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Justify the title of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Quick answer:
The title of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway comes from one of Donne’s meditations. The full line is “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” In other words, when we find out that someone has died, we should recognize that we will one day suffer the same fate. The title is appropriate as death is a constant preoccupation of the characters in the story.
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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