Violence In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

He served in the war to a poor extent, and does not let his dependence on alcohol become an excuse. Hemingway projects on Jake the same emotion he feels- the war held him back, he is a victim, and the world is unfair. The victim complex can prevent one from moving forward, a value found deeply ingrained in the story (“Values,” Reynolds 1). The Roaring 20s were an attempt at recovery from the first World War, an attempt at healing the minds and bodies of countless broken and affected nations. People wanted to forget, but Hemingway and Jake alike were facing difficulties in moving

The Emphasis on the individual is a central idea in both Romanticism and The Sun Also Rises. As members of the Lost Generation, Hemingway’s characters experience a “physical” lifestyle, concerned with only tangible things drinking and sex. The characters are also in search of finding what they believe to be their “true-selves”, but the reader knows these “true-selves” to be idealized versions of who they wish they were or want to be. Hemingway presents this especially within the character Robert Cohn. Robert Cohn is unlike many of his peers in the novel, he chooses not to drink alcohol or engage in a lot of sexual activity, yet he

“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.

There are two kinds of violence found in literature. The first is when the characters perform violence to themselves or others. This is shown in Harry Potter series. Lord Voldemort tries to murder Harry on several occasions. This type of violence has both internal and external consequences towards Harry and his friends. The second type of violence is inflicted by the author to the characters. In The Grapes of Wrath, Rose of Sharon’s baby dies, due to no fault of any character in the book, but by the author. This type of violence is simply a way to further the plot and has internal pain to the characters in the novel. Both types of violence affect the characters in the novels but through different ways and with different meanings to the plot.

    In the post World War I era,  people were affected directly and indirectly from the war in many ways. In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Jake faces an insecurity which has affected both his masculinity and love life which Hemingway symbolizes with the steer. He copes with these insecurities through alcohol abuse like the rest of the characters and lack of communication. These insecurities further lead to bad coping skills which include excessive drinking and lack of direct communication and that further creates conflicts.

Hemingway sat down to write The Sun Also Rises on September 15,1925 and only six days later, the first draft was complete with the title of Fiesta. The first draft was almost a direct journalistic account of his experience in Paris and Spain, with the names of the characters corresponding to real people. After taking a break from it and writing The Torrents of Spring in order to break his contract with publisher Horace Liverwright, Hemingway returned to his first draft of The Sun Also Rises, making major changes including editing out the first two chapters and changing the order of the book to a straight chronology, and changing the names of the characters. In mid-October, 1926, his book

Based on Jake’s observations, it can be observed that Cohn has turned to books to cope with the pain and disappointment of having a “rotten time … in college” and “not be[ing] everything to his first wife” (Hemingway 16). These books range from travel guides on South America to romantic love stories like The Purple Land which, according to Jake, is a “very sinister book if read too late in life” due to its “splendid imaginary amorous” contents (17). This observation tells the reader about Cohn’s mindset, as well as Jake’s. Due to the personal nature of Cohn’s failures resulting in his losses, Cohn still has a sense of optimism and romanticism that he explores through reading books like The Purple Land as they provide him with inspiration for ways to better his life and his character. Jake, however, believes that Cohn’s obsession with The Purple Land is naive. Jake believes that his war-induced impotence has destroyed his love life, leading him to conclude that The Purple Land portrays an inaccurate representation of love. Jake has lost all hope for himself, and this mindset proves it. One night, after looking at himself naked in the mirror, Jake “started to cry” after getting lost in his thoughts, revealing how hopeless he believes his situation is and how he still cannot fully come to terms with his condition (38-39). Due

Hemingway once said, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to it” (p. 19). Cohn, like the other characters in the novel, wanted to find a place of self satisfaction and worldly value. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, inescapable struggle, pain and worthlessness are evident throughout the novel. Based in the early 1920’s not long after the war, everyone had seen more than what they had hoped for. They longed to see and feel calm and peace with life situations and themselves. In her article, “Character Studies: Lady Brett Ashley,” published in the Paris Review, LaCava noted, “How heavenly to not worry what anyone thought, to engage in the forbidden pleasures of alcohol and sex” (para. 8). This is how the majority of people portrayed life at this time, but there were more underlying feelings. War injuries, feelings of masculine inferiority, and longing to find the perfect prince charming, plague the characters. Drinking and being

