Essay, Research Paper: THE SUN ALSO RISES

THE SUN ALSO RISES



Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois--a rich, white, Protestant, and exclusive suburb of Chicago, by his parents Ed and Grace Hemingway. Hemingway never got along with his scrupulous parents--neither during his midwestern boyhood, nor in adulthood. In retrospect, Hemingway refered to Oak Park as a town of "wide lawns and narrow minds."

Oak Park, Hemingway had confessed, imposed its Christian precepts and inhibitions on him. But during the summers he was able to escape suburbia. At the family cabin on Lake Walloon in northern Michigan, Hemingway developed interests and values that would remain permanent: a passion for hunting and fishing, and an obsession with violence and courage.

As a high school student, classmates thought of young Ernest as "...a handsome, friendly, and courteous boy...." Others that saw his harsher side considered him to be "...exceedingly competitive towards everyone...and would not allow any restrictions oh his activities...always aggressive, doing what he wanted to do."

After graduation Hemingway was expected to attend college but instead took a job he got through his uncle and the Kansas City STAR, working as a cub reporter. At the STAR, lIonel Moise, known as a capable, tough, drinking and brawling ladies' man, was a man whom Hemingway admired for his writing style and violent way of life.

After seven months in Kansas City, Hemingway was eager to participate in the War in Europe. He enlisted but was rejected because of poor eyesight, for which he blamed his mother. So instead he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver and arrived in Paris in late May, 1918. Two days later, Hemingway traveled to Milan where an ammunitions factory exploded. His introduction to war was an initially shocking and gruesome one, faced wiht the task of hauling mutilated corpses and human fragments to and improvised mortuary.

Later that summer on July 8, Hemingway was seriously wounded by and Austrian trench mortar--a five gallon can filled wiht explosives and scrap metal. The shell killed the man who stood between Hemingway and the explosion, and blew the legs off a another nearby. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious and embedded 237 pieces of shrapnel in his legs. After regaining consciousness, he carried a nearby Italian soldier to a first-aid dugout. Hemingway's courage was confirmed; he was awarded he Silver Medal of Valor.

Siginficantly, apart form the trauma to his knees and legs, Hemingway claimed he was shot twice through the scrotum. During his recovery other soldiers who hod been seriously damaged as such, inspired the wound of Jake Barnes, the hero of THE SUN ALSO RISES.

Jake Barnes narrates THE SUN ALSO RISES, and is also the theoretical author. Much of what is known about Jake comes from one's own reasoning. Hemingway lets his reader indirectly draw conclusions about Jake through actions and dialogue, and how other characters interact with him. Hemingway probably envisioned Jake to be somewhat but not entirely like himself.

Jake served in World War I, was injured, and rendered impotent. He is now trying to adjust to a civillian and sexless life in the Paris of the 1920s. Jake resents his sexually scarred condition.

Jake is a sportsman, with a keen interest in fishing, tennis, boxing, bullfighting, and most other masculine activities. Jake keeps himselfi n good enough shape--he was a soldier, and now plays tennis, and is able to endure and extensive hike inthe mountains of Spain, after which he goes fishing. He is critical of others' appearances and comments on "good-looking" people; it can be assumed he is critical of his own appearance as well. He feels positively about himself and can be considered attractive.

In the novel he scorns a group of homosexuals; he sees this as a perversion of masculinity, which he has lost forever.

Jake is fiercely satiristic and sarcastic toward the character of Cohn. Cohn learned to box to shield his inferiority, and became quite good, winning a title at Princeton. Jake is not impressed nor can he fathom this as fact. A sportsman should be in love with his struggle; he should have "aficion."

Cohn is disgustionly passive; Jake cannot take it. He says Cohn was "...married BY the first girl who was nice to him," but she eventually left him. Cohn was later "taken in hand by a lady..." and this lady after three years--after Cohn has neglected to commit or not commit to her--publicly humiliates him. Jake is sickened by Cohn's ability to take such abuse and walks out of the restaurant.

Jake also finds Cohn's inability to be self-criticizing repulsive. Cohn has a talent for "behaving badly" but never attempts to evaluate his wrongs, let alone correct them. And quite comically in Pamplona, Spain, Cohn reads a huge banner that says "Hooray for the Foriegners!" and wonders "Where are the foriegners?" In contrast, Jake is constantly critical of himself and his experiences, usually describing them as "good" or "not very good."

Jake is also intolerant of Cohn's naive romanticism. Cohn lives his life in books and does not really experience life. He reads a bood and envisions himself in a techincolored South America, surrounded by jungle princesses. But Cohn needs Jake to go with him. Like a child Cohn insists that Jake go, and even offers to pay for everything. Jake tells the child that "countries look exactly like they do in the movies" knowing that Cohn would get equal amounts of pleasure from either experience.

