<p> </p><p><em>For Whom the Bell Tolls</em> is Ernest Hemingway's story of the Spanish Civil War. This war has often been seen as a conflict between good and evil, and the novel is frequently viewed as a way of illustrating the brotherhood of man in its portrayal of how Robert Jordan fights as a volunteer for the republicans against the fascists. This essay shows that Jordan actually loses his faith in the war. I instead propose that his determination to perform his mission is regained through Maria, and that he integrates with her as he finishes his mission. Initially, Jordan becomes alienated because he discovers the hopelessness and immorality of the republican struggle. The fascists are really not true enemies, and the republicans seem to have become the very evil that they originally set out to destroy. His faith in his mission is regained through Maria, and the completion of his mission becomes entwined with his integration with her. It becomes clear that she, a character whose thematic importance has often been neglected, is a part of the natural world. By becoming a part of nature, Jordan can thus become an eternal part of her. As he finishes his mission, his integration with nature intensifies. As he awaits death after having finished his mission, he literally becomes a part of nature and thematically a part of Maria, and even though he will die, the lovers are united. This, I suggest, is the complete integration that Jordan experiences.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

For Whom the Bell Tolls is Ernest Hemingway's story of the Spanish Civil War. This war has often been seen as a conflict between good and evil, and the novel is frequently viewed as a way of illustrating the brotherhood of man in its portrayal of how Robert Jordan fights as a volunteer for the republicans against the fascists. This essay shows that Jordan actually loses his faith in the war. I instead propose that his determination to perform his mission is regained through Maria, and that he integrates with her as he finishes his mission. Initially, Jordan becomes alienated because he discovers the hopelessness and immorality of the republican struggle. The fascists are really not true enemies, and the republicans seem to have become the very evil that they originally set out to destroy. His faith in his mission is regained through Maria, and the completion of his mission becomes entwined with his integration with her. It becomes clear that she, a character whose thematic importance has often been neglected, is a part of the natural world. By becoming a part of nature, Jordan can thus become an eternal part of her. As he finishes his mission, his integration with nature intensifies. As he awaits death after having finished his mission, he literally becomes a part of nature and thematically a part of Maria, and even though he will die, the lovers are united. This, I suggest, is the complete integration that Jordan experiences.

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. / text