Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short story writer known for his terse and understated prose style. He commanded loyalty from readers as he was always a young writer focused on themes like panic that resonated with younger generations. His novel The Sun Also Rises established him in his mid-twenties. Hemingway is important because he confronted existential anxieties and insisted through his stories that moments of truth come to all people. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls explored these existential themes through a protagonist grappling with political ideology and individual experience during the Spanish Civil War.

1. Presented by :
Bhatt Riddhiben D.
riddhi28bhatt@gmail.com
Sem : 2
Roll No. : 15
Paper Name : 108 (The American Literature)
PG Year : 2020-2021
PG Enrolment No. : 3069206420200004
MAHARAJA KRISHNKUMARSINHJI BHAVANAGAR UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

2. 
 Who is Hemingway?
 What was in Hemingway’s writing that enabled him to
command the loyalty of a generation?
1. Always a young writer and always a writer for the young
2. His great subject :Panic
 Why is Hemingway Important ?
 Existential Elements in ‘For Whom the Bells Tolls’ of Ernest
Hemingway

3. 
Ernest Miller Hemingway
 Born July 21, 1899
 Died July 2, 1961 (aged 61)
 Awards Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953)
Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)
 Famous Objective and Terse Prose style

4. 
 Hemingway had written, “Something happens to our good writers at
a certain age. . . .” devote the first half of their lives to imitating human
experience and the second to parodying their imitation.
 Always a young writer, and always a writer for the young.
 His best novel “The Sun Also Rises” in his mid-twenties and
completed most of his great stories by the age of forty.
 Started a campaign of terror against the fixed vocabulary of literature,
a purge of style and pomp, and in the name of naturalness he modelled
a new artifice for tension.
 A short-breathed writer, whether in the novel or story.
 Struck past the barriers of culture and seemed to disregard the
reticence of civilized relationships.
Always a young writer and always a
writer for the young

5. 
 In his very first stories Hemingway struck straight to the heart
of our nihilism, writing with that marvellous courage
 Hemingway struck straight to the heart of our nihilism through
stories about people who have come to the end of the line, who
no longer know what to do or where to turn
 Obsessed with the problem of fear, sought in his fiction for
strategies to overcome it; and that is true, but only partly so.
 Touched upon something deeper, something that broke forth in
his fiction as the most personal and lonely kind of experience
but was formed by the pressure of 20th Century history.
 Touched the quick of our anxieties, and for the moment of his
excellence he stood ready to face whatever he saw.
His great subject :Panic.

6. 
 Through the clenched shape of his stories he kept insisting that no one can
escape, moments of truth come to all of us.
 John Berryman once said that:
“we live in a culture where a man can go
through his entire life without having once
to discover whether he is a coward.”
 Hemingway forced his readers to consider such possibilities, and
through the clenched shape of his stories he kept insisting that no
one can escape, moments of truth come to all of us.
 Fatalistic as they often seem, immersed in images of violence and
death, his stories are actually incitements to personal resistance
and renewal. Reading them, one felt stirred to a stronger sense — if
not of one’s possible freedom — then at least of one’s possible
endurance and companionship in stoicism.
Why is Hemingway Important ?

7. 
 It is this attempt at participation which Hemingway discuss in For
Whom the Bell Tolls.
 Robert Jordon, an American professor, joins the Communist forces
as a dynamiter during the Spanish Civil War.
 At the beginning of his service Jordon found a great fulfilment in
his participation and seemed on his way to a commitment to
Coaununism.
“Stop making dubious literature about the Barbara and the old Iberians
and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice
have enjoyed it at aloe time whether they lie about it or not.
You have been tainted With it a long time oow.”
Existential Elements in ‘For Whom the
Bells Tolls’ of Ernest Hemingway

8. 
 It is because of this taint of spilt from too much that Jordon must reject
communist ideology. Although he desires to participate in the world he
cannot do ao to the extent called for by the Collllllunist collective
because he cannot place the reality of the collective before that of the
individual
 What Hemingway is saying in For Whom the Bell Toll and which is
consistent with existentialism is that the life of t he individual with its
plenitude of concert e experience transcends a rationally devised
political and social system.
 The participation that Jordon seeks is indeed one of brotherhood with his
fellow men, but it is not the brotherhood of ColJllunism.
 Perhaps the key to the kind of participation that Jordon seeks is in the
sermon by John Donne which the title of the book ia taken. The key part
of the sermon is in the last few lines:
••• any man's death diminishes me, because 1
am involved in Mankinde : and therefore never
send to kgo~ for whom the bell tolls; it tolls
for thee. 3

9. 
 With this discovery of the self and the realization that what one
shares with others is the existential condition Hemingway has
found the basis for participation. in the movement
 From the courage to be as oneself to the courage to be as part
 Hemingway has elevated the existential view, which a before
only an individual proceas, to a universal position. And
courage is the force which enables the individual to move from
participation.

10. 
 D. S. Savage. “Ernest Hemingway.” The Hudson Review, vol. 1,
no. 3, 1948, pp. 380–401. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3847332.
 SIGAL, CLANCY. Hemingway Lives!: Why Reading Ernest
Hemingway Matters Today. OR Books, 2013. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt207g878.
 Wild, John. “Existentialism as a Philosophy.” The Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 57, no. 2, 1960, pp. 45–62. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2022807.
 Young, Philip. "Ernest Hemingway". Encyclopaedia Britannica,
10 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-
Hemingway.
References

11. 