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
It is three o’clock in the afternoon before the planes come, and Robert Jordan sits in the sun reading the letters that were in the pockets of the dead cavalryman. He surmises that the boy was from Tafalla in Navarra, the son of a blacksmith, twenty-one years old. Jordan reads a letter from the boy’s sister with “quite a lot of religion” in it. He also reads a letter from the boy’s fiancée, which is “completely hysterical with concern for his safety.” He decides that he does not want to read the other letters and puts them away.
Robert Jordan begins to feel guilty about killing the cavalryman when he reads the soldier’s letters, which make him seem real and human—not just a representative of fascist evil—and prompt Jordan to feel that he has committed evil himself.
Themes
Jordan asks himself how many people he has killed, and whether or not he knows it is wrong to kill: he does, but he has killed nonetheless. He refuses to keep track of the number, though he is sure that he has killed more than twenty; he does not know if all of these were real fascists, except for two. “No man,” though, “has a right to take another man’s life unless it is to prevent something worse happening to other people.”
Jordan tells himself that he cannot forget anything about the war, and that he is not a “real Marxist,” since he believes in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jordan thinks that after the war, he can “discard” what he doesn’t believe in. He reflects that he is lucky to have found love, even if he dies tomorrow; he then tells himself to “cut out the dying stuff” and refocus on the war, despite its “great panic cry.”
Jordan also thinks about his politics, realizing that he is too American (he believes in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) to be a Marxist (a Communist), and that after the war, he will have to think about the different beliefs he learned about during the war and decide which of these suit him. In war, it seems, different philosophies can coexist: distinctions are broken down, and thus Jordan, an American, can join forces with Spanish Republicans. After the war, though, those distinctions must be rebuilt. At the same time, Jordan tells himself not to think about the future, again resolving to focus on his role as a combatant in the present.
Themes
