Justify[ing] the title of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
By: Dolly Doyle (eNotes)
![Justify[ing] the title of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls](http://thenewstalkers.com/group_discuss/image/discuss_image/24976/xxxlarge/_v=63f541763431055 "Justify[ing] the title of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls")
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Dolly Doyle, M.A. Librarian
B.A. from Southeastern Louisiana University M.A. from Southeastern Louisiana University
Educator since 2018
College instructor, writing tutor, and journalist with a M.A. I currently work at a library, and write fiction, poetry, and criticism.
Ernest Hemingway was invoking the poetry of the seventeenth-century writer John Donne when he came up with the title, For Whom the Bell Tolls . Donne's poems were often metaphysical and spiritual in nature. The term "for whom the bell tolls" comes from one of Donne's meditations and describes the tolling of funeral bells.
Here is the poem in full:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Essentially, Donne is saying that all people are connected by their mortality. When another person dies, a part of one's own self has died as well because all human beings are unified in networks of relationships ("no man is an island"), both in daily life and on a larger scale.
The choice of title is pertinent politically since the novel centers around the Spanish Civil War, in which socialist and fascist parties fought for dominance. Hemingway is essentially arguing that what happens to Spain affects the rest of Europe and by extension, whatever affects Europe affects the rest of the world, a notion which would become a reality with the Second World War.
The title also refers to the danger of death which hangs over all the characters in the novel. They could die at any time due to the violent conflict and sometimes characters such as Robert Jordan wonder if it is worth the risk. Ultimately, the novel affirms that it is.
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Contrary to what Dolly Doyle wrote, the quotation of what John Donne wrote is not at all "the poem in full" but is only one stanza from it. As well, she wrote that it is one of Donne's Meditations. In fact it is from Donne's Meditation XVII.
The significance of the bell's tolling is because during those days there was no such thing as a newspaper or any other method of spreading the word of a person's death in such way to alert many people of it, the church bell would toll and the people of the village would go to the church to find out the news. Donne proposes that it is not necessary to determine who died, because when one person dies, we all die a little ourselves.
In Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls Robert Jordan gets involved with the Spanish Civil War because he was, as were we all, affected by it, because "no man is an island."