The Waste Land and the Indian Knowledge Systems

The Waste Land and the Indian Knowledge Systems

This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. 

The Guru in the Shadow

Tracing Eliot's Indian Footsteps

London, 1922. The city streets still smelled of cordite and grief. The war to end all wars had ended, yes, but what came after? A generation shellshocked, a culture fractured, a spiritual void so vast that the cathedrals of Europe could not fill it. Into this wreckage stepped T.S. Eliot, an American expatriate with a Harvard education and a Sanskrit vocabulary, carrying a poem that would become the obituary for Western civilization as it knew itself.

The Waste Land didn't just diagnose the disease. It prescribed a cure one that came not from the ruins of Carthage or the ashes of Troy, but from the banks of the Ganges and the silence of the Himalayas. Eliot's masterpiece is often read as a lament, a five-part dirge for a world that lost its way. But what if we've been reading it wrong? What if The Waste Land is not a complaint but a quest a search for Brahman, the ultimate reality that lies beyond the illusions of our shattered mirrors?

This is not some orientalist fantasy I'm spinning. The evidence is in the text itself, in the thunder's threefold command, in the chant of "Shantih" that closes the poem like a prayer. Eliot didn't just borrow from India. He surrendered to it. And to understand the revolution he started in modern poetry, we need to trace his footsteps back to the source.

The Thunder Speaks: Setting the Moral Compass

Let's start with the obvious: the ending. "What the Thunder Said" is not window dressing. It's the hinge on which the entire poem turns. M.E. Grenander and K.S. Narayana Rao, in their landmark essay on The Waste Land and the Upanishads, make this crystal clear. The thunder's utterance Da Da Da is lifted directly from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest and most revered texts in Hindu philosophy.

In the Upanishad, Prajapati (the Lord of Creation) teaches his three kinds of children gods, humans, and demons by repeating the syllable Da. Each group interprets it differently: the gods hear "Control yourselves" (Damyata), humans hear "Give" (Datta), and demons hear "Be compassionate" (Dayadhvam). Why the difference? Because each group struggles with a particular vice. Gods are impulsive and pleasure-seeking, so they need discipline. Humans are greedy and acquisitive, so they need generosity. Demons are cruel and violent, so they need mercy.

Eliot flips the order in his poem Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata placing human virtue first. Why? Because The Waste Land is ultimately a human story, not a celestial one. The poem speaks to us, the living dead shuffling across London Bridge, not to angels or devils. And what does it tell us? That salvation begins with sacrifice.

Grenander and Rao dig deep into what Datta means in the Hindu context. It's not about tossing a coin to a beggar. It's about the "awful daring of a moment's surrender," the kind of self-giving that can never be taken back. They reference the Vedic story of Maharishi Dadhichi, who gave his spine yes, his actual backbone so the gods could forge a weapon to free the seven rivers locked up by demons. That's Datta. That's the gift Eliot is talking about: total, irrevocable, terrifying.

But here's where the Western critics get it wrong. Grover Smith, in his otherwise excellent study of Eliot's sources, reads this passage as a negative answer to the thunder's command. He thinks the speaker is confessing to a "craven surrender to a tyranny of the blood," a moment of lust rather than love. Grenander and Rao demolish this reading. They argue that the tone of the passage is far too solemn, too reverent, to be about a one-night stand. The speaker is not confessing a sin. He's mourning a failure the failure to give himself fully, either to another human being in love or to the divine in faith. The "age of prudence" that cannot retract the moment is not an accusation. It's a lament for the Prufrocks of the world who never dared at all.

This reframing is critical. If we read Datta as a failed attempt at human connection, then the entire poem shifts from despair to longing. The Waste Land is not barren because humanity sinned. It's barren because humanity held back.

The Twin Selves: Tiresias as the Watching Bird

If the thunder gives us the moral center of the poem, then Tiresias gives us the existential one. P.S. Sri, in his essay on Upanishadic perceptions in Eliot's work, identifies a core theme running through all of Eliot's major poetry: the perception of the dual self.

The Mundaka, Svetasvatara, and Maitri Upanishads all describe the human soul using the same metaphor: two birds perched on the same tree. One bird flits from branch to branch, eating the fruit some sweet, some bitter. The other bird simply watches from the highest branch, silent and still. The lower bird is the ego-self, caught up in desire and suffering, entangled in maya (the illusion of the material world). The higher bird is the eternal self, the Atman, which is identical to Brahman, the ultimate reality.

Eventually, through cycles of craving and suffering, the lower bird realizes that all its struggles are meaningless. It looks up, recognizes the higher bird, and becomes one with it. This is liberation. This is enlightenment.

Eliot's poetry is haunted by this duality. Prufrock is split between "I" and "you," acting and observing, paralyzed by self-consciousness. Gerontion squats in his "decayed house," watching the world spin in a "wilderness of mirrors" while he waits for death. The Hollow Men shuffle in circles, unable to look up. These are all variations of the lower bird, trapped in illusion, unable to see the watcher above.

And then there's Tiresias.

Eliot's note on The Waste Land is explicit: "What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." Tiresias is not just another character. He is the consciousness that contains all the others. He is the one-eyed merchant and the drowned Phoenician sailor. He is the typist and the carbuncular clerk. He is all the women in the poem because "the two sexes meet in Tiresias."

Sri argues that Tiresias functions like the higher bird in the Upanishadic metaphor. He is the observer, watching his own past lives unfold before him like a film reel. The characters in the poem are not separate people. They are Tiresias remembering himself in different incarnations, enacting the same patterns of desire and suffering again and again. This is samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth. And Tiresias, blind but clairvoyant, sees it all. He "foresuffered all," enacted it all on the same divan or bed.

The genius of this reading is that it makes the poem's fragmentation not a bug but a feature. The shifting voices, the jumbled timeline, the abrupt scene changes these are not signs of chaos. They are signs of consciousness trying to grasp the totality of its own existence. Tiresias is struggling to break free from maya, to see through the appearances to the reality beneath. He perceives that the world is "unreal" London, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, all of them are just shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, or in this case, projections on the screen of his mind.

