[Often] Hemingway's fictional women emerge as more admirable than his men: braver, more faithful and loving, more responsible. (p. 6)

[Hemingway expressed his view of the morality of compensation, in which nothing can be given or taken without an equivalent] in the metaphor of finance—a metaphor which runs through the fabric of [The Sun Also Rises] as a fine, essential thread. It is Jake Barnes who explicitly states the code of Hemingway's novel…. Jake reflects that in having Lady Brett Ashley for a friend, he "had been getting something for nothing" and that sooner or later he would have to pay the bill, which always came…. (p. 22)

Jake's philosophical musing is illustrated time and again in the profuse monetary transactions of The Sun Also Rises…. Between the beginning and the end, Hemingway specifically mentions sums of money, and what they have been able to purchase, a total of thirty times. (pp. 22-3)

Hemingway reveals much more about his characters' financial condition and spending habits than about their appearance….

Hemingway had several good reasons to note with scrupulous detail the exact nature of financial transactions. Such a practice contributed to the verisimilitude of the novel, denoting the way it was; it fitted nicely with Jake's … obsession with the proper way of doing things; and mainly it illustrated in action the moral conviction that you must pay for what you get, that you must earn in order to be able to buy…. (p. 23)

Money and its uses form the metaphor by which the moral responsibility of Jake, Bill, and Pedro Romero is measured against the carelessness of Brett, Mike, and Robert. Financial soundness mirrors moral strength. (p. 26)

[Robert Cohn, a] romantic,… is understandably unable at first to conceive that his weekend with Brett at San Sebastian has meant nothing to her, but he forfeits any claim to sympathy by his subsequent stubborn and violent unwillingness to accept that obvious fact. Terribly insecure, he takes insult after insult from Frances and Mike without retaliation, though he is ready enough to fight with his "best friend" Jake over what he construes as insults to Brett and himself. A Jew in the company of gentiles, he is a bore who takes himself—and his illusions—far too seriously. Unlike Jake, he has not "learned about" things. He does not know how to eat or drink or love. (p. 27)

Still, it would be possible to pity Cohn for his dominant malady … were it not for his callous and opportunistic use of the money he has not earned. (pp. 27-8)

What comes too easily has a pernicious effect on him as a person. Having inherited a good deal of money, he wastes nearly all of it on a little magazine—and in purchasing the prestige that comes to him as its editor. But Cohn's most damning misuse of funds occurs when he attempts to buy his way out of obligations to women…. It is in his attempt to buy his way out of entanglements without expending anything of himself that Robert Cohn most viciously breaks the moral code of compensation. (pp. 28-9)

Both "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and, even more notably, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" depict bad marriages held together by despicable financial binding. (p. 34)

In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the writer Harry [dies at the end, his demise] … brought about by a physical gangrene that parallels his moral rot. He has married Helen, an extremely wealthy woman, and let his talent go to seed…. Harry knows that what has happened is no one's fault but his own. After all, he had let himself be bought…. (p. 35)

[In his] fiction Ernest portrayed the rich as an entirely separate breed, more distasteful than the rest of mankind. Clearly, there was no doubt in his mind that an inverse relationship existed between money and morals. (pp. 53-4)

Marxist critics like Alvah Bessie had rightly complained that [For Whom the Bell Tolls] did not fulfill the promise of its title … by affirming the value of universal brotherhood. But For Whom the Bell Tolls does affirm the value of belonging to and sharing with a family (a word which Hemingway several times applies to Pablo's irregulars).

The point is emphasized through the metaphor of the gift. When Jordan first reaches the band, he jealously guards what is his. (p. 119)

After sharing danger and disappointment during his three days in the mountains, however, Jordan learns to put aside his selfishness and becomes "completely integrated" with the band. One of his teachers is the valiant El Sordo, whose generosity vividly contrasts with the American's possessiveness. (pp. 119-20)

[Jordan] remains behind to cover the retreat of Maria and the others at the end, and so makes the ultimate gift of self. "Each one does what he can," he thinks as he lies crippled. "You can do nothing for yourself but perhaps you can do something for another."

