Ernest Hemingway’s

The Sun Also RisesEnglish III Hrs/AP/IB

Troy High School Mrs. Snipes

Pablo Picasso’s Bullfight, Death of Toreador

IntroductionErnest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, remains, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “a romance and a guidebook.” It also became, in the words of critic Sibbie O’Sullivan, “a modern-day courtesy book on how to behave in the waste land Europe had become after the Great War.” The Sun Also Rises successfully portrays its characters as survivors of a “lost generation.” In addition, the novel was the most modern an American author had yet produced, and the ease with which it could be read endeared it to many. But for all its apparent simplicity, the novel’s innovation lay in its ironic style that interjected complex themes without being didactic. Generally, the novel is considered to be Hemingway’s most satisfying work. The material for the novel resulted from a journey Hemingway made with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends to Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. Among them was Lady Duff Twysden, a beautiful socialite with whom Hemingway was in love (the inspiration for the novel’s Lady Brett Ashley). There was also a Jewish novelist and boxer named Harold Loeb (source of Robert Cohn) whom Hemingway threatened after learning that he and Lady Duff had had an affair. Lady Duff’s companion was a bankrupt Briton (like Mike Campbell). The trip ended poorly when Lady Duff and her companion left their bills unpaid. The ending of the novel is only slightly more tragic, yet it recovers those precious values which make life livable in a war-wearied world: friendship, stoicism, and natural grace.

Hemingway BiographyHemingway grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, the son of a physician father and a musically inclined mother. He accepted the community's conservative universe, and nothing in his youth marked him for a writer whose cynicism and sexual frankness would be the source of dismay for many Oak Parkers. Among the most dismayed were his parents. When his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was due for discussion at her book club, his mother absented herself, unable to bear the shame of it all.  For his part, Hemingway became alienated from both his parents, seeing his mother as overbearing and his father as weak. Those judgments eventually formed the basis of "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," his devastatingly negative portrayal of a marriage. The Hemingways spent large portions of every summer at their cottage on Walloon Lake in Michigan. There, young Ernest learned early the joys of hunting and fishing. On his third birthday, his father took him fishing for the first time. The expedition proved hugely successful. "He knows when he gets a bite," his mother reported afterward, "and lands them all himself." But the Michigan summers gave Hemingway something beyond his lifelong love of field and stream. Out of his memories of Walloon would come the settings and characters for some of his finest short stories. The estimation of Hemingway in his high-school yearbook was "None are to be found more clever than Ernie." The observation reflected the respect he had earned for his abilities both in academics and in such extracurricular endeavors as his editorship of the school newspaper. The next logical step following graduation seemed to be college. Hemingway, however, was having none of that. Anxious to be independent, he decided instead to go to Kansas City, Missouri, and become a reporter for the Kansas City Star.  In 1917, the Kansas City Star was among the best newspapers in the country. Its staff boasted many bright and talented writers, and Hemingway's exposure to the intellectual interests of these reporters broadened his own perspectives substantially. Their influence doubtless also fed his nascent aspirations to write fiction. As one Star veteran recalled years later, just about every reporter during Hemingway's tenure on the paper harbored dreams of writing a novel.  In the spring of 1917, the United States became an active participant in World War I, and massive recruitment of American soldiers began. Hemingway wanted to enlist, but between parental objections and an eye condition that would probably have precluded his

