No Man Is an Island

I had almost never given Spain any thought. Even when I heard names like Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, or Barcelona, they never evoked any particular association or curiosity about the country. Of course, there were also figures like Columbus, Cervantes, or Picasso, but for me all these fragmented impressions never formed a coherent whole. Whether from a historical, geographical, or cultural perspective, my impression of Spain was as shallow as that of most other countries—until the abundance of Spanish sentences and place names in For Whom the Bell Tolls made me, for the first time, glimpse a shadow of Spain as refracted through the eyes of Robert Jordan, this American—through Hemingway’s eyes, to be precise.

Ever since I finished reading The Old Man and the Sea in my teens, my impression of Hemingway had remained stuck there for a long time, until it finally began to change after I read The Sun Also Rises. Born in a time of peace, I’ve always had an inexpressible sense of puzzlement about war. This confusion is not directed at war as a whole, but rather at its details, which I often cannot make sense of no matter how I try. Behind the grand war scenes in film and television, how are these tens of thousands of people actually organized? The marching and fighting, the camps and cooking, the logistics and supplies… All these things are usually glossed over by writers without firsthand experience. Only a soldier like Hemingway, who had personally lived through war, could, with his simple, unadorned yet profoundly truthful language, take readers deep inside and make them feel those countless inexpressible emotions and experiences within war.

These past few days, stuck in Xiamen by the no-show typhoon Nepartak, I had already finished reading The Sicilian, which I’d brought with me, and so I went to a nearby bookstore to pick up two more books, preparing myself for a “protracted battle.” One of them was For Whom the Bell Tolls. It felt reminiscent of The Sun Also Rises, and yet quite different. The Sun Also Rises focuses more on the confusion and disorientation individuals face in the context of war. Although the subject matter is different, in style and feel it indeed has something in common with Kerouac’s On the Road, no wonder both are considered representative works of the “Lost Generation.” For Whom the Bell Tolls, on the other hand, incorporates a much more concrete stance on the Spanish Civil War instead of making generalized comments about war. The author sides neither with the fascists nor with the Republicans, but strives to reflect the different facets of this war as truthfully as possible. Naturally, it also reflects Hemingway’s own reflections and doubts about the various behaviors found in wartime. The theme of suicide appears more than once in the novel, as if laying a foreshadowing thread for the author’s own eventual end.

Yet in my view, the true touchstone of the book still lies in the John Donne poem quoted at the beginning:

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less…”

Therefore, do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls, in the end, for the salvation of your own soul. In a war—or in any society—the role that an individual can play is infinitesimal, and yet each of us is intimately connected with this world. In this world, we are like Robert Jordan: we cannot control the outcome of a war, but, like Robert Jordan, we are inseparably tied to every war; no one is an island. We may choose, like Pablo, to flee at the last moment, only to find, as he does, that there is no way out but to turn back and face it. Or we may, like Robert Jordan, offer to this world even the smallest and humblest measure of our own strength.