Yet Jordan does do a good deal for himself in staying behind: he regains the dignity and self-respect which his own father had failed to bequeath to him. Visions of his brave grandfather and cowardly father course through his brain during his last hours, and it is only as one man alone that he can redeem the suicide of the father he cannot forgive. Like Anselmo, who, having been brought up in religion, misses God but realizes that "now a man must be responsible to himself," Jordan understands that the final test is within. (p. 120)

A Farewell to Arms supplies Hemingway's most extended fictional statement of [his disillusionment with war]. (p. 126)

The symbols of war—pistol, medal, helmet, salute—take on a shabbiness that parallels the quality of combat generalship. In Frederic's company, no one knows what is going on, though they all speak "with great positiveness and strategical knowledge," and it is no different at the top….

Under the circumstances, patriotism seems out of place, and indeed most of the patriots whom Frederic meets are at considerable distance from the combat zone. (p. 128)

A Farewell to Arms has usually been interpreted as a tragic tale of two lovers, driven together by the war, who selflessly give themselves to each other in an affair that might have lasted in indefinite bliss had not fateful death unjustly intervened to snatch one away…. But to read A Farewell to Arms in this way drastically minimizes Hemingway's accomplishment. The construction of his 1929 book is far subtler and more complicated than that of the conventional sentimental novel, and the story it has to tell is anything but straightforward. (p. 151)

[The] character Frederic Henry, whom Rinaldi calls "the remorse boy," has a great deal to be remorseful about. In dealing with his own sins …, he tries to smooth them away, just as he had tried to brush the taste of harlotry away with toothpaste. The entire novel may reasonably be construed as his attempt to excuse himself from blame. But Hemingway does not let his storyteller off so easily. He makes it clear, between the lines, that we should take what Lieutenant Henry has to say with a grain of salt. The difficulty in grasping this point derives from the reader's tendency to identify with Frederic, who as first-person narrator serves as guide to what happens in the novel. He seems a trustworthy enough guide to the action. But as Hemingway warned, even when he wrote a novel in the first person, he could not be held responsible "for the opinions of the narrator."

People are always misspelling Frederic Henry's name, and no wonder: only once in the book does Hemingway supply it, in full, and those who know him best usually do not call him by any name at all. What is significant is what they do call him…. ["Baby" is] the term of affection which Rinaldi consistently and repeatedly uses in talking to Frederic. (pp. 152-53)

Whether they use "baby" or "boy,"… the other characters in A Farewell to Arms clearly perceive Frederic Henry as young, inexperienced, and unaware. (p. 153)

A mere boy, Frederic Henry suffers at the beginning of the novel from a pervasive lack of awareness. He does not know why he has enlisted in the Italian army, nor what he is fighting for. He lacks any perceptible ambition or purpose in life beyond the securing of his own pleasure. During the course of his war experiences he does to some degree grow in understanding…. The question at issue involves the extent of his education, how far Frederic Henry moved along the continuum from ignorant, self-centered youth to knowing, caring adulthood. (p. 154)

As the book progresses, [Frederic] becomes more loving and less selfish, but only as compared to an initial policy toward Catherine that can best be defined as exploitative. During their first meetings in Gorizia, Catherine poignantly reveals her vulnerability, but Frederic nonetheless treats her as he would any other potential conquest—as an opponent in the game of seduction he intends to win. (p. 156)

The love he feels is almost entirely sexual, however, and derives from the pleasure she gives him, pleasure far superior to that dispensed by the [prostitutes he has known]…. Since he is bedridden, she must come to him, a practice which symbolizes his role, then and later, as an accepter, not a giver, of services. (p. 157)

Throughout their affair, Frederic rarely displays honest and thoughtful concern for Catherine's feelings. Where she invariably thinks of him first, he often does not think of her at all. Only when she lies dying of childbirth in the Lausanne hospital does he finally begin to want to serve and to sacrifice for her. (p. 160)

