Major Characters of This Novel:
Jake Barnes
Montoya
Count Mippipopolous
Belmonte
Harvey Stone
Background: Ernest
Hemingway is a famous author in American
Literature. He has created many novels, poems, fictions and short stories. The
Sun Also Rises is one of the great creations. It is written in 1926. Biographer of Hemingway Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is
"recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar
Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was
published in the United States in October 1926 by the publishing house Scribner's. A year later, the London publishing house Jonathan Cape published the novel with the title
of Fiesta.
Somebody think that, Hemingway intended to write
a non-fiction book about bullfighting but thought that the week's experiences
had presented him with enough material for a novel. So he began writing the
novel on his birthday in 1925, and finished the draft manuscript barely two
months later. The source of the novel was Hemingway's 1925 trip to Spain. The
setting was unique and memorable.
The novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made
him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. The characters of
this novel are based on real people and the action is based on real events. In
the novel, Hemingway presents his concept that the "Lost Generation", degenerate and permanently damaged
by World War I . Furthermore, he investigates the themes of
love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity.
Plot
Summary: Jake Barnes is the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises. He is
also an expatriate American journalist living in Paris. Jake suffered a war
wound that has caused him to be impotent. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley.
Brett embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, having had numerous love
affairs. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend
Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count
Mippipopolous in a nightclub.
Cohn had an affair with Brett a year earlier and
still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. Jake and Bill
enjoy five days of tranquility, fishing the streams near Burguete, after which they rejoin the group in Pamplona,
where they begin to drink heavily. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat,
watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces
Brett to Romero at Montoya's inn; she is smitten with the 19-year-old matador
and seduces him. The jealous tension between the men builds; Mike, Jake, Cohn,
and Romero each love Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has
fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he injures. At last Bill returns
to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián in northeastern Spain. Lady Brett Ashley announces
she has decided to go back to Mike.
Major themes
The themes of The Sun Also Rises are apparent
from its two epigraphs. The first is an allusion to the "Lost Generation and the other epigraph is a long quotation from Ecclesiastes. He thought the major characters in The Sun Also Rises may have
been battered but was not lost. The book can be read either as a novel about bored expatriates or
as a morality tale about a protagonist who searches for integrity in an immoral
world.
Lost Generation:
Hemingway captures the angst of the age and transcends
Brett and Jake's love story, although they are representative of the period:
Brett is starved for reassurance and love and Jake is sexually maimed. His
wound symbolizes the disability of the age, the disillusion, and the
frustrations felt by an entire generation. While living in Paris, Hemingway
thought he lost touch with American values, but his biographer Michael Reynolds
claims the opposite, seeing evidence of the author's midwestern American values in the novel. Hemingway admired hard work. He
portrayed the matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, in a
positive manner, but Brett, who prostitutes herself, is emblematic of "the
rotten crowd" living on inherited money. It is Jake, the working journalist, who pays
the bills again and again when those that can pay do not. Hemingway shows,
through Jake's actions, his disapproval of people who did not pay up. Reynolds
says that Hemingway shows the tragedy, not so much of the decadence of the Montparnasse
crowd, but of the self-destruction of American values of the period. Jake
becomes the moral center of the story. He never considers himself part of the
expatriate crowd because he is a working man.
Women and love:
Lady Brett Ashley represented the
liberated New Woman and in her Hemingway created a character
who reflected her time. Sexually promiscuous, she is a denizen of Parisian
nightlife and cafés. In Pamplona she is out of her element and causes chaos: in
her presence, the men drink too much and fight; she seduces the young
bullfighter; she becomes a Circe in the festival. Critics define her variously as
complicated, elusive, and enigmatic. She is vulnerable, forgiving, and
independent. Jake and Brett, in spite of
their love, have a relationship that becomes destructive because the love
cannot be consummated. Brett destroys Jake's friendship with Cohn, and in
Pamplona she ruins his hard-won reputation among the Spaniards. Meyers
sees Brett as a woman who wants sex without love while Jake can only give her
love without sex. Although Brett sleeps with many men, it is Jake she loves. Dana
Fore writes that Brett is willing to be with Jake in spite of his disability,
in a "non-traditional erotic relationship". By the end of the novel,
although Jakes loves Brett he appears to undergo a transformation in Madrid
when he begins to distance himself from her. Reynolds believes that Jake
represents the "everyman" and that in the course of the narrative
he loses his honor, faith, and hope.
