The story under the title "On the American Dead
in Spain" was written by Ernest Hemingway, who was one of the most famous
American novelists, short-story writer and essayist, whose deceptively simple
prose style have influenced wide range of writers.
The whole story is very short and resembles a tale
spoken by an old military man. So, the subject matter of the story is the
recollections of the events of the war on the Spanish area where the Lincoln
Battalion held for four and a half months along the heights of the Jarama
River, described by the author as eulogy (of /to) those who gave their lives in
the sake of the freedom. The controlling idea deduced by the author is that not
a single soldier of that fight is forgotten, all of them live in the hearts of
people they protected. If to revise that Hemingway visited Spain not once and
liked this country, we can underline that the given idea is quite patriotic.
What concerns the text itself, it is told in the 1st
person narrative, though we don’t have any obvious evidences of Hemingway’s
presence, usually marked by the personal pronoun “I”. But on the other hand, we
always feel as if the author narrates us the story right now, we feel how
passion, sorrow and hate boils in him, as if ready to return everything to
fight again: “The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen
before against tyranny.”
The narration is interlaced with descriptive,
historical and lyrical passages. We can be convinced of that for example by
reading the first passage of the story:
“The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight. Snow blows
through the olive groves, sifting against the tree roots. Snow drifts over the
mounds with small headboards. (When there was time for headboards.) The olive
trees are thin in the cold wind because their lower branches were once cut to
cover tanks, and the dead sleep cold in the small hills above the Jarama River.
It was cold that February when they died there and since then the dead have not
noticed the changes of the seasons.”
What matters here is that there are no dialogues of
personages and no individual characters at all. Just the common reference to
people: the dead, the Spanish people, the fascists, the Spanish peasants, the
Spanish workers. This also proves the type of narration being close to the
recollection.
The prevailing mood of the story is rather gloomy and
sometimes lyrical, coming into more optimistic at the end. Such words as dead,
die, slavery, war – make it gloomy. The sentences like “The black trees will
come to life with small green leaves, and there will be blossoms on the apple
trees along the Jarama River” add some lyrical tone to the narration. And the
assurance of the author in the future supplements the text with some kind of
the optimism.
The style of the author is colloquial, he doesn’t applies
here pompous bookish words or professionalisms, as the coloquial style fully
corresponds the given situation. This fact demonstrates the talent of Hemingway
as an outstanding writer.
The logical structure of the text is not simple, as
while reading we come across the passages of different length. The last
paragraph for example consists of only one sentence. And the logical
argumentation of the paragraphs needs also deep considering of the reader, as
the sentences of different passages are closely combined with the certain
subject line.
Among the stylistic devices used by the author we
would name the repetition, which aims to stress the things important for the
narrator: “For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of
Spain can never die”, “and there is forever for them to remember them in”.
The cases of parallel construction also contain some
implied sense: “Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come
alive again.”
All in all, the story reflects the author's preoccupation
with the moral self and can give food for thought to anyone who is able to
think.
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