The creator of Frederic Henry believed in retribution, in rewards and punishments, in actions producing consequences…. In an attempt to justify himself, he fixes all blame on a deterministic world. "The world" stands against the lovers; a vague "they" are at fault: "Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you." Adopting the rhetorician's device of the second person "you," Frederic tries to gain his audience's assent to this philosophy. But there is a logical inconsistency in the terrible game of life-and-death he posits: though he is at least an equal partner in any mistakes that have been made, he survives and Catherine dies. (pp. 160-61)

[Frederic] attempts under cover of the doctrine of determinism to evade responsibility years after the fact of his affair with Catherine Barkley. Worse yet, he does not love Catherine as she deserves. He takes without giving. He withholds. By showing us these shortcomings in Frederic Henry and by implicitly repudiating his philosophical justifications, Hemingway distances himself from his protagonist, who is one of those first-person narrators whose opinions are not to be trusted. (p. 162)

Hemingway rarely again portrayed a woman as believable and sympathetic as the heroine of A Farewell to Arms. The bitches who populate his fiction of the 1930s, like Margot Macomber in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and Helene Bradley in To Have and Have Not, yield in later novels to such Latinized Child-women as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Renata in Across the River and into the Trees…. Dorothy Bridges in The Fifth Column … is satirically depicted as lacking in perception and understanding because of her foolish, knee-jerk liberalism. (p. 163)

More than half of the fifty-odd stories Ernest Hemingway wrote dealt with love in one form or another; but not one of them depicted a satisfactory, lasting, mutually shared love between a man and a woman. (p. 169)

Characteristically, Hemingway's fictional protagonists finish alone, a pattern which becomes increasingly dominant in his later writing….

Most of Hemingway's love stories, which usually assume a dominant-submissive relationship, focus on [a symbiotic love, in which one partner assumes a passive, masochistic, inferior role to the other's active, sadistic superiority]…. Mature lovers, on the other hand, share equally: they give and gain by giving. (p. 173)

Among his fictional counterparts, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls comes closest to achieving the … state of mature love. Like Frederic Henry with Catherine, he resists Maria's desire to become exactly like him, to passively submerge herself in him…. Unlike Frederic, though, during his three days among the Spanish guerrillas, Jordan comes to understand the beauty of giving and the importance of selflessness to those in love….

At least once in his fiction, then, Ernest Hemingway created a hero who loved maturely and selflessly without giving up his own integrity. (p. 174)

Driven to seek a substitute for the outmoded faith of their fathers, Hemingway's characters often turn to primitive rituals for comfort. They invest physical love-making with mystical import; they ritualize the mundane business of eating and drinking; they follow elaborate procedures derived from games. Such rituals, as they have always done, help to satisfy his characters' yearning for order and meaning in their lives. Sometimes they serve a therapeutic purpose as well. In this sense, [Malcolm] Cowley points out, Nick Adams' fishing trip in "Big Two-Hearted River" may be regarded "as an incantation, a spell to banish evil spirits" [see excerpt above]. (p. 234)

[The Sun Also Rises] is rather carefully organized around a contrast between paganism and Christianity. The initial scenes in Paris establish that cosmopolitan city as the home of paganism. Sexual aberrations proliferate there…. But as soon as Jake enters Spain, a far more devout Christian country, the references to churches multiply, and Jake goes to pray in them as he had not done in Paris. These two strains commingle during the fiesta of San Fermin ("also a religious festival") at Pamplona, where Brett is elevated to the status of a pagan idol by the drunken crowd…. She is forbidden entrance to one church because she has no head covering, and finds herself unable to pray for her lover Romero in another, because the experience makes her "nervy." She even asks to hear Jake's confession, but that, he tells her, is not allowed "and, besides, it would be in a language she did not know." (p. 235)

