Ever since Hemingway published his novel “The Sun Also Rises“ he was in the center of attention of the world's reading audience. It was obvious that he shared his personal experiences with his audience through novels. Hemingway took his life experiences and gave them shape turning them in to simple prose. However, the simplicity in his writing hides complicated and implicit meanings.
In order to understand this novel we have to look back and analyze the political and social context of the time the novel was written. The United States participated in World War I and after the war successful businessmen earned fortunes including all status symbols such as cars, electricity, telephones and other technical aids. During the 20ties alcohol was forbidden in the States, therefore illegal bars started blooming. During that period women gained the right to vote, started speaking in public and act more freely. Intellectual climate, especially Freud’s theory, had a great impact on minimizing traditional values. During the economic progress an individual lost sense of identity creating lost generation. “The Sun Also Rises” actually deals with the problems of “lost generation”, the term that expresses pessimistic and depressive attitude created by war. Recent presence of war can only be anticipated in the novel and the consequences of war can be seen on characters of the novel and their destinies.
The political background can also be noticed in this novel. If you read the novel carefully you can notice the cry for help of the lost generation. They could live carelessly, without having to worry about the money, but is that all that matters for a person to be happy and fulfilled? In those days, the value of US currency was high and a person could live nice in the Europe with the income in the US currency. But, how did money matter to them? They could only find the relief in alcohol consumption and the money only made it easier for them to drink and try to find solutions for their issues. Paris was an excellent place for drinking with no prohibition and with numerous bars and clubs that it had to offer. “The Sun Rises Again” gives us an outstanding image of alcoholism as a pathological issue. Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell are shown as excessive drinkers in the novel. Lines that confirm this obsession with alcohol can be found throughout the whole peace. Characters drink together, talk about alcohol or contemplate about it. Alcohol seems to be excellent opium that allows Hemingway's characters to escape reality and to forget about their own deeper issues. It helped them to build a wall between them and the world. Excessive drinking of his heroes is self-destructive and reveals personal dissatisfaction with their lives. Some of the critics such as Gelderman pointed out that alcoholism in Hemingway's novels should be interpreted as his own problem with depression, since alcoholism can mask depressive disorders and anxiety. (Carol Gelderman, 1979)
Another hidden social issue that colors this masterpiece reflects altering in gender roles. As mentioned earlier, Victorian, traditional views regarding gender roles changed with war and the industrial and psychological revolution. War forced women to work since men had to go to battle fields and a lot of them lost their lives. Women were coping with social issues and in order to provide for living they had to seek for jobs. This caused them to interiorize some other features that were earlier considered to be typically gendered male. This change and we can freely say crisis in gender roles is described in “The Sun Also Rises” (Comley, Scholes, 1994). We see Brett, with boyish haircut, the women who will rather go partying and drinking with man, than stay at home. She is not portrayed as traditional women, inferior to men. She, in fact, dominates over man through the whole novel and can’t seem to settle down with one man, which is a behavior that characterizes more men than women. Throughout the novel she is involved with numerous men. She plays with her sexuality freely and has no fear of exploring it. This fact significantly distanced her from traditional, patriarchal women role. Wendy Martin points this out in her work: “Brett represents Hemingway’s idealized rendering of the woman free of sexual repression She represents the principle of female Eros unbounded by patriarchal control” (Martin 51). Sex became enjoyment and researching field for women, not only their duty in marriage. Also, Brett’s dress style reveals her androgyny. While they are in the dance club Jack describes her as pretty but her style is somewhat masculine.
“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey“. (Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 22)
Here we see that she has short hair and her dress style is revealing curves of her body. This was pretty daring for that time. Her restless nature is also accented in the part where she pushes Pedro Romero away from her. We must notice that she was not quite accepted by Montoya in Pamplona, because of his traditional values. He had trouble understanding this social change. This is due to the fact that Spain was left out of war and this social wave infected people of this country later. Montoya is worried that Brett could corrupt Pedro.
We see independent woman who is not afraid to explore her sexuality on one hand, but on the other we have confused men losing their masculinity and trying to cope with it in different ways. Jake’s disability to satisfy woman who he is in love with is seen as abandoning classical understanding of men’s dominance in bed. Hemingway reveals this attitude through sentence such as:
“Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bedOf all the ways to be wounded. I supposed it was funny” (Hemingway, „The Sun Also Rises“, 30).
Instead he offers different connection with women, he offers friendship. He succeeded to bring close gender roles under these new historical lights. The social and political context, as we can see, play very important role in this novel and the piece cannot be understood without knowledge about these frames.
