Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises seems to draw me like a magnet, particularly in the summer. Every now and then I go back to this novel and glean something new, while the pathos, sadness and tragic existence of these characters always remains with me.
The novel is a powerful exposé of the life and values of a lost generation, a generation deeply scarred by World War I. Millions of soldiers were killed in that war, which shattered the lives of countless survivors.
Jake Barnes, an American journalist and war veteran, is leading a somewhat Bohemian life in Paris. He is in love with a young, English war widow, Lady Brett Ashley, but their relationship is complicated by Jake’s war injury, which has left him sexually incapacitated.
Brett has become engaged, as a matter of convenience, to Michael Campbell, an Englishman. Further complications arise as Robert Cohn, a former boxing champion at Princeton University, is also attracted to Brett.
The expatriates travel to Pamplona for the Fiesta de San Fermin and there they meet the young matador Pedro Romero, who performs “without falsity” and thus upholds the pure standards of the bullfight. Sexual intrigues, most of them revolving around Brett, provide the catalyst for Jake’s re-evaluation of his generation’s moral standing.
The novel has heavy undercurrents of suppressed emotions and buried values. Its jaded and aimless expatriates serve as metaphors for society’s lost optimism after the war.
Ironically, there is a marked silence regarding the war itself — it is a topic rarely discussed by any of the characters. What is most significant in this novel is the author’s keen portrayal of characters adrift in a world that cannot satisfy their needs.
In their relentless pursuit of pleasure and in their quest to replace old, lost ideals with new ones, Hemingway’s characters demonstrate a yearning to connect with some sort of universal order. For the author and his main character, this higher order is symbolised by the honour and pageantry of bullfighting.
Every morning, ordinary citizens risk their lives to run with the bulls through the streets of the city. There, Jake, who is a true follower of the bullfight, has his convictions shaken by the events that unfold over the course of the week.
A famous scene from the book, which graphically describes the running of the bulls in Pamplona, helped popularise the event in English-speaking cultures.
The novel was a roman à clef, as many of the characters were based on Hemingway and his friends who accompanied him to Spain in 1925.
The character of Robert Cohn is a savage portrait of novelist Harold Loeb, who aroused the anger of Hemingway by indulging in a tryst with Lady Duff Twysden in Normandy before bringing her to Spain. Twysden was the model for Brett Ashley, while Hemingway based the character of Barnes on himself.
The novel opens in Paris in the early 1920s. The left bank of the river Seine was a magnet during the period which followed World War I, particularly for philosophers, artists and writers.
Hemingway lived in Paris as a young man and famously mingled with such literary figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.
Ernest Hemingway chooses two contrasting epigraphs, opening quotations, for The Sun Also Rises, and through their juxtaposition establishes a clear, simple theme. Gertrude Stein, the writer and mentor of many young artists in Paris during the 1920s, once described the expatriates as “the lost generation”.
A powerful exposé of the life of thelost generation
Stein’s observation suggests the transience of humankind. Hemingway took her statement to mean that his generation had no longer any recourse to the ideals and structural order of World War I civilisation.
Hemingway draws the book’s second epigraph from the Old Testament, Book of Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.”
This prophecy suggests a cosmic order in God’s scheme of the world; there is no “lost generation”. And the self-centred, fragile human ego appears insignificant next to the cycles of the sun and the passing of time.
The fishing scenes depicted in the novel are not mere pastoral scenes in an otherwise frenzied novel. These scenes serve to reinforce Hemingway’s primary theme. Jake recognises that he is missing some crucial element which is critical to his happiness, and he undertakes a quest to discover his generation’s lost values.
Hemingway once said that The Sun Also Rises was the most moral book he had ever written. It was a kind of “tract against promiscuity”. Although at first Brett gives the impression that she will sleep with anyone, in the end she takes the honourable route where the young Romero is concerned. Brett has come of age and she has realised the importance of setting standards.
By recognising this fact, Brett is echoing the novel’s principal theme, that it is necessary to discover or rediscover those values that define a morally satisfying life.