Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love in War
Cultural Connections
Violence, Cowardice, and Death
The Eternality of the Present
Summary
Analysis
Maria asks Robert Jordan what he is thinking about, and he tells her that he is thinking about Gaylord’s, the hotel where he knows “some Russians,” and the book that he will write someday. She asks him if he likes Russians, since Kashkin was a Russian, and Jordan says that he thought he was “very beautiful and very brave.” Pilar says that this is “nonsense,” since Jordan shot him. Andrés asks him if he believes in “the possibility of a man seeing ahead what is to happen to him,” as Kashkin saw his own death and asked to be shot preemptively. Jordan says that he believes no man can see the future, and that Kashkin was merely “tired and nervous” and imagining “ugly things.”
Time and time again, Robert Jordan refuses to take superstition—notably the possibility of predicting the future—seriously, choosing instead to focus on the present, as well as logical explanations for potentially supernatural phenomenon (like Kashkin being able to envision his own death).
Themes
Jordan says that “fear produces evil visions,” and Pablo says that his arrival was a “bad sign.” Pilar says that Robert Jordan is “deaf” and “cannot hear music,” and that she foretold Kashkin’s death. Jordan insists that she saw only “fear and apprehension” in his face, not death, but Pilar says that he “smelt of death”: it reminds her of the story of Blanquet, a matador’s assistant who smelled death on his matador, Manolo, who was then killed in the ring. Pablo says that he doesn’t know if he believes in superstition, but he does believe that Pilar “can divine events from the hand.”
Both Pilar and Pablo push back against Robert Jordan’s anti-superstitious notions: whereas Jordan attributes “fear,” amplified by war, to imagining “evil visions,” Pilar and Pablo believe these “visions”—particularly Pilar’s visions of the future—to be true. Again, Robert Jordan prefers to think about the facts of the present, not the possibilities of the future.
Themes
Fernando wants to know what death smells like, and Pilar says that to know what death smells like, one must know the smell of the ship when “there is a storm and the portholes are closed up.” After, “you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo […] and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares,” waiting for an old woman, who will “drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered,” to emerge; you must then kiss her.
Pilar provides a vivid description of death’s “scent,” suggesting both the overwhelming power of death and the fear it inspires. Pilar represents death as an old woman who must be “kissed,” implicitly connecting death to both sex and femininity—and demonstrating the power of all of these forces.
Themes
Then, Pilar continues, you must smell a “refuse pail with dead flowers in it,” so that the scent of the woman and the ship mingles with the flowers. While walking through the city after, you must smell an “abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night,” when prostitutes gather in the park. Jordan looks outside of the cave and sees that the storm has ended and the snow has stopped falling.
By describing death in detail, Pilar indicates that death may be in the guerillas’ future, even as the snow stops falling outside: though the storm has died down, tensions are rising.
Themes
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