Shantih: The Peace That Cannot Be Spoken

And what about that final word? Shantih, shantih, shantih. Eliot's note tells us it's a formal ending to an Upanishad, "the Peace which passeth understanding." But K. Narayana Chandran, in a sharp little essay published in American Literature, argues that we've all been missing the irony.

Chandran points out that Shantih is never chanted alone in Hindu ritual. It must be preceded by Om, the primordial syllable, the sound of the universe, the symbol of Brahman itself. The Chandogya Upanishad is explicit: Om is the essence of all essences, the Word from which all other words flow. It represents the unity and order of the cosmos. Without Om, Shantih is just a wish, not a blessing. It's a prayer without power.

And Eliot knew this. He studied Sanskrit under Charles Rockwell Lanman at Harvard. He read the Upanishads in the original. He could not have missed the significance of Om. So why did he leave it out?

Chandran's answer is devastating: because there is no Om in the Waste Land. There is no unity, no order, no cosmic harmony. The poem's world is fragmented, chaotic, broken beyond repair. To chant Om in such a place would be a lie. So Eliot gives us only Shantih the hope of peace, not the reality of it. It's a peace that "passeth understanding" in the most literal sense: it is beyond reach, beyond comprehension, beyond the capacity of the broken voices in the poem to achieve.

The Harvard Roots: How Eliot Became a Student of the East

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before Eliot could strip Om from Shantih, before he could speak through Tiresias or channel the thunder, he had to learn the language. And that education began not in London or Paris, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University's Oriental Study Center.

Rajani Sharma's essay, published in The Criterion, gives us the biographical scaffolding we need. Eliot arrived at Harvard in 1906, a young man from St. Louis with literary ambitions and a restless intellect. By the time he left in 1914, he had earned a master's degree in philosophy, studied under some of the greatest minds of the era, and steeped himself in Sanskrit, Pali, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

His mentors were formidable. Irving Babbitt, a fierce advocate of Humanism, taught him that the chaos of modernity could only be tamed by returning to classical discipline and restraint ideas rooted in his study of Buddhist Pali texts. George Santayana, the poet-philosopher, showed him that religion and poetry could coexist, that beauty and metaphysics were not enemies. And then there were the language teachers: Charles Rockwell Lanman and James Haughton Woods, who opened the door to the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita.

Lanman deserves special mention. His Sanskrit Reader (1884) was a landmark in American scholarship, and his essay "Hindu Law and Custom as to Gifts" published in the Kittredge Anniversary Papers in 1913, the same year Eliot was his student provides a direct link to The Waste Land. Lanman's essay opens with the exact passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that Eliot would use in "What the Thunder Said." It explains the symbolism of Prajapati's teaching, the meaning of the syllable Da, and the ritual of pouring water to seal a gift a gesture that symbolizes irrevocability. "Just as the water, once poured out, can never be regathered and taken back, so the gift, once given, will never be taken back."

Sound familiar? "The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract." Eliot did not stumble onto this idea. He studied it in Lanman's class.

Sharma argues that Eliot's engagement with Indian thought was not superficial or exotic. It was organic to his worldview. He saw in Hinduism and Buddhism a seriousness about moral life, a willingness to confront suffering and impermanence, that he found lacking in the complacent Christianity of the early twentieth century. As Sharma puts it, "Eliot envisioned and in turn advocated that spiritualism was the only way to release modern humanity from the desert of spiritual miasma." And he knew that Western traditions alone could not provide the cure.

This is where Sharma's reading gets really interesting. She zeroes in on a passage in "A Game of Chess" that most critics either ignore or misread: the conversation between the woman and her friend about Lil and Albert. Lil has taken pills to abort a pregnancy. Her friend scolds her: "What you get married for if you don't want children?"

On the surface, this is just sordid realism working-class London gossip. But Sharma argues that it's a direct critique of Western modernity's abandonment of sacred structures. In Hinduism, marriage is not a contract or a romantic arrangement. It is a samskara, a sacred ritual that binds husband and wife in a cosmic order. And the bearing of children is not a choice or a burden. It is another samskara, a duty to the ancestors, a way of ensuring that the wheel of life continues.

By taking the pills, Lil violates both samskaras. She treats marriage as a convenience and childbirth as an inconvenience. She is the embodiment of the Waste Land's sterility not because she is poor or uneducated, but because she has lost any sense of life as sacred. Sharma connects this to the Indian concept of Sanyam restraint, discipline, the control of desire. If people want to limit procreation, the Hindu answer is not pills or abortion. It is self-control, the cultivation of a higher will.

This reading transforms the entire scene. It's no longer just about class or gender or the horrors of backstreet medicine. It's about the collapse of a moral framework, the replacement of the sacred with the mechanical. And the only solution Eliot can offer is the one the thunder will speak later: Damyata. Control yourself.

The Upanishadic Mirror: Nanda's Vision of Maya and the Fisher King

If Sharma gives us the biographical and moral context, Manoj Kr Nanda gives us the metaphysical one. His essay, published in the International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, reads The Waste Land as a direct parallel to the structure and themes of the Upanishads.

Nanda argues that the poem is not just influenced by Indian philosophy it is built on it. The five sections of the poem mirror the five elements of Hindu cosmology (earth, water, fire, air, ether). The journey through the poem is the journey toward moksha liberation from suffering. And the central symbol of the poem, the Fisher King, is an avatar of the seeker in the Upanishads, wounded and waiting for the knowledge that will heal him.

Let's unpack that. The Fisher King, in medieval legend, is a wounded ruler whose land has become barren because of his injury. The land and the king are one; his sickness is the land's sickness. Only the Grail Knight, by asking the right question, can heal him. But what is the "right question"? Nanda suggests that it's the same question the Upanishads pose: Who am I? What is the true nature of the self?

The Fisher King, in this reading, is not just a mythological figure. He is every human being caught in the illusion of maya, mistaking the material world for reality, suffering because he cannot see his true nature as Atman, identical to Brahman. His wound is ignorance. His barren land is the world of appearances, the world of Tiresias's "unreal city."

