Student Question
Why is the old man at the bridge?
Quick answer:
The old man is at the bridge because he is too exhausted to flee further from the advancing Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. He symbolizes the vulnerable civilians overwhelmed by the conflict. The story, set during the war, captures the dire situation for Loyalist supporters as the Fascists, backed by Nazi Germany and Italy, gain ground. Hemingway's minimalist style and dialogue convey the urgency and despair of the moment, representing the broader impact of the war.
The old man has just crossed the bridge and has sat down beside the road because he is too tired to go any farther. He is one of the many civilians fleeing before the advancing forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Fascist leader who eventually became supreme ruler of Spain. The Fascists, or Nationalists, were killing peasants and workers as a means of spreading terror and also under the assumption that these impoverished people must be supporters of the lawfully elected Loyalist government. There were terrible atrocities committed by the Fascists during the war.
The narrator is standing there because he is watching for the approach of the Nationalist tanks, trucks, and soldiers. He is evidently an American and one of the many foreigners who volunteered to help the Loyalist cause against the fascist rebels. Hemingway wrote at length about the Spanish Civil War in his best novel, For Whom...
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the Bell Tolls. It features an American volunteer assigned to blow up a bridge to stall the advance of Fascist tanks. The dialogue in "Old Man at the Bridge" is in English, but it is to be understood from the simplicity of the vocabulary and some of the syntax that the narrator and the old man are speaking in demotic Spanish. Hemingway did this in For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was very good at writing dialogue and used dialogue to characterize the speakers as well as to provide exposition.
The narrator is primarily concerned about the advancing army, but he is also concerned about the old man.
"This is not a good place to stop," I said. "If you can make it, there are trucks up the road where it forks for Tortosa."
When the narrator again advises him more urgently to get up and go on,
"Thank you," he said and got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.
It is pretty obvious that this old man is going to get killed when the Fascists cross the bridge. He is too old and too worn out to flee any farther, and he doesn't really have anything left to live for. He might be said to symbolize the Liberal government and its Loyalist supporters, gradually being overwhelmed by the Fascists who were backed by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.
This little story, or vignette, or slice-of-life, is intended to represent the big picture of the war. Hemingway was a foreign correspondent and was accustomed to sending brief dispatches because of time and communication constraints. Foreign correspondents were fond of finding little scenes that symbolized great historical events. Hemingway wrote this story as a dispatch and then decided to publish it as a short story instead. Many of Hemingway's dispatches are collected in an interesting book titled Byline Ernest Hemingway.
In "The Old Man at the Bridge," why is the old man at the bridge?
"The Old Man at the Bridge" is one of Hemingway's stories in which he deliberately leaves out most exposition in order to focus on the here and now. The reader has to make all kinds of assumptions and deductions based on what the author actually tells him; but this requirement tends to draw the reader into the setting and make it more vivid. In this story Hemingway is describing an incident that occurs during the Spanish Civil War, which took place between 1936 and 1939, resulting in the overthrow of the elected socialistic government by Fascist reactionaries assisted by foreign powers, notably Nazi Germany. The Spanish Civil War was considered a prelude to World War II. Hemingway was in Spain as a foreign correspondent and was sympathetic to the Loyalists. Eventually he wrote about the Spanish Civil War in what many consider his best novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
In "The Old Man at the Bridge" the Fascist rebels are obviously winning all over Spain and are on the offensive everywhere. Soldiers and civilians are fleeing the advancing army across a pontoon bridge. The old man has crossed the bridge and is sitting on the ground. Hemingway's famous prose style is one of the interesting features of this story. For example:
The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust. But the old man sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther.
Notice that Hemingway even avoids using commas after "up and away" and again after "out of it all." He avoids using a hyphen in "ankle deep." The words "ground up and away" are effective because they describe the sound the trucks make as the drivers have to shift into a lower gear to make it up the hill. They also suggest the mood of desperate retreat.
The old man tells the narrator that he is seventy-six years old. He will be one of the many civilian casualties of this war. Although both the narrator and the old man converse in English, it is to be understood that they are really speaking Spanish. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway made it more apparent that the characters were mostly speaking Spanish by phrasing his English dialogue somewhat foreign syntactically. In "The Old Man at the Bridge" there is just a hint of this "Spanish-ness" in such lines as:
"No," he said. "Only the animals I stated. The cat, of course, will be all right. A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others."
Other good examples of Hemingway's creation of dialogue in English which is supposed to be understood as actually being spoken in Spanish are to be found in his stories "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and "The Undefeated." Hemingway loved many things about Spain, including the bull fights, which he wrote about in his nonfiction book The Dangerous Summer. But he refused to go back to Spain after the brutal Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Fascists won the war and took control of the government.