assertion of our bond to the dead: â€Å"never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.† Proper mourning acknowledges the losses to our self in the death of another. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls depicts such connections to the dead and examines the emotional effects of incomplete mourning in terms that parallel Freud’s own†¦show more content†¦In both works, Hemingway praises the volunteers who died fighting to protect republican values. In an introduction to the â€Å"Eulogy† written after World War II, Hemingway scolded America for its failure to support these â€Å"premature antifascists† (Nelson 26). At another point, he explains this failure: The majority of the career diplomats of England, France, and the United States , are fascist, and it is they who supply the erroneous information on which their foreign offices and state departments act (Hem on War, 293). The ideologies of the diplomats led to the great bloodbath of the Second World War. Hemingway helps us to mourn the deaths of Jordan and the other volunteers because he affirms that they are, in fact, unacknowledged instances of our own losses. Yet, many of the volunteers in the International Corps during the Spanish Civil War felt betrayed by Hemingway’s depictions of literary and historical characters and events. Some of the veterans criticized the lack of political ideology in the central character, the literary self-indulgence of the love relationship between Jordan and Maria, and the negative depictions of several of the leaders of the Republican forces. Pilar’s narrative describing the massacre of civilian villagers provoked the sharpest criticism. According to Milton Wolff, many veterans felt that Hemingway had 2 Page 3 ignored fascist atrocities and betrayed loyalist soldiers who had been killed or wounded in Spain. Wolff also