
Hemingway -- For Whom the Bell Tolls (continued)
Wai Chee Dimock, professor at Yale, concludes her discussion of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls by reading the novel through dispossession and repossession. She examines the rape of Maria in front of a barbershop mirror as one form of disempowerment, and Robert Jordan's death as another, though one carrying the possibility of redemption. Dimock traces how Jordan shifts between being a have and a have not, depending on how ironically the reader takes Maria's question What hast thou. Chapters move from the novel's treatment of war and gender through the symmetry of brutality and narration, into Jordan's loss of narrative control and his eventual repossession of meaning at the end of his life. Part of Yale's open course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, recorded in Fall 2011, this is a close literary reading rather than a survey, assuming familiarity with the text.