Jordan As An American Immigrant

The Foreigner Many Americans were struggling to survive economically but getting almost no help from the government during the Great Depression. Some of these people, who were known as the Lost Generation, were soldiers who came home after World War I and became lost in society. Ernest Hemingway, an American author living through this era and who was part of the Lost Generation, reflected about this time period in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. In this story, the main character, Robert Jordan, is a soldier in the Spanish American Civil War with the duty of destroying a bridge to stop the enemies from acquiring reinforcements. Jordan has to review his morals and conscious during the war to determine whether his actions are validated by

His tanned face and fair hair reveals that Jordan is a man that spends much of his time outside in the view of the sun, making him out to be an outdoor type of person, correlating with his duty in the military which is moving behind enemy lines and plants bombs because he is a dynamiter. Surprisingly, for such a dangerous position he has for Spain, Jordan comes from America. He was a spanish teacher and joined the Civil War to fight alongside the republicans of Spain. During the time of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was very active than he had been before which is shown in Anton Nilssons article where he declares “Ernest Hemingway was unusually politically active and outspoken. As the war dragged on, the author embarked on many kinds of projects that he had never attempted before”. Showing how much Hemingway had dedicated himself to the politics and issues surrounded by it. Not only did Hemingway have knowledge of the war before writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, he was actually very involved in showing his political

This shows how Jordan is truly committed to his duty as a soldier for Spain which is very strange considering how he is an American not a Spaniard, yet he is extremely dedicated to Spain. Jordan begins to encounter situations where he expresses how much he is willing to do for the war when he has a flashback during the novel of killing a man who was also a fellow dynamiter on his side, however the man was too injured to walk therefore needed to be executed. Although his conscious can be damaged by this man's death, Jordan does not even let it phase him, because he makes it justifiable by the greater good of the country that he does not belong