The Shape of Equivocation in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls

Abstract

S INCE THE DEATH of Ernest Hemingway in I96I, an extensive reassessment and reevaluation of his later work have taken place. While Hemingway's defenders argue that extrinsic factors such as the sheer popularity of those later works and Hemingway's ambivalent political views have alienated the judging literati and, indeed, prevented them from seeing the more complex questions which Hemingway approached in such works,1 others have argued that the imitative, repetitive, and self-consciously profound nature of Hemingway's style in his later years led to decidedly inferior novels and stories. Hemingway, writes Leslie Fiedler of that later work, no longer creating, but merely imitating the marvelous spare style that was once a revelation. . . . What was once an anti-rhetoric has become now merely another rhetoric, perhaps our most familiar one, . . .[which] even its inventor cannot revive . . . for us.2 The critical argument, then, has scarcely been joined, since the two groups I have distinguished have constructed their arguments on such different bases. My purpose here is to suggest a new basis for evaluation: one upon which these other standards of critical appraisal would appear to depend. I shall be concerned here with no less than the effectiveness of Hemingway's work as depicted narrative tragedy. Style, complexity of thematic questioning-all such matters are subsumed by the encompassing tragic forms I shall discuss. I shall argue that the idea of tragedy lies at the center of Hemingway's oeuvre but that this idea is worked out narratively in different novelistic forms throughout his career. My exemplary text is Hemingway's novel of