Allegorical Figures in Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises'

Hemingway once said “ Live the full life of mind, exhilarated by new ideas , intoxicated by the romance of unusual.” (Ernest Hemingway). Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises demonstrates just that. Hemingway portrays love and relationship, the lost generation and the New Women in his novel. Hemingway portrays these themes through each of the characters in novel. Hemingway portrays those themes through character Brett. In Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, the character Brett symbolizes the ideal New Women and freedom for women by her actions, personality and physical appearance.

“The Sun Also Rises” is an impressive fiction which shows the Lost generation. This fiction is from the American author Ernest Hemingway. This fiction shows social change because of the World War 1, this war undercut the traditional notions of morality, faith, and justice. People are lost in this time period, in this fiction, author uses some story to shows people’s inside change, Jack, Brett, and their friends’s dramatic life makes them lives empty, no longer believe in anything. They filling their time with dancing, drinking and debauchery, this shows the huge impact of social changes, and that make this generation feels lost. In some ways, this also depicts the bad influence of the War, and he trying to tell the people to against the war.

Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren provide a clear view to Ernest Hemingway’s writing. The criticism shows little opinion and looks deeper into the literary elements of Hemingway’s stories. In Wilson’s review of In Our Time he calls Hemingway’s work “..odd and original..”(Wilson). Wilson describes the unique quality of Hemingway’s story which involves not only a series of literary works but also “a set of brief and brutal sketches”(Wilson). These sketches involve many violent times that Hemingway had experienced I his lifetime. The word brutal would accurately describes the scenes that were drawn out and the book may have been seen as too violent for many readers at the time it was published and to this current day. Wilson believes that Hemingway’s stories follow the bases that “The condition of life is pain, and the joys of the most innocent surface are somehow tied to its stifled pangs”(Wilson). This abstract thought “in art made the beauty of Hemingway’s stories”(Wilson).

At first glance, Ernest Hemingway’s The  Sun Also Rises is an over-dramatized love story of bohemian characters, but with further analysis, the book provides a crucial insight into the effects of World War I on the generation who participated in it. Hemingway’s novel follows a group of expatriates as they travel Europe and experience the post war age of the early 1900’s. The protagonist is Jake Barnes, an American war veteran who lives in Paris and is working as a journalist. Jake was injured during the War and has remained impotent ever since. His love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, is an alcoholic englishwoman with severe promiscuity, which is representative of women and the sexual freedom that emerged during the Progressive Era. Jake and Brett

The outcome and brutality of the Great War causes the change and promotion of many things in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Some of the most evident changes the Great War causes are the changes in the traditional roles of men and women and in the promotion in the use of alcohol. Hemingway expresses these changes through the actions of some of the books main characters, most notably Jake and Brett. The novel’s characters perform these taboo and abnormal actions in response to the Great War and the war’s impact on the characters.

Bullfighting is one of the symbols in which Hemingway describes Jake. Hemingway portrays Jake to be like the

Known for his own masculinity and hard living, Hemingway interjects many of his own experiences into his writing making this masculinity an important aspect of the culture displayed in his writing. The main character, Jake faces his original problems with his masculinity which stems from his war injuries. From these injuries “Jake, literally is impotent as a result of a war wound, and instead it is his female love Brett who acts the man, manipulating sexual partners and taking charge of their lives” (O’Connor 2). While the characters of The Sun Also Rises want to find meaning and fulfillment in their lives, Jake often feels that he lacks this because of his impotence which makes him feel like less of a man. In the series of short stories in In Our Time, the main character, Nick, who is said to be written based on Hemingway himself, deals with masculinity on several levels. Readers see a boy growing into manhood, going through war, surviving the war while learning how and what it means to be a man. At first Indian Camp introduces the theme of masculinity in the series of short stories when Hemingway turns a typically female act of giving birth into a male-dominated situation. He achieves this through the intervention of Nick's father and his openly sexist and racist uncle. Additionally in this masculine atmosphere, the suicide of the Indian father is an example of a man acting in a feminine manner. Nick’s father mentions that he probably killed himself because he could not stand it or he wasn't man enough to handle the situation or becoming a father. Finally at the end of the book, when Nick arrives home from the war, in a very nature oriented fashion, he finds himself connecting with an image of “big trout looking to hold

Seeing as there can be a number of different themes in a story, Ernest Hemingway does not hold back from ever giving the reader a chance to fall in love with the story. The reader’s first glimpse of reality in the story is shot through the depths of the theme. One of the most common themes in the book is war. War marks and defines the characters in the book. It is the death in their eyes and fear in their hearts. The reader knows this. Because the reader can easily define war as one of the major themes in this book, the reader can also feel the loss and pain that the characters experience throughout the story as well.