And the water that can heal him? It's not literal rain. It's spiritual knowledge, the flow of divine grace. Nanda points to the Dhammapada, a Buddhist text Eliot also studied, which describes the seeds of the Bodhi tree (enlightenment) being "irrigated well with the waters of compassion and richly manured by meditation." Water, in this symbolic register, is the teaching, the dharma, the truth that dissolves illusion.

This is why the drought in The Waste Land is so devastating. It's not just a physical drought. It's the absence of wisdom, the silence of the teachers, the drying up of the spiritual sources. Nanda writes: "Ganga was sunken and the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant, over Himavant." Ganga is not the Thames. It is the sacred river of India, the embodiment of purity and grace. Himavant is not the Alps. It is the Himalaya, the throne of Shiva, the home of the gods. Eliot uses these Sanskrit names deliberately. He is telling us where to look for the cure.

The thunder that finally speaks is not a natural phenomenon. It is the voice of Prajapati, the voice of the universe, breaking through the silence. And its message Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata is the path out of the Waste Land. Give, sympathize, control. These are not moral platitudes. They are practices, disciplines, ways of breaking the cycle of samsara and realizing the self.

Nanda also addresses the fragmented structure of the poem, which has puzzled and frustrated readers since 1922. But he argues that the fragmentation is the point. The Upanishads teach that the material world is fragmented, plural, constantly shifting this is maya, the dance of appearances. The mind caught in maya cannot perceive unity. It sees only parts, only surfaces, only mirrors reflecting mirrors. The fragmentation of The Waste Land is a formal enactment of this condition. Eliot is not trying to give us a coherent narrative. He is showing us what consciousness looks like when it is trapped in illusion.

Synthesis: The Debt Modernism Owes to Ancient India

So what do we do with all this? How do we reconcile Eliot the Harvard-trained Sanskritist with Eliot the Anglo-Catholic convert? How do we square the Indian wisdom in The Waste Land with the Christian symbols that also saturate it?

The answer is that we stop trying to separate them. Eliot himself said, in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, "Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too, and I know that my poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility." He did not say "borrows from" or "alludes to." He said shows the influence of. It's in the DNA.

Modernism, as a movement, is often described as a break with tradition, a rejection of the past in favor of the new. But that's only half the story. What Eliot and his contemporaries actually did was expand the tradition. They looked beyond the canonical Western sources Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and asked: what if the tradition is bigger than Europe? What if the wisdom we need to understand the modern crisis has been sitting in the Ganges Valley for three thousand years?

The Waste Land is the answer to that question. It is a poem that places the Buddha and St. Augustine side by side, not as competitors but as co-witnesses to the same truth. It is a poem that uses the thunder of the Upanishads to judge the spiritual bankruptcy of London and Vienna. It is a poem that ends with a Sanskrit benediction because English has no word adequate to the task.

The Final Word: Shantih

Let me end where Eliot ended, with that threefold chant. Shantih, shantih, shantih. We've established that it's ironic, that it's incomplete, that it's a hope rather than a fulfillment. But it's also something more.

It's an invitation.

Eliot gives us the fragments. He gives us the thunder's command, the Fisher King's wound, Tiresias's memories, the sunken Ganga, the distant Himavant. He gives us enough clues to begin the journey, but he does not give us the destination. That is our work. The reader's work. The work of every generation that picks up the poem and tries to make sense of it.

The Waste Land is not a museum piece. It is a living text, a set of instructions for navigating spiritual crisis. And the instructions are drawn from the oldest manual we have: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada. These texts teach that suffering is real, that illusion is powerful, but that liberation is possible. That the lower bird can become the higher bird. That the Fisher King can be healed. That peace, however distant, is worth seeking.

Did Eliot steal from the East? No. He surrendered to it. And in doing so, he gave us a poem that refuses to be contained by any single tradition. The Waste Land is Western and Eastern, Christian and Hindu, modern and ancient. It is a crossroads. And the guru in the shadow is still there, waiting to teach anyone willing to listen.

Works Cited

Chandran, K. Narayana. "'Shantih' in The Waste Land." American Literature, vol. 61, no. 4, 1989, pp. 681-683. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2927003.

Grenander, M.E., and K.S. Narayana Rao. "The Waste Land and the Upanishads: What Does the Thunder Say?" Indian Literature, vol. 14, no. 1, 1971, pp. 85-98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330564

Nanda, Manoj Kr. "The Upanishadic Elements in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land." International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, vol. 12, no. 9, 2024, pp. c932-c935. www.ijcrt.org.

Sharma, Rajani. "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Perspective on Indian Thoughts." The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014, pp. 370-377. www.the-criterion.com.

Sri, P.S. "Upanishadic Perceptions in T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Drama." Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2008, pp. 34-49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20479528.

Walking Without a Country: Homebound (2025) and the Collapse of Citizenship in Pandemic India

This essay is written as part of a film screening assignment conducted by Prof. Dilip Barad sir on Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025). The film confronts the Indian migrant crisis during the COVID-19 lockdown, not as a momentary disaster, but as a structural exposure of how dignity, citizenship, and state responsibility collapse when the poor are no longer useful.

Film Information

• Title: Homebound
• Release Year: 2025
• Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
• Languages: Hindi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi
• Genre: Social Realism / Survival Drama

Principal Cast

• Vishal Jethwa as Chandan- a Dalit youth aspiring to join the police force
• Ishaan Khatter as Shoaib- a Muslim police aspirant
• Janhvi Kapoor as Sudha Bharti- an Anganwadi worker positioned at the margins of state welfare

Production Credits

• Executive Producer: Martin Scorsese
• Producer: Karan Johar (Dharma Productions)
• Screenplay: Neeraj Ghaywan, adapted from Basharat Peer’s essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway” (2020)
• Cinematography: Pratik Shah
• Music: Naren Chandavarkar & Benedict Taylor
• Editing: Nitin Baid

Logline

Homebound follows two aspiring police constables from marginalized communities whose pursuit of institutional dignity and social mobility is abruptly derailed by the sudden announcement of a national COVID-19 lockdown. Forced to undertake a perilous journey on foot, their aspiration-driven narrative collapses into a stark struggle for biological survival, exposing the fragility of citizenship when the state withdraws its protective presence.

