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Narrative Messages In For Whom The Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway

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Abstract:
Between 1937 and 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote eleven articles for the North American Newspaper Alliance on the Spanish Civil War and published For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of his most renowned novels. The two types of writing are significantly different on surface value and can be told apart most evidently by their differing narrative voices. This essay is an analysis of how the ideas that arise in the two types of texts and the techniques that are used vary in the two genres and how these affect the overall message transmitted to the reader. The investigation for this essay involved reading the articles and the novel and identifying common grounds that could be isolated and compared. The most prominent differences in technique relate to the approaches that Hemingway takes to …show more content…

In addition, while the ideas that emerge also differ, they only form the surface to the message which Hemingway conveys. This message, that is, the expression of futility regarding the actions of the Republic forces who acknowledge their unfavorable odds but who still fight on, is consistent in both writing types. For example, even though the portrayal of bombings vastly differs between the two genres, they both show that the Republic is less prepared than the Fascists. Thus, one could conclude that the written pieces have the same purpose since they convey the same message. However, given that the narrative voice in For Whom the Bell Tolls allows Hemingway to convey the message through a wider variety of methods and from different angles, the novel possesses an advantage over the articles at expressing the message. Additionally, since the novel was written after the Republic lost the war, Hemingway might have tried to express this message more profoundly in

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