The
Nature, the fiesta and corrida: It's a great tragedy—and
the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts
again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at
the war with nothing going to happen to you." He demonstrated what he
considered the purity in the culture of bullfighting and presented it as an
authentic way of life, contrasted against the inauthenticity of the
Parisian bohemians. He was profoundly affected by the spectacle of
bullfighting, writing, "It isn't just brutal like they always told us to
be accepted as an aficionado was rare for a non-Spaniard; Jake
goes through a difficult process to gain acceptance. Hemingway considered the bullring as war with
precise rules, in contrast to the messiness of the real war that he, and by
extension Jake, experienced. Critic Keneth Kinnamon notes that young
Romero is the novel's only honorable character. Before the group arrives in
Pamplona, Jake, Bill and Cohn take a fishing trip to the Irate River. As Harold Bloom points out, the scene serves as an
interlude between the Paris and Pamplona sections, "an oasis that exists
outside linear time". More importantly, on another level it reflects
"the mainstream of American fiction beginning with the Pilgrims seeking
refuge from English oppression"—the prominent theme in American literature
of escaping into the wilderness, as seen in Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Thoreau. Furthermore, nature is where men are without
women: men fish, men hunt, men find redemption. In nature Jake and Bill do not
need to discuss the war because their war experience, paradoxically, is
ever-present. The nature scenes also serve as counterpoint to the fiesta scenes.
All of the characters drink heavily during the fiesta and generally throughout
the novel. In Hemingway's writing, nature is a place of refuge and rebirth,
according to Stoltzfus, where the hunter or fisherman gains a moment of
transcendence at the moment the prey is killed.
Gender:
Elliot believes that Hemingway viewed
homosexuality as an imitation way of life, but he supports Jake with homosexual
men because, like them, he does not have sex with women. Jake's anger shows his
self-hatred at his inauthenticity and lack of masculinity. His sense of
masculine identity is lost—he is less than a man. Hemingway's writing has been
called homophobic. For example, in the fishing scenes, Bill
confesses his fondness for Jake but then goes on to say, "I couldn't tell
you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. Romero is the symbol of
masculine identity; at the bullring Jake can only be a spectator. The Davidsons
write that Romero reflects the code of masculinity in his bravery, and that
Brett is attracted to him for this reason. Romero is the symbol of masculine identity; at
the bullring Jake can only be a spectator. The Davidsons write that Romero
reflects the code of masculinity in his bravery, and that Brett is attracted to
him for this reason.
Writing
Style: there is no hesitation
to say that the novel is well-known for its style, which is variously described
as modern, hard-boiled, or understated. From Pound Hemingway learned
to write in the modernist style: he used irony, pared away
sentimentalism, and presented images and scenes without explanations of
meaning, most noticeably at the book's conclusion, in which multiple Hemingway scholar Anders Hallengren writes that
because Hemingway learned from Pound to "distrust adjectives" he
created a style "in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising
the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the
door on sentiment, on the subjective. Although the novel is written in a
journalistic style, Frederic Svoboda writes that the striking thing about the
work is "how quickly it moves away from a simple recounting of
events". Jackson Benson believes that Hemingway used autobiographical
details as framing devices for life in general.
Balassi says Hemingway applied the iceberg
theory better in The Sun Also Rises than in any of his other
works, by editing away extraneous material or purposely leaving gaps in the
story. He made editorial remarks in the manuscript that show he wanted to break
from the stricture of Gertrude Stein's advice to use "clear restrained
writing". In the earliest draft the novel begins in Pamplona, but Hemingway
moved the opening setting to Paris because he thought the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to
the later action in Spain.
Source: (Wikipedia,
Text Book, Note Book and My Own Practice)
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