Hemingway novel is well known for the styles that have been used. The style is described variously as modern, understated or hard-boiled. As a journalist and novel writer in Paris, Hemingway learned the modernist style of writing from Ezra Pound. He pared away sentimentalism, used understatement and made a scene and images presentation without an explanation of their meaning, notably in the book’s conclusion where there are multiple Brett and Jake future possibilities. He created a style that was in accordance with the ethics and esthetics of raising emotional temperature to the universal truth level by shutting door on sentiment and subjective. His book has indeed played itself among the characters and it lacked a central narrator. His spare, laconic prose got influenced by his journalist work, and over 20th-century he has had greatest stylistic influence.
After the First World War Hemingway had a feeling that he needed to start over, he was trying to write, starting with simplest things, putting down what he saw and felt in the simplest and best way that he could tell. This novel has almost no similes or metaphors, contains few adjectives, and fewer adverbs. This is so because he wanted to focus on the issues at hand, therefore he used only simple verbs and simple nouns. Compared to style used by other writers, his style is extremely lean. He believed that a writer did not require writing everything if he knew his subject well and to him writing was like an iceberg tip; the reader only saw only a fraction but would understanding and feeling the rest. He further believed that for him to effectively reach the readers it could be through emotional and physical reactions of his characters.
Through lucid description of sensations like sight, smell and sound, Hemingway hoped to produce similar feelings in his readers. The Sun Also Rises is not just a dramatic love and betrayal story or an allegory of salvation and damnation though in parts it is all these things. It is efforts of Hemingway in putting into practice his writing theory. His style was enduring pure, clean and professional. He got jobs done economically and he would avoid mystification or tricks and he never showed off. He indirectly celebrated his perfect writing style when he celebrated the bull fighting technique of Romero. Key to his style is omission; there is little that is learnt about Jake through the direct interior narration, but through how he reacts to others and the way he leaves out. For example, he is well understood through the thoughts he has on Cohn, who shares a lot of Jake’s traits. An example of the way Hemingway omits, Jake does not fully make a description of his war injury, this leaves it open for interpretation. At this point, Hemingway provides an excellent outline of his style in the way Jake describes bull-fighting style for Romero; there were no mystification and tricks.
Hemingway, like Romero moves closer to his subject, however in favor of honest and authentic writing, he eschews flashiness. He may have wished to have a negative or weak hero but lacked the experience of creating a protagonist or a hero because the fictions comprised of extreme short stories. It is only during the writing of The Sun Also Rises that the hero changed. He eliminated other characters in protagonist character and indirectly brought Jakes in the role of the hero in the novel. This novel based the characters on living people as Hemingway used the easily found prototypes in Latin Quarter to base his characters. Though the novel has its base from journalistic style, the work easily moves away from recounting of events that is simple.
Hemingway made use of autobiographical details for life in general as framing devices. Example, he drew out experiences from a scenario of what if he got wounded in a way that he could not sleep or made him crazy or if he was to be sent back to front. He believed that there would be a description of one thing while a different thing would occur. Hemingway broke the past writing styles which were overwritten and florid, loaded with compound sentences and sentimental. He enjoyed critical success and radically changed the taste in fiction by public immediately after publishing The Sun Also Rises. He began to be mimicked by numerous writers.
Events in his book are primarily described through Jake Barnes’ eyes so the reader has to carefully look at the strengths and weaknesses of Jakes in order to judge reliability of him as a narrator Hemingway and Jakes shares some superficial similarities; both were Americans, same age, journalists in Paris and both got wounded during the World War I, though in different ways..Hemingway creates Jakes as a fully realized character and he necessarily does not say everything that the author believes. Example, he tells the story by sometimes putting himself in proper light and other times not. His conclusion about character differs from the audience and his anger and jealous for affair that Cohn had with Brett colored his hatred for him. He also had tolerance for Mike Campbell who in the novel is a drunken anti-Semite. A reader is therefore left to make a decision of what one thinks of Mike, Cohn and the other characters which is a way of making the reader participate in the novel creativity.
The reader is made to trust Jakes for basic facts because he is the only narrator. In weighing his judgment the reader has to keep in mind his prejudice; his dislike of the American tourists, and the respect he has for people, what he calls passion. There are three distinct parts in The Sun Also Rises. The first part is set in Paris and introduces the major characters as well as their relationships. Second part we follow them on a Spain trip. Here Jake and Bill are in the Spanish countryside and they go fishing, they later join others and hold yearly bullfighting festival at Pamplona. The last part is an epilog that follows the fiesta where the novel ends in Madrid, a large city. These three sections can be viewed as movement series: from city to country and back, and from wasteland to the bountiful land and back. On his fishing trip, Jake moves from sickness to health and back to sickness. Bretts goes down into her own hell where she wallows in it and through her moral act, she makes a demonstration of salvation possibility.
Hemingway‘s distinctive prose style can be describe as economical, terse and journalistic. He turns away from his precursors’ lush and rich style, or even his contemporaries like Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hemingway got most of his lessons from his brief journalist time where he introduced into his novel’s genre the newspaper element style. The first serious work to ever introduce his trademark voice was The Sun Also Rises to the world at large. Immediately he earned praise and condemnation for his work. In the novel he employs dialogue that is snappy and realistic as well as sentences that are short and simple. This style created a novel that moved quickly and practically and the reader can actually have a feel of the text’s action as it actually happens. In this novel more than any other of his works,
Hemingway applied better the iceberg theory. He edited extraneous material or purposely left gaps and his editorial remarks showed that he wanted to break from use of restrained writing. He moved the opening settings from Pamplona to Paris because his thinking was that life in Montparnasse was a good counterpoint to the later Spain action. For each character, he added metaphors: the money problem that Mike had, association of Brett with Circle myth and association of Robert with segregated steer. He later during the revision pared down the story through getting rid of explanations that were unnecessary, minimized descriptive passages and stripped the dialogue. All this created a story that was tight and compressed. Hemingway‘s style was in characterization vision and his work was a success due to the blend of style that skillful, despite being faced by criticism that it lacked vision. He used action to express emotions instead of passive thought.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2012. Print.
Oliver, Charles. Ernest Hemingway A to Z:The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing, 1999. Print.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway:The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999. Print.
Svoboda, Frederic. Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises:The Crafting of a Style. Kansas UP, 2003.
Print.
White, William. The Merrill Studies in The Sun Also Rises. Columbus: C.E. Merrill, 2009. Print.