The Sun Also Rises, written by Ernest Hemingway, is a novel about a group of young expatriates, living in Paris after World War I and going on a trip to Spain filled with drinking, bullfighting, and much more. The protagonist, Jake Barnes, an impotent American WWI veteran and bullfighting aficionado, spends much of his time watching and sometimes helping Brett, the woman he loves, go off with other men. Most of the book takes place in urban areas like Paris and Pamplona is filled with drunken fights and arguments. Many of the characters are hesitant to address and solve their issues with each other and their values, but when Bill and Jake go on a fishing trip, Hemingway’s imagery of the Spanish countryside creates a more peaceful setting

The life of a Hemingway character always seems like it is an endurance test. There are mental and physical attacks that constantly berate his characters. Since insight on emotions and mental state is not often given by Hemingway, he resorts to physical methods of testing, and violence is a reoccurring theme that Hemingway puts his up against frequently. Violence erupts in patterns, sometimes springing up when a character is already in turmoil where he must adapt to and overcome the obstacles in his way. His reaction to the situation is set in stone, following the hero code. Violence is interpreted as a contest in Hemingway’s works (Poetry Foundation).

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, is about the growing emergence of a new type of woman that comes about in the early twentieth century. In the novel Hemingway creates new models for strong American women that had not been used before in literature. Hemingway’s main female character, Lady Ashley Brett has even less regard for her absence of conformity with the societal expectations of her era than any female character that precedes her in American literature. Hemingway uses the character of Brett to reconsider the preexisting gender roles for women and men in the twentieth century by revealing that manly, alcoholic, and emotionally careless women can still be loveable, but in doing so Hemingway emphasizes the ‘code’ system of gender that his character Lady Ashely Brett is trying to escape from.

Their desire and inability of being complete and feel and love and care, perfectly shows us the results of war and the invisible, painful wounds of their soul. 

You gradually see how spleenful the characters are. How they’ve lost the idea of living the life, seizing the day and feeling the moment. They are wandering all around in search of happiness, or in search of feeling something, having something again. They are damaged and cracked, deeply sank in the ocean of non-existence. The whole point of Hemingwaytion, as I call the state of learning Ernest, is this senseless attempt of understanding how can this orthodox and surprisingly simple, minimalist writing style leave so much more for you to think and change something inside of

“You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another,” a quote written by Ernest Hemingway from the novel of discussion, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was quite the interesting man for his time; injured during the first World War, an avid bullfighting aficionado, even being close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. These tales and adventures of his young career become a retelling through the eyes of Jacob Barnes, whom Hemingway based himself off of, although this is not just any retelling. It’s one of love and ability, of otherness, and what it meant to be a man or woman of the time. Hemingway wanted people to see how one thing affects another, how manhood impacts love, for instance. Hemingway had many different views for love

The disillusionment of the war caused many who fought to feel lost because they no longer held onto traditional American beliefs about war and fighting. Edgar Johnson notes that the brave fought in the war, but "they never understood" (Johnson 88). Jake, more than any of his friends, has suffered the worst injury of the war--one with which he struggles throughout the entire course of the novel. This struggle makes Jake the most complex character of the novel. In fact, his struggle and insecurity caused us to reconsider the definition of manhood. Robert Penn Warren claims that the "shadow of the ruin is behind the typical Hemingway situation" (Warren 35). However, the typical Hemingway character manages to salvage something from his or her situation. Warren also observes that this type of situation is what brings us to Hemingway 's "special interest in

Ernest Hemingway is celebrated as one of the greatest 20th-century novelists. Penning roughly twenty-seven novels throughout his lifetime, Hemingway declared that "a writer's job was to tell the truth," (Bloom, pg 10). It was through this belief that he often drew upon worldly experiences and events as well as personal happenings and musings to create his works. In his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway utilizes and references his time spent as Red Cross volunteer in Italy, his adventures in Pamplona, Spain, and his profound love for alcohol to fuel the adventures of Jake Barnes and his assorted company throughout the novel, focusing on underlying themes of alcoholism, personal rebellion, and sensuality.