Bulls

Bulls are both actual animals encountered in Spain and a recurring measure of how people face danger. Memories of village bullbaiting and the bullring shape characters’ ideas of courage, while Robert Jordan and Anselmo distinguish killing animals from killing human beings. The contrast becomes especially sharp beside the novel’s wartime deaths: bravery before a bull may resemble bravery in combat, but neither resemblance erases the moral cost of killing.

Identity and Setting

The Bulls are fighting animals encountered in village festivities and professional bullfighting, as well as in the characters’ memories. They appear in sharply different settings: the formal ring where Finito de Palencia performs, the improvised village bullbaiting remembered by Andrés, and the conversations in the guerrilla camp where the past is recalled amid preparations for military action. The animal is never simply a decorative emblem. Its strength and unpredictability make it a real danger to the people who approach it, while its presence draws spectators into practices that can become communal rituals.

The novel also sets bull encounters beside hunting and war. Anselmo says he loves hunting, but Robert Jordan answers that he does not like killing animals. Anselmo reverses the comparison: he dislikes killing men. Jordan replies that killing is tolerable to him when necessity and the cause require it. Their exchange establishes a moral distinction rather than an easy equivalence: the characters can accept violence in war while still registering a different reluctance toward animals or fellow human beings.

Fear, Courage, and the Bullring

Pilar’s account of Finito de Palencia gives the bullring its fullest remembered form. She recalls him as short, sober-faced, and visibly apprehensive, yet capable of acting with composure before a bull. In her recollection, he waits until the animal’s movement creates an opening, makes his approach, and kills it with a controlled thrust. Afterward, he watches the bull fall and circles the ring amid the crowd’s applause. Pilar’s memory holds fear and skill together: the performance is not evidence that Finito felt no fear, but that he could act despite it.

The people around Pilar disagree over how to judge him. One man dismisses Finito as an inadequate matador; Pablo counters that his short stature disadvantaged him, while Primitivo remarks on his tuberculosis. Pilar rejects any simple separation of physical frailty from the conditions of his life. She describes the poverty and hardship of a poor man’s route into bullfighting, including Finito’s traveling beneath the seats of third-class carriages as a boy. In her account, his fear of bulls and his illness coexist with the nerve he displayed in the ring.

A particular bullfight makes that contradiction memorable. At a Valladolid fair, Finito killed a large bull associated with Pablo Romero. The admirers who had adopted his name for their club later presented him with the mounted head at a banquet in the Café Colon. The head remained covered during the meal, and Pilar noticed that Finito would not look toward it. The trophy celebrated his achievement, but his avoidance of it complicates the victory: public admiration did not mean that he welcomed a permanent reminder of the animal he had killed.

Village Bullbaiting and Andrés

Andrés’s memories of village bullbaiting make courage more physical and collective. As a boy in Villaconejos, he looked forward to the annual appearance of the bull, even though anticipation brought excitement and fear together. Carts were arranged around the square to close its exits, and the bull was released from its traveling box into the crowd. Andrés remembers waiting for the charge and trying to draw the animal away from people who had fallen.

His reputation grew from repeatedly putting himself in danger to protect others. He could hold his ground until the last moment, pull at the bull’s horns or tail, and try to turn its attention away from someone on the ground. During one remembered killing, he joined the crowd that rushed the animal. He was mocked for biting and holding its ear, but the same act became expected: each year the villagers looked for the “Bulldog of Villaconejos” to repeat it. When the bull was dead, Andrés felt ashamed of that part of the performance as well as proud of his courage. He washed himself and his knife at the village fountain, then drank wine to clear the taste from his mouth.

The memory is not a straightforward celebration. Andrés’s village honors him and jokes with him, and he takes pride in being brave; yet the yearly performance leaves him feeling empty as well as pleased. The bull’s death is the end point of a ritual that brings the crowd together, but Andrés’s private reaction preserves unease within the communal acclaim. His recollection also turns the prospect of missing the festival into relief: when rain canceled the event, he was glad not to have to face it.

Bulls Beside War and Animal Death

Pilar’s judgment of Finito becomes a pointed comparison with Pablo. She says that Finito feared the bullfight intensely but behaved like a lion once he entered the ring; Pablo, by contrast, is afraid to die now and treats that fear as important. The comparison does not deny fear or make courage a fixed quality. Instead, it separates feeling fear from surrendering to it: Finito’s conduct in the ring is the evidence Pilar uses to challenge Pablo’s present retreat.

Andrés makes a related comparison when he is sent away with a message while an assault on the posts and the bridge is approaching. The assignment initially brings relief, and he remembers the childhood feeling of waking to find that rain would cancel the bullbaiting. Yet he concludes that delivering the message does not excuse him from returning to the action. He thinks of his brother Eladio and the others who will be involved, and resolves to return in time. His recollection of the bull square thus gives shape to a conflict between escape and participation: past bravery becomes a standard against which he judges his obligation in the present war.

The novel also refuses to treat animal death as an abstraction. Anselmo remembers seeing a bear’s paw displayed at a church and says that it gave him pride in the encounter, but that the killing of a man leaves nothing good behind. Jordan observes that a man’s hand cannot be nailed up like the paw; Anselmo answers that the human hand resembles the bear’s paw. The comparison joins animal and human bodies in a single image while preserving a difference in how killing is remembered.

On the hill where El Sordo makes his last stand, a wounded horse can no longer climb properly. El Sordo pulls it by the bridle, then shoots it himself so its body will block a gap between rocks and support the position of his automatic rifle. The act is at once military calculation and an intimate, deliberate killing of an animal that has carried him. Elsewhere, Maria tries to calm the horses during the attack, but her anxiety unsettles them; she holds the neck of a white-faced bay stallion as firing and bombs sound nearby. These moments place animals inside the war’s practical demands and dangers, not outside them as mere metaphors.

Significance

Across these episodes, bulls embody neither uncomplicated heroism nor a single judgment about violence. The ring makes courage visible as practiced control; village bullbaiting turns risk into a public ritual that both honors and unsettles Andrés; and Pilar uses Finito’s conduct to expose the difference between being afraid and giving way to fear. The bull’s death can produce trophies, acclaim, and pride, but Finito’s reluctance to look at the mounted head and Andrés’s mixed feelings keep those rewards from closing the moral question.

Set against war, the bull also helps distinguish kinds of necessity without making killing innocent. Jordan’s refusal to kill animals and acceptance of killing for a cause, Anselmo’s reluctance to kill men, and El Sordo’s killing of his wounded horse show that ethical feeling persists amid violence even when practical demands prevail. Bulls therefore recur as creatures in their own right and as a test of human stories about courage: they make fear visible, bind memory to the body, and reveal the distance between celebrating an act and living with what it has cost.