The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, war, nothingness, battlefield
Focusing on the lost generation, in the aftermath of World War I, The Sun Also Rises is mostly autobiographical. In his very first novel, published in 1926, Hemingway depicts the narrator, Jake Barnes, and his wandering from Paris to Spain.
Jake is a journalist in Paris. We are in 1925 and he has become impotent because of the war. Jake is thus part of this « lost generation », that is to say the young generation which suffered from the war and which consequently does not believe in anything anymore. Desperately in love with Lady Brett Ashley, whom he met during the war when she treated him for his wound, he enters a race for oblivion, as the young lady has plenty of affairs with many men except him, whom she considers as a platonic lover. Although she admits that she's in love with Jake, she just can't help seducing and above all won't give up having sexual relations.
When Jake decides to go to Spain with some of his friends to do some fishing and then attend the fiesta at Pamplona, he also meets up with Brett there. As usual, the lady is getting lost in love affairs which lead her nowhere, and as usual, Jake is the passive onlooker whose shoulder welcomes her every time she runs crying to him.
When the passage we're going to study starts, Jake has just spent the night at the fiesta in Pamplona and the extract starts the next morning.
[...] Hemingway replaces psychological development with the story of action as well as the characters' behaviour. In addition, he uses true, accurate words. For example, he won't write « party » but « fiesta ». Likewise, he won't write « brandy » but « Fundador ». The precision of such a controlled style perfectly fits with T.S.Eliot's vision : « The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an « objective correlative »; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion ; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [...]
[...] His impotence also lies in his incapability to cheer up or to be delighted, for example, by « the overfoliaged, wet, green Basque country » (line 19). Besides, it is interesting to notice that the last paragraph focuses on Nature, that is to say the « trees », « hill[s] », « the mountains », and the « wet, green Basque country » : as the characters are leaving Pamplona, they leave the chaos linked to the fiesta behind them and Nature reasserts itself, for the stoic characters are fully aware that contrary to them, the sun will always rise and Nature will survive them. [...]
[...] As far as Hemingway's style is concerned, the reader can identify his elliptic way of writing, without any psychological development, from the very beginning : « In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished. I woke about nine o'clock, had a bath, dressed, and went downstairs. » (line 1). From a rhetorical point of view, these three sentences have a minimalist structure. The style is icy, straightforward and thorough. Facts are given with an objectivity reminding the reader of an official report. [...]
[...] When the passage we're going to study starts, Jake has just spent the night at the fiesta in Pamplona and the extract starts the next morning. What is immediately striking in the passage is the notion of absence, or nothingness, and we are logically prone to wonder how this « nothingness » is conveyed by the author throughout the extract. To begin, we'll focus on the art of understatement which peppers the passage. We'll analyse afterwards Jake as a ghost on the ruins of a battlefield. To finish, we'll underline the « omnipresence of Brett's absence ». [...]
[...] Indeed, it shows the stoic and epicurean despair of a generation destroyed by the war but which goes on a spree in order to forget that as far as war is concerned, there is no winner. The passage ends with the prospect of Jake going fishing, for, after all, there is nothing more on earth than fishing rods, friends and a bottle of whisky. That was Hemingway/Jake's vision of life. Reading The Sun Also Rises actually sums up the author's existential pains and may unfortunately foreshadow Hemingway's suicide in 1961. [...]
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