Introduction

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) is not merely a film about the COVID-19 migrant crisis; it is a profound meditation on dignity, ambition, and systemic apathy in contemporary India. Adapted from Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway”, the film fictionalizes real lives to expose how caste, religion, and state institutions structure who is allowed to dream and who is allowed to survive. This blog critically examines Homebound through adaptation studies, narrative analysis, performance, cinematic language, ethics, and political economy, following the academic worksheet framework.

PART I: PRE-SCREENING CONTEXT & ADAPTATION

1. From Reportage to Fiction: Reconfiguring the Protagonists

Main Point: The transformation of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub (informal textile workers) into Chandan and Shoaib (aspiring police constables) marks a crucial ideological shift in the adaptation.

In Basharat Peer’s reportage, the protagonists are positioned as informal labourers, whose vulnerability arises primarily from economic precarity and exclusion from formal state structures. In contrast, Neeraj Ghaywan’s cinematic adaptation reimagines them as aspiring agents of the state, fundamentally altering the narrative’s political orientation. This shift reframes the tragedy: the men are no longer external to the system, but invested believers in its promises.

Their desire to wear the police uniform functions as a potent symbol of institutional dignity, embodying the hope that legality, merit, and state authority can neutralise entrenched caste and religious marginalisation. The protagonists’ ambition thus becomes a faith in procedural justice and social mobility.

The resulting irony is devastating. Their trust in the state ultimately becomes the mechanism of betrayal. While Peer’s essay primarily laments abandonment and neglect, the film advances a sharper critique of false inclusion the illusion of belonging offered by institutions that are structurally incapable of delivering equality. In this context, ambition itself is revealed as a disciplinary trap, rather than a route to emancipation.

Summary: By transforming the protagonists’ social position, the adaptation deepens its political critique, exposing how institutional aspiration can function as a mode of entrapment for marginalised citizens.

2. Production Context: Scorsese’s Mentorship and Global Realism

Main Point: Martin Scorsese’s involvement as Executive Producer reinforces the film’s commitment to a global realist aesthetic.

The film’s restrained editing, observational camerawork, and rejection of melodrama reflect a realist mode aligned with Scorsese’s advocacy for ethical spectatorship—a cinematic approach that resists emotional manipulation and prioritises moral attentiveness. Formal choices such as extended long takes, minimal background score, and the non-sensational depiction of suffering situate Homebound within an international art-house realist tradition.

These aesthetic strategies render the film legible and credible within global festival circuits such as Cannes and TIFF, where realism is often equated with seriousness and political authenticity. However, this same aesthetic discipline also produces a cultural tension.

While Western audiences frequently interpret Homebound as a universal humanist social tragedy, domestic audiences, shaped by traditions of emotional excess, narrative closure, and cinematic escapism, may experience the film as bleak, slow, or emotionally inaccessible.

Summary: The film’s contrasting reception reveals how global realism, while enabling international acclaim, simultaneously exposes divergent cultural expectations regarding realism, affect, and cinematic pleasure.

PART II: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE & THEMATIC STUDY

3. The Politics of the Uniform

Main Point: The police uniform operates as a symbol of social mobility, moral legitimacy, and institutional belonging.

For Chandan and Shoaib, the police uniform represents far more than employment; it functions as a protective shield against humiliation and social vulnerability. To wear the uniform is to be seen as lawful, respectable, and authoritative an identity presumed to transcend caste-based stigma and religious suspicion. The uniform promises entry into the moral centre of the nation-state.

However, the film deliberately undercuts this promise through the stark statistic: 2.5 million applicants competing for 3,500 positions. This numerical imbalance exposes the myth of meritocracy, revealing how the language of equal opportunity masks profound structural inequality. Competition is framed as fair, yet access remains radically unequal.

In this context, ambition is no longer empowering but becomes a form of managed hope, carefully sustained to maintain belief in the system while ensuring minimal actual mobility. The uniform thus emerges as a disciplinary symbol one that produces aspiration without guaranteeing dignity.

Summary: The uniform signifies institutional dignity that is endlessly promised yet structurally denied, revealing how aspiration itself becomes a mechanism of control.

4. Intersectionality: Caste and Religion as Quiet Violence

Main Point: The film foregrounds micro-aggressions and everyday exclusions rather than overt spectacle to depict systemic oppression.

Case A: Caste and Internalised Erasure

Chandan’s decision to apply under the ‘General’ category, rather than claim caste-based reservation, is a moment of profound internalised caste shame. The act is subtle, bureaucratic, and silent yet deeply violent. By erasing his caste identity, Chandan attempts to appear more “deserving,” revealing how dominant notions of merit require self-negation from marginalised subjects.

This moment exposes how caste oppression often operates not through explicit discrimination but through psychological discipline, compelling individuals to disown their identity in pursuit of legitimacy.

Case B: Religion and Everyday Exclusion

Shoaib’s denial of a water bottle is similarly understated yet devastating. No verbal abuse is articulated, no confrontation staged. Instead, exclusion operates through silence and refusal, transforming a basic human necessity into a site of discrimination. The cruelty lies precisely in its ordinariness.

By refusing spectacle, the film shows how religious marginalisation functions through normalized social practices, rendering exclusion socially acceptable and therefore invisible.

Summary: Homebound demonstrates how systemic oppression is reproduced through ordinary interactions, where violence is quiet, routinised, and socially sanctioned.

5. The Pandemic as Narrative Exposure

Main Point: COVID-19 operates not as a narrative rupture but as an accelerator of pre-existing injustice.

The film’s tonal shift from an ambition-driven social drama to a survival narrative does not introduce new forms of suffering but intensifies those already embedded within the social order. The pandemic strips away institutional performance, revealing state neglect, disposable lives, and infrastructural violence that had long remained obscured.