Although Hemingway’s writing style is simple and while reading his “The Sun Also Rises” a person has no problem with understanding words or sentences, he uses symbols that should be noticed during reading in order to completely understand the piece. Even in the first chapter of the novel we can see hidden messages that characters are sending to each other. This is actually a hidden advice for the readers to be careful during comprehension of the novel. At the beginning Jake Barns acquaints us with his friend Robert Cohn and his lady Frances. The three of them can't seem to have an open and honest communication. They send each other nonverbal messages hiding from the third person true meaning of what they really want to express. When Jake made a suggestion to go on a trip to Strasbourg and mentioned that there is a girl that he knows, Frances kicked him under the table. We see here that she doesn’t want Cohn to know that this kind of trip and the girl that Jake mentioned bothered her. Right after that communication Cohn lies that he has to go to buy newspaper just go outside of the café so that he could talk to Jake alone. This deceptive communication gives us a greater picture on how the novel and messages that characters are sending to each other should be understood. (Hemingway “The Sun Also Rises“, 4)
Throughout his simple and rather violent prose Hemingway tells us here that his characters shouldn’t be entirely trusted. He gives a warning to readers in the first chapter of the book. After this, he again warns reader to take close care when reading his novel in the second chapter when he explains the significant influence that book called “The Purple Land“ had on Cohn's life-style. Here he actually implies that anyone who reads his novel should be aware that it doesn’t offer a life guide as “The Purple Land” was to Cohen. Instead, it should be read with a dose of disbelief and questioning.
Hemingway’s short and precise sentences hide deep emotions. His friend Wister, to whom he corresponded through letters, criticized Hemingway’s style in his letters by saying that his style sometimes is too choppy, staccato and that he puts too many short sentences together. Also, he said that Hemingway sometimes puts little details that are not organic, that don’t count in the intended picture and it sounded to him like sentences were copied from a diary. (Frank Scafella, 2012, 103)
This “chopping” is something Hemingway called the “iceberg” theory. Similar to psychoanalytical theory where the consciousness is only a small part of an individual or the part of an iceberg that can be seen above the water, while a great part that cannot be seen is the part of our personality that we are not aware of. He applied the same theory in his novel, where he gave readers only a tip of an iceberg refusing to explicitly reveal emotions. Deep and profound emotions can be sensed but they are left under the surface. This is present in everyday communication. All of us refuse or have trouble talking about “hot issues”. Hemingway noticed that intense emotions make our communication much more difficult and he portrayed it by writing short and yet precise sentences in dialogues. This means that his work was based on observations of the outside world. He noticed feelings of other people, watched them, listened to them and the psychology of the novel is not descriptive, it is rather reflected by gestures, phrases and mimics. Emotions are generally hidden, but that makes feelings seem much stronger and deeper. One of these emotional conflict dialogues is the one where John asks Brett if they could live together.
"Couldn't we live together, Brett? Couldn't we just live together?"
"I don't think so. I'd just “tromper“ you with everybody. You couldn't stand it."
Here John begs Brett to live with him and she says no justifying her answer by her disability to be faithful to him. With John being impotent, but not explicitly written in the novel, she knows that she would have affairs with other men and John couldn’t stand that. Here we see how Hemingway can send an emotional and complicated message using short sentences. Hemingway left us only to suggest and assume that John is impotent.
Regardless on the simplicity of his writing style and his simple grammatical sentences, Hemingway’s pieces till this day remain enigma in the world of prose. Although numerous critics carefully analyzed his work, every day something else, which has not been seen earlier in his acts, is revealed. However, Hemingway wrote the novel for his readers, not for the critics, ant that is that thing that we must guide on while reading this wonderful novel “The Sun Also Rises”. We, as readers of his novel, are the ones who should grasp into the depth hidden behind every sentence of his actors and try to find concealed meaning.
References:
Adair, William. "Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: The Novel As Gossip." Hemingway Review 31.2 (2012): 114-118. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 July 2012.
Comley, Nancy R., and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994:40-43.
Gelderman, Carol. “Hemingway’s Drinking Fixation”. Lost Generation Journal 6, 1979:12-14.
Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. "When Hemingway Hated Paris: Divorce Proceedings, Contemplations Of Suicide, And The Deleted Chapters Of The Sun Also Rises." Studies In The Novel 44.1 (2012): 49-61. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 July 2012.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2012. Web.
Scafella, Frank. "The Sun Also Rises: Owen Wister's 'Garbage Pail,' Hemingway's Passage Of The 'Human Soul'." Hemingway Review 6.1 (1986): 101. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 July 2012.