Hemingway used Christian symbolism in his fiction as it suited his artistic purposes, not so much out of calculation as instinctively. Thus, two very dissimilar protagonists, Colonel Richard Cantwell of Across the River and into the Trees and Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea, are both symbolically associated with Jesus Christ…. What [Cantwell and Christ] have most in common is suffering, and it is [Cantwell's] wounded places, especially his misshapen right hand, that Renata most loves. Cantwell acquired his wounded hand "Very honorably. On a rocky, bare-assed hill," like Calvary, which was surrounded by Christmas trees. (pp. 238-39)

Though he must die, he will not, the colonel decides, "run as a Christian" in the end. That would be hypocritical, since he resembles the Messiah closely only in the courage and endurance with which he faces suffering and death. Suffering was the natural condition of man and death his inevitable end, but each man could face these tyrants as he chose. Hemingway finds his heroes among those who, like Cantwell and Santiago, confront their fate with courage, endurance, and dignity.

Santiago is virtually inundated with religious imagery…. Despite all the religious imagery, however, The Old Man and the Sea is not a Christian fable. Hemingway nowhere suggests that we are all fallen with the persecutors of Christ or saved by His example. What he is celebrating is the capacity of one man to endure terrible suffering and pain with dignity. (pp. 239-40)

In exalting the value of the struggle itself, and in celebrating the endurance and bravery a man might summon in the face of suffering, Hemingway affirmed the grandeur of which the individual human being was capable. And there was one other article in Hemingway's private creed: a worship of the natural world around him. Santiago, for example, feels a powerful affinity for the sea which supports him….

[Reverence] for the natural world, then, constitutes a kind of glory for Hemingway, but it is balanced—often overbalanced—by his concurrent sense of the blank, dark meaninglessness of our existence. In his feeling for nature, Hemingway stems from Emerson and Thoreau; in his consciousness of the blackness "ten times black," he derives from Hawthorne and Melville. His unsolved problem—a basic problem of modern faith—was to reconcile the two, the "glory and the blackness" both. (p. 240)

Hemingway used a memorable figure of speech to describe his most striking technique as storyteller: that of leaving out critical details. "I always try to write," he put it, "on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg."… At its best, as in "Big Two-Hearted River," this device worked brilliantly. (p. 245)

As time wore on, the iceberg theory became less and less applicable to Hemingway's fiction. For one thing, he could seldom resist the opportunity to point his moral through irony. It is in terms of his use of irony that he may most accurately be called … a sentimentalist. His writing was not sentimental, of course, in the usual sense of calling for overblown emotional responses to trivial matters. In fact, if sentimentality is that error which exacts of the reader more emotion than the event calls for, Hemingway might be regarded as a sentimentalist in reverse, since in its understatement his writing apparently asks for less emotional expenditure than is warranted. Sometimes, though, he intrudes with irony to help make up for the unseen portions of his iceberg.

Hemingway's irony usually functions to separate the mechanical, unfeeling, unperceptive, and therefore immoral character from the one who feels deeply and sees well below the surface. Such distinctions abound in his fiction, and occasionally—as at the end of A Farewell to Arms …—the irony seems to be tacked on gratuitously. In [that] novel, two nurses come hurrying along the hallway, laughing at the prospect of witnessing the Caesarean that will take Catherine's life. (pp. 245-46)

For Whom the Bell Tolls traces the painful education, telescoped into three short days, of its protagonist Robert Jordan. From Maria, he learns what it is to love. From Pilar and Anselmo, he learns what it is to belong to a family. Finally he learns in triumph how to die, the most difficult lesson of all and one which he must master on his own.

The novel stands as an in-depth study of death, a theme reflected not only in its title but in Hemingway's alternate title, "The Undiscovered Country" from whose bourn no traveler returns. Early in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pilar "reads" Jordan's imminent death in his palm; after that, the issue becomes not whether Jordan will die, but how. (p. 299)

Scott Donaldson, in his By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (copyright © 1977 by Scott Donaldson; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.), Viking Penguin, 1977.