Crucially, the lockdown does not create inequality; it merely removes the illusion of normalcy that sustained belief in state protection and social fairness. The road, the hunger, and the exhaustion are not aberrations but logical outcomes of systemic indifference.

By refusing to frame the pandemic as an exceptional catastrophe, Homebound positions it as a diagnostic event a moment that renders invisible structures brutally visible.

Summary: The pandemic functions as a social X-ray, exposing the skeletal framework of inequality that ordinarily remains hidden beneath everyday routines.

PART III: CHARACTER & PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

6. Somatic Performance: Chandan’s Shrinking Body

Main Point: Vishal Jethwa’s performance mobilises the body as a site of caste memory and trauma.

Rather than relying on dialogue, Vishal Jethwa communicates Chandan’s caste vulnerability through somatic expression. In moments when Chandan is asked to state his full name, his body responds instinctively: the shoulders collapse inward, the gaze lowers, and the voice loses volume. This physical contraction is not merely individual nervousness but a deeply historical reflex.

The film thus visualises what caste theory describes as embodied social conditioning a Dalit body trained over centuries to anticipate surveillance, judgment, and punishment. Authority does not need to speak; the body already knows how to behave. The camera’s attentiveness to these gestures transforms performance into political testimony.

By foregrounding bodily vulnerability, the film suggests that caste oppression operates not only through institutions but through internalised corporeal discipline. Trauma is stored not in memory alone, but in muscle, posture, and breath.

Summary: Chandan’s body functions as an archive of historical humiliation, where caste violence is inscribed somatically rather than narratively.

7. Shoaib and the Question of Home

Main Point: Shoaib’s restrained anger articulates the condition of minority alienation and conditional belonging.

Shoaib’s narrative trajectory is defined by a crucial choice: rejecting a secure job opportunity in Dubai in favour of a government post in India. This decision is driven by a desire for recognition and national belonging, rather than economic advancement alone. Shoaib seeks legitimacy within the Indian state, believing institutional service might secure his place within the national community.

However, the film steadily reveals the paradox of this aspiration. Shoaib remains persistently marked as the Other his religion rendering his belonging provisional and fragile. His anger never erupts into spectacle; instead, it simmers beneath the surface, expressed through controlled silence and restrained gestures. This emotional containment reflects the cost of conditional citizenship, where dissent risks further exclusion.

By denying Shoaib emotional release, the film exposes the psychological toll of being asked to constantly prove loyalty, patience, and restraint.

Summary: Homebound reframes home not as a physical location but as recognition and dignity, both of which remain inaccessible to Shoaib.

8. Sudha Bharti: Device or Counterpoint?

Main Point: Sudha Bharti operates as a figure of relative privilege, ethical witnessing, and narrative contrast.

Critics have often argued that Sudha functions primarily as a narrative device facilitating exposition, emotional grounding, or moral balance. However, a closer reading reveals her role as a structural counterpoint to Chandan and Shoaib. Sudha’s access to education, her relative institutional safety, and her position within a feminised care economy mark her as differently placed within the social hierarchy.

Importantly, Sudha does not possess the power to dismantle the system she witnesses. Her empathy is genuine, but it remains ethically limited by structural constraints. The film thus avoids positioning her as a saviour figure. Instead, she becomes a moral witness one who sees, records, and responds emotionally, without claiming authority over the narrative of suffering.

Through Sudha, the film invites reflection on the limits of liberal empathy and the responsibilities of those who are privileged enough to observe injustice without bearing its full weight.

Summary: Sudha is not a redeemer but a mirror to privilege, reflecting how empathy can coexist with structural powerlessness.

PART IV: CINEMATIC LANGUAGE

9. Visual Aesthetics: The Aesthetic of Exhaustion

Main Point: The film’s visual strategy is defined by a refusal of spectacle and an insistence on embodied fatigue.

Homebound adopts a visual grammar that systematically resists panoramic grandeur or emotionally cathartic imagery. Instead, the camera lingers on fragmented close-ups cracked feet, sweat-soaked skin, dust-clogged clothing breaking the human figure into exhausted parts rather than heroic wholes. This fragmentation transforms the migrant body into a series of moving remnants, marked by wear, repetition, and depletion.

The highway, traditionally a symbol of mobility and progress, is reimagined as endless, hostile, and indifferent. Its vastness offers no promise of arrival, only prolonged endurance. By denying visual relief or narrative acceleration, the film forces the spectator to confront the temporality of exhaustion, where movement does not signify freedom but survival.

This minimalist aesthetic refuses to convert suffering into visual pleasure. Instead of inviting empathy through spectacle, it demands durational attention, compelling viewers to inhabit the physical strain experienced by the characters.

Summary: Through visual minimalism and bodily fragmentation, the film produces an aesthetic of exhaustion, compelling the spectator to experience fatigue rather than merely observe it.

10. Soundscape: Silence as Ethics

Main Point: Silence, rather than music, functions as an ethical stance within the film’s sound design.

The sparse score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor deliberately avoids melodramatic cues that might guide or manipulate emotional response. Music appears minimally, often withdrawing entirely to allow ambient sounds footsteps, breath, wind, and distant traffic—to dominate the auditory field. This restraint prevents suffering from being framed as emotionally consumable.

In this soundscape, silence becomes a moral space. It refuses to aestheticise pain or convert trauma into sentiment. The absence of musical insistence places ethical responsibility on the viewer, who must confront suffering without interpretive comfort or emotional scripting.

By withholding sonic excess, the film aligns its auditory strategy with its visual minimalism, reinforcing a mode of ethical spectatorship in which tragedy is neither amplified nor performed for effect.

Summary: The film’s use of silence ensures that tragedy is witnessed rather than staged, preserving the dignity of suffering through sonic restraint.

PART V: CRITICAL DISCOURSE & ETHICS

11. Censorship and State Anxiety

Main Point: CBFC interventions reveal institutional anxiety toward politically unsettling realism.

