The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway uses a Gertrude Stein quote as an epigraph for his book The Sun Also Rises, “You are all a lost generation.” If this book is to be the standard of that quote one would certainly have to add the alcoholic, promiscuous, violent, and shallow generation. Lost does not begin to capture the characters of the novel; they are vacant. The characters wander aimlessly about Europe morally corrupted—morally bankrupt (some financially too). They don’t believe in anything. They don’t particularly want anything. They are stripped of any sense of a dream—any reason for existence beyond their tawdry excesses. Life is about sex and drugs and rock and roll—or rather—sex and alcohol and bullfighting.

The text is rife with shallow—or—non-existent relationships; Robert and Jake, Jake and Georgette, Jake and Brett, Brett and Mike, Mike and Jake, Jake and Bill, Bill and Edna, Bill and Mike. It is dizzying to put so many dysfunctional characters in the span of two hundred pages. Jake loves Brett, who loves Jake, but is marrying Mike, who knows Brett is cheating on him and is perfectly ok with that until she has an affair with Robert, who begins to stalk Brett, who cries on Jake’s shoulder, who sort of kind of skirts the issue in conversations with Bill, who is quite sure that sex is the downfall of everything… My reaction to the text as a whole was similar to my reaction to A Moveable Feast—is there a point here, and if there is what the hell is it? And do I care? It reads (to me) like poor-rich-kids with too much time and money and not enough brains, morality—or backbone.

Brett Ashley has a backbone, sort of, I suppose. But Hemingway’s misogynistic presentation, at least for this reader, removes the power/impact of what could have been an otherwise strong and independent character. Brett is charismatic and beautiful (although not rich in her own right—the money comes to her through a man). Her very presence is disruptive to everyone around her—all men. Her liaisons with one or another of them create tension within all of the male-male relationships (excepting Jake and Bill on their fishing trip—which could almost be described as homo-social/erotic). This group of men, Jake, Robert, Mike and Bill, travels together, allegedly friends, at least acquaintances, and they come to blows. Brett disrupts Romero’s reality and her interaction with him threatens to destroy his career and reputation. She seems to rob men of their personal power and feeling of control. She is commitment phobic and profoundly self-centered, spoiled and shallow. The only other women portrayed in the novel are shrews (Frances Clyne), and harlots (Georgette). What sort of a statement is that?

One could, of course, attribute the insecurity of the male characters to their involvement in World War I with its trench warfare and lack of honor and chivalry; a war in which all illusion of individual honor and bravery were stripped away. This theory may work for Jake who in many ways (at least in Hemingway’s mind) did surrender his “manhood” to the war, but it does not work as well for Mike—who simply appears to be a raging alcoholic not complicated by any emotion at all. And what of Robert Cohn (who would surely be in jail today under some stalking law!)? Or Romero? Neither was in the war and yet they too seem to personify this loss of manhood—emasculated by Brett Ashley.

For me, this text has to be looked at as a reflection of the writer himself (although I do hate to do that). The text reveals so many of Hemingway’s insecurities, phobias and biases. How he perceives women, men, the world. One can look at the bullfighting as a microcosm of Hemingway’s vision of the world: We will travel, as men, in packs and kill anyone who strays from the herd—or gets in our path. Perhaps it is lost, in a pathetic rather than ennobling sort of way.