A Spanish portrait : Spain and its connections with the thematic and structural dimensions of "For whom the bell tolls"
After having visited several countries in Europe and Africa, Hemingway found in Spain a land which would play a key role in his later literary career. His first stay in our country in the early twenties would mean the outset of a closed and long relationship with Spain that took almost forty years. During his different travels to Spain, Hemingway had the chance of discovering in the Spanish people a set of values and traits for which he felt a special attraction, such as violence, rebelliousness and, above all, a fatalistic vision of existence where death was inherent to life itself. In his most renowned novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway offers a wider and deeper vision of those characteristics which made the Spanish soul so particular from his point of view. We identify some of them by analyzing the main structural and thematic elements of this novel set in the Spanish Civil War.