The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) cuts imposed on Homebound such as muting words like “Gyan” or excising references to hunger (for instance, the line mentioning “aloo gobhi”) signal a deep discomfort with cinematic narratives that render structural deprivation and social fracture visible. These alterations do not merely regulate language; they seek to neutralise political meaning.

Such censorship reflects a broader pattern in which realism is permitted only when it remains non-threatening. As noted by Ishaan Khatter’s public remarks on the industry’s double standards, films are encouraged to be “authentic” so long as they do not expose systemic failure or state neglect. Once realism begins to interrogate power, it becomes subject to regulation.

In this sense, censorship functions not as moral guardianship but as a form of narrative control, shaping what kinds of suffering can be represented and how openly social inequality may be acknowledged.

Summary: Censorship in Homebound operates as an instrument of state anxiety, attempting to discipline realism by containing its political charge.

12. Ethics of True-Story Adaptations

Main Point: Raising awareness does not absolve ethical responsibility.

As a film adapted from real events, Homebound inevitably raises questions about ownership of suffering and representational ethics. Allegations of plagiarism and reports that the victims’ families were unaware of the adaptation foreground a crucial ethical dilemma: who has the right to narrate trauma, and under what conditions?

While visibility can generate public awareness, it cannot substitute for consent, acknowledgement, and inclusion. Ethical storytelling requires more than empathetic intention; it demands accountability to those whose lives form the narrative foundation. Without such engagement, representation risks becoming appropriative, even when politically sympathetic.

The film thus occupies a morally complex space drawing attention to injustice while simultaneously exposing the limits of authorship in stories of marginalised pain.

Summary: Ethical adaptation requires participatory storytelling, where visibility is accompanied by consent and responsibility rather than symbolic recognition alone.

13. Art vs Commerce

Main Point: Politically serious cinema faces structural marginalisation in the post-pandemic market.

Despite its critical acclaim at Cannes and Oscar shortlisting, Homebound struggled to secure meaningful domestic visibility. Weak distribution strategies, limited screens, and a market environment shaped by post-pandemic audience fatigue contributed to its commercial underperformance.

The contemporary film economy increasingly prioritises escapism, spectacle, and emotional comfort, leaving little space for cinema that demands confrontation with social reality. In such a landscape, films grounded in grim realism are often framed as niche or inaccessible, regardless of their artistic or political significance.

This tension underscores a persistent divide between artistic legitimacy and commercial viability, where international recognition does not translate into local sustainability.

Summary: The film’s reception reveals a market logic that rewards distraction over discomfort, marginalising serious cinema even in moments of global acclaim.

Conclusion: The Journey Home as Denied Dignity

Homebound ultimately argues that dignity is not a reward for effort but a basic right repeatedly denied. The physical journey during lockdown mirrors a deeper existential one a failed attempt to belong within India’s social fabric. Chandan and Shoaib do not merely walk home; they walk toward a truth the nation refuses to face. The tragedy of Homebound lies not in death alone, but in a system that never truly allowed them to live with dignity.

References:

Barad, Dilip. (2026). Academic Worksheet on Homebound. 10.13140/RG.2.2.10952.99849. 

Homebound. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, performances by Vishal Jethwa, Ishaan Khatter, and Janhvi Kapoor, Dharma Productions, 2025.

Peer, Basharat. "A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway." The New York Times Magazine, 25 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/opinion/sunday/India-migration-coronavirus.html.

"COVID-19 Lockdown in India." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdown_in_India. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

"Caste System in India." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

"Italian Neorealism." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_neorealism. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

Thank you!

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: War, Sacrifice, and the Ethics of Action

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls: War, Sacrifice, and the Ethics of Action

This blog task is assigned by Megha Trivedi Ma'am(Department of English, MKBU).

Here is the Mind Map of this blog: Click here

About the author:

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his distinctive prose style, war fiction, and exploration of courage, loss, and human endurance. His writings reshaped modern English prose and continue to shape literary studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Early Life

• Born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Son of a physician; influenced early by outdoor life hunting, fishing, and nature
• Began his career as a journalist, which shaped his concise and factual writing style

War Experience

• Served as an ambulance driver in World War I
• Seriously wounded in Italy (1918)
• War trauma deeply influenced works such as
• A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Lost Generation

• Lived in Paris during the 1920s
• Associated with modernist writers like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Coined as part of the “Lost Generation”—writers disillusioned after World War I

Major Works

• The Sun Also Rises – Post-war disillusionment
• A Farewell to Arms – Love and war
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Spanish Civil War
• The Old Man and the Sea – Human endurance and dignity

Writing Style (Iceberg Theory)

• Known for the Iceberg Theory (theory of omission)
• Simple language, short sentences, minimal description
• Deep meanings lie beneath the surface of the text
• Focus on action rather than explanation

Themes

• War and violence
• Death and loss
• Heroism and courage under pressure
• Masculinity and stoicism
• Nature as a testing ground for human spirit

Awards and Recognition

• Pulitzer Prize (1953) for The Old Man and the Sea
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his overall contribution to literature

Later Life and Death

• Suffered from depression and health issues
• Died by suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho
• His life reflected the same struggle and intensity found in his fiction

Literary Importance

Hemingway revolutionized modern prose and became a central figure in modernist literature. His works continue to be studied for their moral seriousness, narrative restraint, and psychological depth, making him essential for undergraduate and postgraduate literary studies.

About the novel:

For Whom the Bell Tolls, written by Ernest Hemingway, is one of the most significant war novels of the twentieth century. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the novel explores the ethical, emotional, and philosophical dimensions of revolutionary violence, personal sacrifice, and human solidarity. Hemingway combines political commitment with existential reflection, making the novel both a historical document and a timeless meditation on life and death.

1. Historical and Political Context

The novel is deeply rooted in the Spanish Civil War, fought between the Republican forces (including Communists, Socialists, and anarchists) and the Fascist Nationalists led by General Franco. Hemingway himself reported on the war as a journalist, and his first-hand experience lends authenticity to the narrative.