The title and narrative focus of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises are rooted in a passage from the Ecclesiastes. In referencing this book of the Hebrew Bible, Hemingway resorts to aged scripture to unearth steadfast truths. His novel uses old-world beliefs to provide a solution for modern day issues, asserting the undeniable value of tradition. The applicability of the Ecclesiastes passage to Hemingway’s portrait of hopelessness in the post-Great War generation demonstrates that a reconnection with the natural world will reverse the unnatural consequences of a meaningless war and permit the reestablishment of hope within the following generation.

196). At Princeton, Cohn had been treated like a Jew, and he had always been shy and snooty. The color white also shines through Lady Brett Ashley’s character and Pedro Romero’s character. Brett’s character is revealed to us as “damned-good looking”, but in chapter 4, Barnes sees through the light of the flares her white face and the long line of her neck that is pure. Stephanie LaCava wrote an article on the phrase Hemingway uses to describe such a character like Brett, and how complex and individualistic she is. Later on in the novel though, her purity diminishes and she becomes the purple and the red that Hemingway uses. Pedro Romero becomes engulfed in red once the bull comes into contact with him. Many compare Brett to the bulls that Romero fights within the last 3 chapters. In particular, on page 221 of the novel, “his shirt ripped out from under his sleeve, the white blowing in the wind, and the bull, the red sword hilt tight between his shoulders, his head going down and his legs settling”. The bull has ripped a bit of Romero’s purity away, but not before he puts an end to the bull and it’s power.

Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises is a story set in Paris, France shortly after World War I. The main character, Jake Barnes, is a veteran of the war. While serving, he suffered from an injury and is now impotent. This has many effects on his life, influencing his opinion of himself and his relationships with those around him.

Jake specifically psychoanalyzes his two closest friends Brett and Cohn in their heteronormative gender roles by superimposing constructs of femininity onto both of them. As the female identity opposes his struggle for masculinity in the story, he observes this gender as extremely threatening to his status and demoralizing to his romanticized ideal of self. This causes him to loathe the position of women and the way they manipulate him, while still lusting after them. This inner dialectic operates through different motifs of Hemingway’s writing throughout the narrative, ultimately leading the reader to interpret the subtle misogyny underlying the text. A textual analysis of dialogical syntax and character roles in The Sun Also Rises will demonstrate how Hemingway’s crafting of Jake’s struggle for masculinity exploits the female position and reveals a broader sense of

Through Jake’s resentful diction and metaphorical use of “promised land” after seeing how Cohn looked at Brett, Jake recognizes how many men Brett can influence, and how his impotency makes him unappetizing to her, as shown in the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Lady Brett Ashley is a strong, independent woman who emits power over the people, especially men, around her through her charismatic personality. Hemingway made her seem corrupt and dangerous, suggesting that he thinks independent women are dangerous. Of course, one can “tell something is going on beyond the story” and infer that Hemingway was a misogynist and used Brett as a way to get his ideas a crossed (Foster 116). Jake describes Brett as “very lovely” which is the

In the novel there’s a lot of events that happen that shows a theme of weakened masculinity which Ernest Hemingway explores through out, “The Sun Also Rises”. The novel revolves around individuals that do not know what to do with their lives. These post war characters carry the same life style everyday of their life. The story focuses around Jake Barnes a war veteran, Lady Brett Ashley a beautiful British women and Robert Cohn a Jewish that still believes in the old values. Hemingway uses these major characters to portray the life of the Lost Generation.

Throughout history, the roles of genders have acted in many different ways. Women seemed to be considered fragile, while men were the strong and emotionless. Coming into the light in the 1920’s was Ernest Hemingway’s novel that switched these positions. Hemingway displayed gender roles in The Sun also Rises in a cunning new way. The traditional ways of the 1920’s for men and women were incorporated into his novel making the reversed roles more realistic to his readers.