Existential Bells Toll for Thee

For Whom the Bell Tolls along with Huckleberry Finn are the very best American novels. I have appreciated them as simple narrative and, as I have re-read them through life, glimpses into our existential becoming. As I have written on this blog, the 19th chapter of Huck Finn defines existentialism in the three most cogent paragraphs in American English. For now I am leaning on the scene in the revolutionary's cave where Robert Jordan decides to let Pablo, the leader of the Republican insurgents, live long enough to help blow up the bridge as the deciding moment. Robert Jordan (Hemingway always uses his full name) ties his existence as bridge destroyer to Pablo in an inauthentic or bad faith bargain. As Sartre points out, bad faith bargains are the devils in our midst.

For the rest of the narrative, we see an evitable end transform into inevitable doom. As I said, both novels can be read aloud to children at bed time because of the wonderful storytelling. A boy and an escaped slave attempt to leave civilization behind and find a life on the river. An American fights fascism by blowing up a bridge real good.

Then the sophomore english term paper kicks in. The river is a symbol of life or the world or our lack of personal freedom or perhaps the presence of our personal freedom - different sophomores have different thesis statements to flesh out. The Spanish Civil War is an alegory for man's struggle with personal ethics and the prevailing tides of history. Huck's raft and Robert Jordan's bridge are allegorical figures from Greek Mythology or derp de derp derp.

In the thin air of high school English these are not right - they are not even wrong. Hemingway wrote a story about a man blowing up a bridge. Twain wrote a story about a youth escaping down the river. Starting and finishing with these existential facts creates a universe in miniature. We live our lives or we live the life of someone else. I have my reasons for blowing up Franco's bridge or I don't. I live authentically by taking the mission or I die. I keep my good faith bargain with death by doing what I can while I live.

Robert Jordan in Chap. 13

"But Maria has been good. Has she not? Oh, has she not. Maybe that is what I am to get now from life. Maybe that is my life and instead of being three score years and ten it is forty-eight hours or just threescore hours and ten or twelve rather."...

So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have the value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Probably Golz knew all about this to and wanted to make the point that you must make your whole life  in the two nights that are given to you; that living as we do now you must concentrate all of that which you should always have into the short time that you can have it."