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The Man At The Bridge Analysis

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Interpretation/Analysis of “The Man at the Bridge” by Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s ‘the man at the bridge’ is most likely inspired by his experiences during the Spanish civil war. Though is it possible that the meeting with the ‘old man’ was based upon the truth? The narrator meets an older man at a bridge during the evacuation of a nearby village. The older man is in poor condition, the narrator starts a conversation with the older man, in hope of helping him across the bridge to safety. The older man’s immobility restricts his chance of survival, while the narrator learns that the older man lost his animals due to incoming artillery. The narrator concludes that the older man only has the thought “that cats know how to look after themselves” to comfort himself. The similarities between the descriptive state of the goats and the older man’s, indicates a strong analogy between the two. Both “without politics” hence inactive towards the civil war, though regardless of their neutral status are they simply collateral damage. They possess one difference present to the plot: only the goats are literally damaged collaterally, while the older man is figuratively damaged. The essential status of the older man is on the contrary no different to the goats, as the “mysterious event called contact” is …show more content…

The narrator perceives the older man to be talking to himself as he says, “I was taking care of animals”, “I was only taking care of animals” the last time. The repetition of this phrase and the added word, ‘only’ in the last phrase, emphasizes the importance the animals are to the older man, as it’s the single thing he thinks about in such miserable situation. “he said dully, but no longer to me” commented by the narrator indicates the irrelevance of his presence, since the older man’s hope is mostly inexistent, except what’s left for his upcoming death, relieving him from his internal collateral

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