Jake cannot take Cohn seriously on his view of death either. Cohn yearns for "life" but has never done anything to bring its counterpart into reality. He ohly grasps death from a statistical point of view. Jake, however, has been in war and seen death first hand. He also states that "nobody lives their lives all the way up except the bull fighters."

Jake himself can be considered a symbol--a representation of people who live by a system of ethics, not necessarily a religious system. Jake is a flawed human being. He realizes his fouldts and accepts them but continues to live his own life according to his rules.

If Hemingway intended Jake to be a political symbol, Jake would represent the antithesis to the expatriots of the lost generation. However, this would not make him a patriot either; Jake many times effectively satirizes Americanisms. Jake would most accurately portray a new sens of independence.

If Jake were a spiritual symbol, Hemingway used him in order to express his own feelings toward religion. Jake is a self-proclaimed "rotten Catholic" and dismisses the religion as "swell advice" but totally unrealistic. In place of unrealistic advice, Jake constructs his own realistic system.

I do not think Hemingway intended Jake to be a psychological symbol of any sort; such sentiment would result in pity toward Jake, who does not feel sorry for himself. Jake moves on with his new, yet sexless life and does not brood over his losses.

Literally, Jake is a man and only symbolizes a man.

THE SUN ALSO RISES, the novel's title is derived from Jake's description of "a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind." Hemingway via Jake expresses his passion for natural beauty and his belief in the cyclical nature of things, hoping for a new generation that will replace the lost one. However spiritually rotten Hemingway feels, he must still hold on to some scrap of faith, for he replies to Gertrude Stein's remark, printed as an epitaph, with a quotation from the book of Eccleaiastes.

Hemingway make his symbols to suit his needs. In other stories and novels he creates his wounded heroes. Hemingway's personal interests like fishing and bullfighting were also crafted into symbols. Not even biblical reference is universal because it only applies to Christians, just as the Corrida de Torros is unique to Spain.

Jake's main struggle is wiht himself and the loss of his manhood. (His struggles with minor characters like Cohn are only peripheral.) We enter Jake's life as he is first developing a new code to live by. For a few months we are allowed to obsereve him as he tests his code. Late in the novel Jake sins under this code and is forced ot evaluate himself and adjust accordingly. And then the novel ends and Jake is left as the novel began--in a state of change. We are not told what becomes of Jake or the other characters, and we can assume that because of the cycle of life, these people continue to life as Hemingway has demonstrated.

Hemingway owes much of his style to his early journalistic career. His "innovative prose," characterized by short sentences, short paragraphs, positive, vigorous English; emphasized by authenticity, selectivity, compression, precisioni, clarity, and immediacy.

In THE SUN ALSO RISES Hemingway scrutinizes many of his comtemporaries. He names ral places and descrives real people. Robert Cohn is a satire. The Braddocks are satires. And I assume other minor characters like Frances Clyne and Harvey Stone are satires as well. Since Jake was friends with Bill and Brett, and admired Pedro Romero, Hemingway was not being satiristic, but father modeled his characters after people he knew.

Hemingway writes with a powerful kind of understatement, of which he said: "the dignity of the movemetn of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." Hemingway omits a great deal and tries to give the reader an experience rather than a "story." He keeps long monologues to a minimum and does not interrupt the flow of conversation with the added on "he said."

Hemingway hs skillfully make symbolism work for him. The novel is brimming with it, and I have only mentioned the tip of that Hemingway iceberg. But some things are best left unsaid. Explaining some symbols defeats the purpose of haveing them in the first place. Symbols in THE SUN ALSO RISES last for a moment and are gone and replaced by another. Even Hemingway's structurization of the novel is symbolic, representing a balancing act as well as existing as a geographic symbol.

As far as recimmendations go, I think Hemingway is an author who either you like or you do not like. Some people consider him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Hemingway's own parents were horrified when their son sent them a copy of THE SUN ALSO RISES. His father remarked that "Ernest has written another dirty little book." Dirty or not, the novel established Hemingway's career, and I consider it to be a "good" book.



(In this paper the student was asked to:
1. give some background on the author
2. state who the major character is, discuss his personality and physical traits, and support the statements with lines from the novel
3. state the theme of the novel and how the major character helped develop the theme.
4. discuss the literal, political, spiritual, psychological, and social symbolism found in the novel.
5. state the conflict of the novel.
6. discuss the author's writing style and use examples to support it.)


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