acceptance, he never tried. Still, he was determined to be part of the war. By early May 1918, he was in New York waiting to sail for Italy as a member of the Red Cross ambulance corps.  His stint with the ambulance corps proved brief, however. On July 8, shortly after midnight, Hemingway was in the frontlines distributing coffee, candy, and postcards to soldiers. Suddenly, an Austrian trench mortar arced down, spewing its metal shards in all directions. Among the wounded was Hemingway, who sat out the rest of the war as a convalescent.  Among the nurses attending to Hemingway following his battle injuries was an American named Agnes von Kurowsky. Before long he was in love with her. More than six years his senior, Kurowsky kept him at arm's length for awhile, but eventually she succumbed to his ebullient charm. Nevertheless, Kurowsky's feelings for Hemingway were never as deep as his attachment to her, and she broke off the relationship in a letter not long after he returned home.  But Hemingway never forgot this romance, and Kurowsky later became a primary model for the heroine in his novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms. After returning from World War I, Hemingway worked for awhile as a reporter for the Toronto Star and later as a writer for a magazine put out by the Chicago-based Cooperative Society of America. Two new acquaintances made in the fall of 1920, however, led to a radical shift in direction. One of the fomenters of change was a young woman named Hadley Richardson; the other was writer Sherwood Anderson. While his relationship with Hadley led to marriage, Anderson was the one who convinced him that the best place to start pursuing his ambition to write fiction was Paris. So it was that in the fall of 1921 Hemingway was preparing to sail to France with his new wife. Eight years his senior, Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, proved unreservedly supportive of his writing aspirations, and it was her income from a trust that enabled him to pursue his literary ambitions in Paris. Although their marriage lasted less than six years, he always regarded her with warmth and gratitude. Hadley returned the compliment, feeling that were it not for his adventurous spirit, her life would have been far more dull and narrow. When the Hemingways arrived in Paris, they were in good shape financially. Hadley's trust could be expected to yield an annual income in excess of $3,000, and Ernest's agreement to write stories for the Toronto Star promised to add to that figure substantially. At the current rates for Paris housing, they could thus afford a decent place to live. Yet when they went apartment-hunting, they settled on a two-room, fourth-floor walk-up in the oldest part of the Paris Left Bank, costing about eighteen dollars a month. The neighborhood was charmless, with no good restaurants or shopping, and the plumbing and heating were primitive. But the newlyweds indulged themselves in other ways. Immediately after moving into their apartment, they left for a three-week skiing holiday in Switzerland. Among the most momentous relationships that Hemingway formed during his first months in Paris was his friendship with the avant-garde art collector and experimental modernist writer Gertrude Stein. In contrast to so many who found Stein's prose incomprehensible, Hemingway respected her professional expertise, and he readily accepted her as a mentor. From her he learned much about the rhythm of words and the power of repetition and unembellished direct statement. The friendship, however, had soured by late 1926, and the final chapter in the Hemingway-Stein relationship is a tale of pot-shots fired at each other in their writings. Ezra Pound was a poet by profession, but he was a generous adviser by instinct, and many a writer, among them T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, benefited from his artistic counsel, encouragement, and editing. Pound met Hemingway early in 1922 and quickly took him on as a protégé. From Pound, Hemingway learned "to distrust adjectives" and received valuable guidance in how to compress his words into precise images. Many years later,

Hemingway called Pound "a sort of saint" and said he was "the man I liked and trusted the most as critic." When Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in the spring of 1925, Fitzgerald had just published The Great Gatsby, and was at the height of his reputation as one of America's leading young writers. Even before they began to talk, Fitzgerald was prepared to like Hemingway, for he had seen in our time and admired it greatly. On the strength of that volume, he had, in fact, recommended its author "as the real thing" to his own editor, Max Perkins, at Charles Scribner's Sons, and thanks partly to his urging, the prestigious Scribner's finally took Hemingway on as one of its writers in 1926. The daughter of a wealthy Arkansas landowner and banker, Pauline Pfeiffer found Hemingway too coarse for her taste when she first met him in early 1925, and Hemingway was much more taken with Pauline's sister than with her. Pauline's friendship with Hemingway's wife Hadley, however, threw them together and ultimately became a subterfuge for pursuing their own relationship. By early 1926, their initial indifference had turned into strong mutual attraction, and at year's end, with his divorce from Hadley in the works, the two were planning to be married.  Pauline was unflagging in her efforts to cater to Hemingway's wants. But eventually her ministrations were not enough to prevent the disintegration of their marriage in the late 1930s.  In 1923, Hemingway saw his first bullfight in Spain. He was so taken with this ancient blood sport that he soon returned to witness one of the bullfights that highlighted the annual fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona. By the time the festival was over, bullfighting was one of the passions of his life, and his third visit to the Pamplona festival in 1925 became the inspiration for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Ever eager to test his courage, Hemingway himself frequently participated in morning sessions at Pamplona where amateur matadors could take on bulls with padded horns. Here, he can be seen (right of center, in white pants and dark sweater) confronting a charging bull. Fired with the fictional possibilities that he saw during his visit to the Pamplona bullfights in 1925, Hemingway started translating them into a novel soon after leaving the Spanish town. Within roughly two months, the first draft of what would eventually be titled The Sun Also Rises was done. Although this work is a classic today, one reviewer charged, at its publication in 1926, that Hemingway was hiding his talents "under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality." Many others, however, disagreed. One critic claimed that its "lean, hard narrative prose" put a good deal of "literary English to shame," and yet another noted that the novel contained the best dialogue to be found in contemporary fiction. Drawn heavily from Hemingway's own experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I, A Farewell to Arms cast its author in a new light. Until its publication in 1929, Hemingway had been seen as a talented writer with great promise. Now, in the wake of reviews trafficking heavily in superlatives, he was a widely acknowledged master of modern prose. After reading Farewell, his friend, poet Archibald MacLeish, wrote: "I am afraid you are not only a fine writer which I have always known but something a lot more than that & it scares me." In late 1936, the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) asked Hemingway to report on the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out between the Loyalist defenders of the current republican regime and a conservative fascist coalition. The money was good; he had strong sympathy for the Loyalist cause; and being in the thick of war appealed to his appetite for adventure. It was, in short, an offer Hemingway could not refuse. Over the next two years, he would go to Spain three times as NANA's man at the front. In the process, he added a new ingredient to his public celebrity. Besides being an innovative man of letters, bullfighting aficionado, and expert outdoor sportsman, he was now the knowing war correspondent.

