FEATURED ESSAYS 1. Ernest Hemmingway 2. Alienation Paper Hemmingway 3. The Sun Also Rises 3 4. The Sun Also Rises By Ernest H 5. Mt. St. Helens 6. The Sun Also Rises: A Hero 7. Review Of Hemmingway's "In Our Ti... 8. The Sun Also Rises - Response 9. Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises 10. The Sun Also Rises By Ernest H 11. The Sun Also Rises : Moral And So... 12. Aggression 13. The Sun Also Rises - Betrayal 14. Ernest Hemingway: Allegorical Fi...

Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises


 In the novel The Sun Also Rises,  Ernest Hemingway describes a couple who
share a very strange and distant kind of love for each other. This story
takes place immediately after World War I, a time of great hardship. This
hardship results in a digression of values both morally and socially. The
love that Brett and Jake share is symbolic of the general decline in
values in that they tolerate behaviors in one another that would have been
previously considered  unacceptable.
 It is clear that Lady Brett Ashley is anything but a lady. She is kind
and sweet but extremely vulnerable to the charm that various men in her
life seem to smother her with.  Brett is not happy with her life or her
surroundings and seeks escape and refuge in the arms of these men. But her
actions seem always to end up hurting her, and she runs back to Jake. Jake
knows that he will never be able to have her for his own, and he accepts
this as fact. This is clear when the Count asks them ³why don¹t you get
married, you two? (68)²  To this question, they give a lame half hearted
awnser which implies that it will never happen. He is tolerant of her
behavior because he loves her unconditionally and is willing to overlook
everything she does. Jake’s willingness to endure and forgive Brett¹s
promiscuity and infidelity is an indication of the skewed values of the
age. It was an ³anything goes² era right after the first war, and Jake¹s
message to Brett seems to be the same: anything goes as long as you
eventually come back to me.
 Jake is forced to accept living in this seemingly terrible way for more
than one reason.  He a weak person socially, but he is also physically
disabled because of an injury that he suffered during the war. He suffered
an injury that caused him to be castrated. The first hint of this is when
he says to Georgeette ³I was hurt in the war (24) in refrence to why they
can not have physical realtions. This injury is one that makes him
insecure, but worse than that, it allows Brett to have almost complete
control over him. Jake and  Brett need each other emotionally, but Brett
feels that she needs more. As a result Jake is force to give her up.
 Jake¹s feelings toward his friend Robert Cohn are a combination jealousy,
compassion,  understanding, and hate. These are a very unusual group of
feelings for a person to have toward one person, but it was a very unusual
time. Jake knew of Robert¹s relationship with Brett, and it ate him up
with envy, but at the same time he knew how it had ended. He had been
close friends with Robert, and had been through a similar situation with
Brett, so he had both compassion and understanding for Robert¹s position.
The only problem was the way Robert choose to deal with his feelings.
Robert also could not stand to see Brett with another man, but he
displayed this much differently. Robert¹s presense bothered Jake even
though they had been close friends. Robert backs out of a fishing trip to
find Brett, and Jake¹s friend makes a comment about that being a good
thing. Jake¹s only reply is ³You¹re damn right(108)². Robert makes a fool
out of himself. He even beats up Jake at one point. Behavior like this
was impossible for Jake to respect and he hated this part of Robert. None
of this would have even been a problem if life during that time had been a
little more solid in a moral sense. Brett would have not been permitted to
act the way she did, while mantaining her social status, which clearly
meant a great deal to her. She would have had to choose, and most likely
her choice would have been that of a more chaste lifestyle.
 In this story, there is a very different way of life from what people
know today.  The relationship that Jake and Brett share is one that would
seem completely unrealistic in today¹s time, but to them, it was
acceptable. Jake no doubt would have preferred to have it differently, but
he is accepting of the way it stands. The hardship and the poverty that is
so widely spread in that area during the post war time causes the people
to lower their moral standards. Jake and Brett¹s love is the perfect
example.

Word Count: 759