Review: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway

In Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the heartbreaking and despicable lives of the characters contained within the pages of the book are displayed through Hemingway's marvelous prose. Following WWI, these tragic characters find themselves in Europe with varying amounts of cash and, for most, uncertain income. They are part of the Lost Generation, full of broken dreams and hopeless dreams and uncertain purpose. Broken, meandering on a perilously tragic path through life, there is precious little to provide reason for living when their cyclical lives hit their low. However, the simplest of passions can become the raison d'être for their lives when nothing else will serve. Thus the players of The Sun Also Rises found purpose through petty passions, or at the very least, distraction.

The first of their many desires and impulses is that of drinking. Throughout the book, characters such as Jake, Brett, and Mike continually turn to drinking in order to align themselves with the world. For that period of drinking, they are able to set their minds on drinking to the extent that it becomes a favored pastime. It connects them with the joys of life, the price to be paid later. From when Jake went fishing, "I found the two wine-bottles in the pack, and carried them up the road to where the water of a spring flowed out of an iron pipe," (p. 123), to the extensively used "cupboard full of liqueur bottles" (p. 116), and the Cafe Select of Paris, they indulge in alcohol everywhere they go. Alcohol consumes the normal processes of their minds, tainting their thoughts so that a waiter with a purple stain beneath each shoulder produces the comment, "'He must drink a lot of wine'," (p. 94). Alcohol is their obsession, and what is purpose if not obsession? Their need to drink has become their purpose. For instance, even when Jake's companions have left him and he has a chance at piece, he continues to indulge in liquor. "The marc was good. I had a second marc after the coffee," (p. 237). It is an enduring and large portion of his life. Beyond drinking, several other activities inspired by fancy and passion consume the minds of Hemingway's characters and give them hollow direction.

Traveling is another activity that provides some purpose to the lives of Hemmingway's characters. Cohn and Jacob were the two who were the most obsessed with travel and its effects. Cohn was, as Jake put it, married to the idea that "South America could fix it and he did not like Paris," (p. 20). This essentially meant that Cohn believed that travel, and new surroundings could provide the key to ending his depression and general weariness with his life. Jacob, on the other hand, said, "...going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that," (p. 19). Despite this, their planned trip to Spain and the journey itself proved to have some calming effect on their minds. For a time, they were able to ignore various pressing issues and instead focus on the sightseeing and the general exhilaration that comes from something new. One such experience was on a train ride. "It was a lovely day, not too hot, and the country was beautiful from the start," (p. 90). Followed with comments about breakfast, it was an ephemeral state of normality and calm. For a time, that strange sense that they are doing something, "taking advantage of" life (p. 19), as Cohn put it, was their reason for living.

The bullfight comprises an enormous section of The Sun Also Rises, and is one of the few things that Jacob truly found enjoyable and looked forward to each year. Jake was an aficionado, filled with passion for the bullfights. In the bullfights he found meaning in his life, by indulging in the lives of others. He was able to experience vicariously the thrills of letting "the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass," (p. 221); able to ascend the bull and become for just an instant, one with bull and filled with purpose, the height of what a man was meant to be (p. 222). True, the life of a bullfighter was as Cohn said, "...an abnormal life," (p. 18), but something out of the ordinary often makes the everyday monotonous tragedy of life bearable for Hemingway's "Lost Generation" of characters. The direction and meaning that the bullfights provided to those who watched and appreciated the interplay of life and death cannot be denied. From Jake's conversations with Montoya to his deep analysis of the bullfighters and their style during and after each display, it allowed him to do something more than contemplate his own existence.

The amount of meaning Hemmingway's characters found in these activities is debatable, the nature of it surely ephemeral, however, it must be conceded that through their various urges, obsessions, and passions there were able to find some degree of purpose and direction for their lives. Through alcohol, they found comfort and distraction along with meaning of the most immediate and shallow nature. By traveling, they found escape and a change from the ordinary that allowed them to forget their problems for a time and take joy in nature and the world itself. In their observation and deep link with the bullfighters they found life itself, and borrowed meaning for their own life. Sometimes, as with Hemingway's characters and perhaps Hemingway himself, finding just a little bit of meaning is enough to maintain one's existence-for awhile.