Old Man at the Bridge

“The Old Man at the Bridge” is an unconventional war story. It effectively presents Hemingway’s commonly used themes of Moral Ambiguity in the Context of War and The Casualties of War in an uncommon way, using fewer than 600 words and without showing a single moment of violence. This stylistic choice is typical of Hemingway, who favored brief but powerful human moments over larger stages and epic battles.

Hemingway wrote more traditional war narratives in his dispatches from the Spanish Civil War that inspired “The Old Man at the Bridge.” These reports, which were sent to the New York Times in April 1938, include vivid descriptions of battles and depictions of civilian victims of the conflict. Likewise, his most famous novel about World War I, A Farewell to Arms (1929), contains scenes of bloody imagery. “The Old Man at the Bridge,” however, includes none of this. Hemingway begins by eliminating the conventions of a war story. The weapons, the violence and the gore are all excluded; they are, in a way, obvious elements of which the reader is already aware. Instead, Hemingway chooses to focus on an intimate, personal moment.

In “The Old Man at the Bridge,” a conversation with a solitary, powerless old man who has no political affiliation or motivation emphasizes the casualties of war on both the micro and macro levels. His individual pain and personal loss stand for those of the multitudes who cross the bridge. Likewise, the implications of the single soldier’s behavior in leaving the old man behind evoke broader reflections on the soldier’s comrades, the army in general, and the war itself. By compressing the scope of a war narrative into an intimate yet minimal moment of conversation, Hemingway encapsulates an expanding and complex moral dilemma that reflects larger themes and is typical of the majority of his work. “The Old Man at the Bridge” employs a minimalist approach as a means to achieving a larger truth.

After eliminating the larger tropes associated with war stories, Hemingway moves on to stripping down his language. The majority of the piece is dialogue, but the old man says only a few things, which are repeated in different forms and iterations that comprise the bulk of the 598 words. The repeated dialogue reveals his distress and angst at having to leave his animals behind. He reveals his inner turmoil by returning again and again to the same questions and declarations: “There is no need to be unquiet about the cat. But the others. Now what do you think about the others?” (58). This question and its variations emphasize his distress and his inability to leave the creatures mentally, despite having abandoned them physically. He will, in a sense, stay with them until the end, as his immobility suggests that he will die sitting by the road, repeating his thoughts into empty space when the Fascist army arrives.

The words of the unnamed narrator, whose mission is to scout out the coming enemy, are full of repetition for a different reason. He repeats his questions without noticing that the old man just gave the answer. His words, like those of the old man, betray his reality: The narrator is not listening. His mind is elsewhere as he watches the stream of refugees crossing the bridge subside. He is a soldier distracted by an advancing army, and his repeated words belie his lack of specific concern for the anxious old man. His disconnectedness and coldness toward the suffering human in front of him imply his emotional deadening, a psychological casualty of the conflict.

Verbal repetition also reflects the situational reoccurrence of the tragedy shown in this scene, which exponentially radiates out from the small moment like ripples on a lake. The old man leaves animals to die. He is left by the soldier, who is also alone, without his comrades. Hemingway’s repetition of the dialogue begins as an act of minimalism in the economy of words and depiction of emotion, but it also imitates the expanding, all-consuming motion of the wide-ranging tragedy of war.

The imagery in “The Old Man at the Bridge” is also extremely spare, as it is crowded out by dialogue. Thus, the limited description that Hemingway presents becomes even more important. What the narrator sees and describes and how he reacts point to themes of moral ambiguity that Hemingway often addressed. The soldier’s role as a scout and an observer is consistent with the details he provides, such as the movement of people and other soldiers and the weather’s effect on the planes. His quickly mentioned description provides a rising tension, in contrast with many war narratives in which suspense is created by intense imagery and sensory details of weapons and battles. In “The Old Man at the Bridge,” small reports about the number of people crossing the bridge, noted so rapidly as to almost be asides, are inserted between segments of dialogue. The large crowds become a slow trickle, and the final detail presented is their ominous cessation. These descriptions are mentioned so casually that they leave the reader to sense, rather than be confronted by, the coming danger. The imagery of the other soldiers “helping push against the spokes of the wheels” (57) to assist vehicles in their escape over the bridge highlights what is distinctly not seen in the story: the provision of help for the old man. The description of the soldiers’ aid to civilians at the beginning of the story proves that assisting the old man is possible. The narrator, however, makes a different choice.

Hemingway doesn’t assign judgement to this decision but creates a dilemma, alluding to his frequent theme of Moral Ambiguity in the Context of War. Leaving the old man to die is a choice that others may find easy to condemn, yet the soldier must also establish certain limits to enable his own survival and the success of the overall mission. The soldier does not seem to experience this as a dilemma. However, based on Hemingway’s statement that the small incidents in his works reflect larger tragedies, the old man's emotional suffering will extend to impact the soldier, and this multiplication will continue.

The imagery of the doves and the fact that the story takes place on Easter Sunday further suggest this theme. The spiritual significance of a day that Christians set apart as their holiest holiday is cast aside as the army charges ahead. The old man’s pigeons, which the distracted narrator mistakenly replaces with the image of doves, will probably be victims of the artillery. These symbols of peace and holiness in the Western world are marked for death or disregarded.