However, the novel is not propaganda. While sympathetic to the Republican cause, Hemingway exposes internal divisions, ideological rigidity, and moral compromises within revolutionary politics. The war becomes a testing ground for human values, rather than a simple clash between good and evil.

2. Plot and Central Action

The narrative spans three days, focusing on Robert Jordan, an American dynamiter fighting with Republican guerrillas. His mission is to blow up a strategic bridge to support an upcoming offensive.

This limited timeframe intensifies the novel’s psychological depth. The external action (the bridge mission) parallels Robert Jordan’s inner journey his reflections on duty, love, fear, and mortality. The tension between individual conscience and collective obligation drives the plot forward.

3. Characterization

1. Robert Jordan

An American dynamiter fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He represents duty, idealism, and moral commitment, torn between political responsibility and personal love. His final act reflects sacrifice and existential courage.

2. Maria

A young Spanish woman traumatized by Fascist violence. Maria symbolizes innocence damaged by war and offers Robert Jordan emotional renewal, love, and hope amid destruction.

3. Pilar

A powerful, intuitive woman and the moral backbone of the guerrilla band. Pilar represents collective wisdom, revolutionary strength, and emotional authority, often guiding decisions when men falter.

4. Pablo

Initially the leader of the guerrilla group, Pablo is cynical and self-preserving. He embodies fear, moral decline, and ideological disillusionment, contrasting sharply with Jordan’s idealism.

5. Anselmo

An elderly guide devoted to the Republican cause. Anselmo represents simple faith, ethical purity, and humane values, deeply troubled by the necessity of killing.

6. Agustín

A loud, aggressive fighter whose crude humor masks fear. Agustín reflects raw revolutionary energy and psychological strain produced by prolonged warfare.

7. El Sordo

Leader of another guerrilla band. His heroic last stand against Fascist forces symbolizes martyrdom, courage, and the tragic cost of resistance.

8. Karkov

A cynical Soviet journalist working with the Republicans. Karkov represents political pragmatism and ideological manipulation, highlighting the complexities of Communist involvement.

4. Major Themes

a) Death and Mortality

Death is omnipresent, yet Hemingway treats it with stoic clarity. The novel suggests that death gains meaning through conscious choice and responsibility, not through ideology alone.

b) Individual vs. Collective

Robert Jordan struggles between personal moral judgment and obedience to the Republican cause. The novel questions whether the individual should submit entirely to political systems or preserve ethical autonomy.

c) Love as Resistance

The love between Robert Jordan and Maria is brief but intense. It functions as a counterforce to war, affirming life in the face of destruction. Love does not negate death, but it humanizes sacrifice.

d) Human Interconnectedness

The title, taken from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, reinforces the idea that no individual exists in isolation. One person’s death affects all humanity.

5. Style and Narrative Technique

• Hemingway’s prose is marked by:
• Economy and restraint
• Understatement (Iceberg Theory)
• Simple syntax conveying complex emotional and philosophical depth

Notably, Hemingway uses literal translations of Spanish idioms into English, creating a foreignized diction that preserves cultural authenticity while subtly reminding readers of linguistic and ideological distance.

6. Symbolism

• The Bridge:  Symbolizes fate, transition, and the irreversible consequences of action.
• Mountains and Forests:  Suggest isolation, endurance, and primitive moral testing.
• Nature: Often contrasts with human violence, highlighting war’s unnatural brutality.

7. Ending and Tragic Vision

The novel’s conclusion, with Robert Jordan wounded and awaiting death while protecting his comrades’ escape, embodies tragic heroism. His acceptance of death affirms Hemingway’s belief that grace under pressure defines human greatness. The ending rejects romantic victory and instead offers moral triumph through self-sacrifice.

8. Critical Significance

For Whom the Bell Tolls stands at the intersection of:

• War literature
• Existential philosophy
• Political fiction

It expands Hemingway’s artistic vision beyond individual masculinity to include communal responsibility and ethical complexity. The novel remains relevant for its questioning of ideological violence and its insistence on shared humanity.

Que. 1| Critical Analysis of the end of the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls".

Ans. 

The ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway stands as one of the most powerful and philosophically resonant conclusions in twentieth-century war fiction. Far from offering narrative closure in a conventional sense, the novel’s final moments compress Hemingway’s central concerns death, duty, love, individual action, and collective responsibility into a single suspended instant. The ending transforms Robert Jordan’s death into a symbolic and ethical act rather than a mere plot resolution.

1. The Suspended Moment and Narrative Technique

The novel concludes with Robert Jordan lying wounded beneath a pine tree, waiting for the Fascist cavalry to arrive. The narrative halts at a moment of intense anticipation rather than depicting the actual act of killing. This deliberate suspension reflects Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics, privileging psychological intensity over external action. The reader is left within Jordan’s consciousness, sharing his heightened awareness of time, memory, and purpose.

This open-endedness resists sentimental closure. Jordan’s death is imminent but not explicitly narrated, underscoring Hemingway’s belief that meaning lies not in spectacle but in the inward acceptance of fate. The stillness of the scene contrasts sharply with the violence of war, creating a solemn, almost sacred atmosphere.

2. Individual Sacrifice and the Ethics of Action

Robert Jordan’s decision to remain behind, knowing he will almost certainly die, is the ethical climax of the novel. His choice is not motivated by abstract ideology alone but by a deep sense of responsibility toward others. By delaying the enemy, he ensures the escape of Maria and the guerrilla band.

Hemingway presents sacrifice not as martyrdom but as conscious, rational action. Jordan’s final thoughts reveal no illusion of glory; instead, they show a calm acceptance of death as the necessary cost of meaningful action. In this sense, the ending affirms Hemingway’s existential ethic: life gains value through commitment and action, even when the outcome is defeat.

3. Love as a Counterforce to Death

The love between Robert Jordan and Maria intensifies the emotional gravity of the ending. Their relationship, brief yet profoundly transformative, gives Jordan a personal reason to live and therefore makes his decision to die more poignant. Love does not rescue him from death, but it redeems death by giving it purpose.

