Word: jordan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hero of the book, a young American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the Spanish Loyalists, is an agonizing study in schizophrenia. He is working at a job--blowing up a bridge behind the Fascist lines with the help of a guerrilla band--which he knows will result in his death and probably that of some of his helpers. Constantly he berates, wheedles, consoles and prods--himself. Under the inhuman, cracking pressure of events, his personality is more and more dangerously split, and is healed at the final page only by the certainty of his death and separation from...
...secret rendezvous in Scotland, there told him he had documentary evidence that Germany was preparing war against England. "Would you like to go to the Admiralty?" asked Asquith. Churchill went to his room, opened the Bible at random, read: "Hear, O Israel, thou art to pass over Jordan this day. ..." He took...
...great Hemingway love story; 2) a tense story of adventure in war; 3) a grave and sombre tragedy of Spanish peasants fighting for their lives. But above all it is about death. The plot is simple, about a bridge over a deep gorge behind Franco's lines. Robert Jordan, a young American International Brigader, is ordered to blow up the bridge. He must get help from the guerrillas who live in Franco's territory. The bridge must be destroyed at the precise moment when a big Loyalist offensive begins. If the bridge can be destroyed, the offensive...
These Spaniards know they may be killed. Jordan senses it when he hears the orders. The general senses it when he gives them. So does Pablo, the pig-eyed, cunning guerrilla leader, when Jordan asks his help. So does Pilar, his big, ugly, wise, foul-mouthed wife. Pilar is a gypsy: she reads doom in Jordan's palm. She smelt death-to-come on the last dynamiter who went through, and he was killed. In one of the book's terrible, eloquent passages ("All right, Ingles. Learn. . . .") the woman with her ancient wisdom actually conveys in words what...
...greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come if they blow up the bridge. Jordan goes through with it because he is intellectually convinced that he is helping to defeat fascism. Pilar goes through with it because she is part of the revolution and cannot stop. Pablo's strong instinct to live makes him desert at the last moment and destroy the detonator. Then he, too, realizes in his own way that "no man is an iland." He cannot stand the loneliness of desertion, returns to help...