The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms - Basically the Twilight of that generation - made Gary Cooper a star only four years after it was published

Earnest Hemingway; the name probably immediately inspires foggy images of old fishermen, perhaps together with dying men on Kilimanjaro and knowledge about his succinct writing style. In short, he’s a famous dude, and he should be. To be honest, I never really loved him until reading ‘The Sun Also Rises’ (as a novel, it should be in italics, but this font lacks that option, so for ease I put it in single quotations), but that text has captured my heart.

    Hemingway is, as aforementioned, famous for ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ (a purportedly semi-autobiographical novel about his own experiences as a WWI soldier), the novella ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ and several short stories, the best-known being “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway is one of the famous expatriate American writers that comprised “The Lost Generation” that set up in Europe during the 1920s; there he hobnobbed with Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, simultaneously getting to know those artists we now hold dear, Picasso and Joan Miro and the like. Somewhat ironically, if you’ve ever read Joyce, Hemingway liked to go on alcoholic sprees with his new friend J.J. (I guess if it’s not in Dublin, it’s not worth writing a pathos-ridden story about?), but I guess this is allowed since Hemingway must have been scarred from his experiences as an ambulance driver in WWI.

    Speaking of WWI, it’s worth mentioning it in connection to Hemingway’s ‘fiction.’ This is the thing: we remember Hemingway as someone who influenced American writing due to an entirely new style, with scarcely any description midst quantities of dialogue. And, while that does add a certain flavor to his book (maybe, in a sense, it makes his characters more true to life, since, when speaking to someone, we’re less aware of “their chocolate brown eyes flashing” and more aware of what they’re saying), there is something in his books that transcends a new style. You can see it in his attempts to address his status as an expatriate, speaking to lostness while still being lost. And this lostness, mayhaps, came from Hemingway’s time in the army, when he was injured and spent 6 months in a hospital. There, he fell deeply in love with Agnes Von Kurowsky, who he planned to marry, but who surprised him by marrying another.

    There are clear similarities to this story in his fiction, both explicit and implied. ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is the story of Henry and Catherine, soldier and nurse who meet in a hospital and fall in love as Henry heals. By the time Henry is ready to return to active duty, Catherine is pregnant with his child and things are more serious than they ought to be in a time of war, where -- apparently -- the personal comes second to the societal. In the end, the future of society is stillborn and his mother dies. Need I point out what it seems Hemingway was trying to say here: that the war being fought for the protection of mother, child, and future, killed them all and left man a cripple?

    ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is also about the losses of war, albeit in a less candid way. This 1924 novel, Hemingway’s first, tells the story of Jake Barnes, an expatriate journalist living in Paris during the 1920s. Barnes suffers from impotence inflicted by a war wound, and this impotence has lost him his true love, Lady Brett Ashley, who assures him she cannot live happily without him in the fullest sense. The novel features the seemingly endless and often almost mundane rising and setting of Jake’s suns, as he travels from Spain to Paris with Brett and other full-time partiers, watching bull-fights, seeing Brett seduce and discard man after man, and struggling with times of apathy, contempt, and depression.

   

    While we may be tempted to write of Lady Ashley as a selfish and silly woman who claims to love Jake fully but who clearly does not, I don’t think this is really the point of Hemingway’s novel. In fact, I feel that her need to have a ‘whole’ man speaks in a way that we can understand in light of PTSD and other war traumas that we are now aware of. Jake was physically scarred, yes, but in the novel he is also aimless: he goes from day to day, drinking and fishing and bull-fighting and drinking and maybe hiring a girl and drinking and arguing with Brett and drinking. He is missing something that we like to believe in when we fall in love: he is missing belief itself. And, in fact, Brett is missing this too. She is just as aimless, and she can’t live with a man who can’t complete her because, as Jake hates her for doing, she tries to use men to do just that.

    In the end, Hemingway seems to be writing about the human search for something solid. In this way, he is the exemplary writer of “The Lost Generation.” And yet, when saying this, it cannot be forgotten that ‘The Sun Also Rises’ takes its title from a Bible verse, Ecclesiastes 1:5, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." And Hemingway himself said that the point of the novel was that “the earth abideth forever” (the epigraph of his book is the full quote from Ecclesiastes: “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh:  but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose”).

    Hemingway also stated his belief that his characters may have been “battered,” but were not “lost.” This, I feel, is the paragraph I should end with.