Maria’s survival ensures continuity. While Jordan’s life ends, the possibility of future life, love, and memory persists. Thus, Hemingway balances tragedy with affirmation: death is inevitable, but love ensures that life extends beyond the individual.

4. The Bell, Death, and Human Interconnectedness

The novel’s title, drawn from John Donne’s meditation, finds its fullest expression in the ending. Jordan’s death is not isolated; it resonates within the collective human experience. His final act embodies the idea that no individual dies alone, and that personal sacrifice reverberates through the lives of others.

In choosing to die for the group, Jordan affirms the novel’s central moral vision: human beings are bound together by shared responsibility. The ending thus universalizes the Spanish Civil War, transforming it into a symbolic struggle for human dignity itself.

5. Tragic Heroism and Anti-Romanticism

Unlike traditional war narratives that glorify heroic death, Hemingway’s ending is marked by restraint and realism. Jordan does not die triumphantly; he waits, injured and vulnerable. This anti-romantic portrayal reinforces Hemingway’s rejection of false heroics. True courage, the novel suggests, lies in endurance, composure, and moral clarity, not in dramatic victory.

Conclusion

The ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls achieves its power through silence, restraint, and ethical depth. Robert Jordan’s final moment crystallizes Hemingway’s vision of the modern hero one who acts decisively in a meaningless world, accepts death without illusion, and affirms life through sacrifice and love. The novel closes not with certainty, but with resolve, leaving readers to confront the enduring question Hemingway poses: how should one live, knowing that death is inevitable?

Que.2 |  In what ways the flashback technique used in "For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Ans. 

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway makes extensive and deliberate use of the flashback technique to deepen characterization, broaden historical perspective, and enrich the novel’s moral and ideological concerns. Far from functioning as mere background information, flashbacks in the novel are structurally and thematically integral. They interrupt the immediate action of the bridge-blowing mission to reveal how personal memory, political violence, and historical trauma shape present decisions.

1. Psychological Depth and Interior Consciousness

One of the most significant functions of flashbacks in the novel is the exploration of Robert Jordan’s inner life. While the surface narrative unfolds over three days, Jordan’s memories stretch backward into his childhood, education, and earlier experiences in Spain.

Example:

Jordan frequently recalls his grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War, whose ideals of honor and courage influence Jordan’s own moral framework. These memories reveal Jordan’s internal conflict between inherited ideals of heroism and the grim reality of modern warfare. Through such flashbacks, Hemingway shows that Jordan’s present mission is not merely military but ethical—shaped by a lifelong struggle to define what it means to act rightly.

2. Historical and Political Context of the Spanish Civil War

Flashbacks also serve to expand the novel’s historical scope, offering vivid accounts of revolutionary violence during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. These recollections prevent the war from being reduced to abstract ideology.

Example:

Pilar’s long flashback describing the execution of Fascist sympathizers in her village is one of the most harrowing episodes in the novel. The memory, narrated in graphic detail, exposes the brutality committed in the name of revolution. This flashback complicates any simplistic moral division between Republicans and Fascists, revealing how political idealism can degenerate into mass cruelty.

Through this episode, Hemingway critiques revolutionary violence while maintaining sympathy for those trapped within historical forces beyond their control.

3. Collective Memory and Communal Identity

Unlike conventional flashbacks centered solely on individual memory, Hemingway uses flashbacks to articulate collective and communal memory. Characters such as Pilar, Anselmo, and Pablo recall past events that define the guerrilla band’s shared identity.

Example:

Anselmo’s recollections of his former religious faith and his reflections on killing illustrate the moral burden carried by ordinary men drawn into war. His memories contrast sharply with ideological rhetoric, reinforcing Hemingway’s emphasis on personal conscience over political slogans.

These shared memories bind the group together, suggesting that history is experienced not only individually but collectively.

4. Structural Tension Between Past and Present

Formally, flashbacks create a counterpoint between action and reflection. While the external plot is urgent the bridge must be destroyed the internal narrative repeatedly slows down, allowing memory to intrude upon action.

This technique heightens dramatic tension: the closer the mission comes to execution, the more insistently the past presses upon the present. Hemingway thus mirrors the psychological reality of soldiers, for whom moments of extreme danger often trigger intense recollection.

5. Love, Memory, and Human Continuity

Flashbacks involving Maria’s traumatic past particularly her experiences of sexual violence and loss serve to contextualize her vulnerability and resilience.

Example:

Maria’s memories of her parents’ execution and her own suffering explain her emotional fragility and her intense attachment to Jordan. These flashbacks transform their love story from a romantic interlude into a deeply human response to trauma, reinforcing the novel’s belief that love is an act of resistance against historical brutality.

6. Moral Complexity and the Rejection of Simplistic Heroism

By juxtaposing present action with past violence, flashbacks undermine romantic notions of war. They reveal that every act of heroism is shadowed by guilt, fear, and memory.

Pilar’s recollections, in particular, expose the cost of revolutionary justice, while Jordan’s memories reveal the psychological toll of ideological commitment. Thus, flashbacks become a moral device, forcing readers to confront the ethical ambiguities of war.

Conclusion

The flashback technique in For Whom the Bell Tolls is central to Hemingway’s modernist vision. Through memory, the novel transcends its limited temporal frame and becomes a meditation on history, violence, and responsibility. Flashbacks deepen character psychology, provide historical authenticity, and expose the moral contradictions of war. Most importantly, they affirm Hemingway’s belief that the present is inseparable from the past, and that every act of courage is shaped and haunted by memory.

Here is the Video overview of this blog: 

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Here is the detailed presentation of this blog:

References: 

Beebe, Maurice, and John Feaster. “CRITICISM OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A SELECTED CHECKLIST.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1968, pp. 337–69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26278613. Accessed 5 Jan. 2026.

Brenner, Gerry. “EPIC MACHINERY IN HEMINGWAY’S ‘FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, 1970, pp. 491–504. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26279232. Accessed 5 Jan. 2026.

Conway, Daniel. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 35/36, 2008, pp. 88–105. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717927. Accessed 25 Dec. 2025.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Scribner Classics, 1940.

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