User talk:CVinson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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 with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no
 bloody fucking chance” ().
+Many guns figure prominently in the  novel For Whom the Bell Tolls,
+perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson . revolver handed down
+by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:
+It was a single action officer’s model . caliber and there was no
+trigger guard.It had the softest,sweetest trigger pull you had ever
+felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although
+the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and
+the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster.
+(Hemingway, For Whom )
+After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of
+it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep
+lake (). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the
+guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and
+the mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the
+fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to
+make his last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and
+thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here
+we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for
+and I hate very much to leave it” (). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the
+firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and
+fight with existential heroism for the good.