User talk:CVinson/sandbox: Difference between revisions
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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 (337). 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 9mm 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” (467). 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. | 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 (337). 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 9mm 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” (467). 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. | ||
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Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1950); the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream'' (1970) and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life (Baker 563). | Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees'' (1950); the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream'' (1970) and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life (Baker 563). | ||