 In late December 1937, correspondent Hemingway was observing the Loyalists' drive to take the nearby town of Teruel. Also on hand was the Hungarian-born photographer Robert Capa, who was just beginning to make his reputation as one of the great war photographers of this century. Capa saw in Hemingway a promising commercial opportunity, and he was soon focusing his lens on the writer with an eye to marketing the results as a photo story.  The series of pictures began with shots of Hemingway in his hotel room in Valencia, making preparations to report on Teruel. It then progressed to the battlefront, where Capa captured him studying his notes, talking to Loyalist soldiers, and seeking respite from a brutal winter cold around a fire. Among the more striking images was this one showing Hemingway sprawled in the grass, helping a Loyalist to unjam his rifle. The picture spoke volumes about Hemingway's approach to war reporting. Never content to be strictly an observer, he liked being part of the action, and the more directly involved in combat he was the more exhilarated he became.  In late 1936, Ernest Hemingway met writer Martha Gellhorn. She was blond, pretty, and successful, and Hemingway was immensely attracted to her. By early the next year, she had joined him in Spain, where he was covering the Civil War, and there the relationship blossomed into a full-blown affair. In late 1940, soon after his divorce from his second wife, Pauline, became final, he married Gellhorn.  Unlike Pauline, Gellhorn was not willing to dedicate herself almost entirely to catering to Hemingway's wants. That unwillingness created difficulties practically from the start, and by the time Gellhorn divorced him in 1945, the marriage was long over. As Hemingway filed his news stories on the Spanish Civil War, he was also stowing away memories of the conflict for use in his fiction, and by early 1939, he was drawing on them to create the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Published the following year, the work was a best-seller from the outset, and more than one critic discussed its merits almost as if it was already a classic. One reviewer called it "the fullest, deepest, truest" book that Hemingway had ever written and predicted that it would eventually rank among "the major novels in American literature." In late 1933, Hemingway arrived in East Africa with his wife Pauline and Key West friend Charles Thompson to begin a hunting safari. The chief aim of this venture was pleasure. Nevertheless, literary concerns were never entirely out of his mind, and the safari inspired two of Hemingway's finest short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Hemingway's passion for hunting and fishing ran as deeply as his passion for writing, and although his literary endeavors were the main source of his fame, his celebrity rested as well on his reputation as an avid outdoor sportsman. By the mid-1930s,  he was, in fact, on his way to becoming the best-known fisherman in America. He was also becoming a pacesetter in developing new and more aggressive techniques in deep-sea fishing, which, according to one expert, ultimately transformed the sport.When the United States entered World War II in late 1941, Hemingway's lifelong relish for things military made involvement in the conflict inevitable. Initially, that involvement took the form of a short-lived adventure into intelligence work and patrolling for German U-boats in waters near his home in Cuba. Ultimately, however, he decided to get closer to the real war. By May 1944, he was on his way to covering Allied operations in Europe for Collier's magazine. Correspondents and soldiers alike enjoyed Hemingway's company during World War II, but none more so than Colonel "Buck" Lanham, commanding officer of the Fourth Infantry Division's Twenty-Second Regiment. Here, Lanham is seen with Hemingway in late September 1944. The Twenty-Second had a few days earlier been part of a successful drive

to penetrate Germany's border defenses, the so-called Siegfried Line, and in the photograph the two are examining a deserted piece of artillery used in those defenses.  Lanham's affection for Hemingway almost seemed like hero-worship sometimes. Writing of a dinner shared near the frontlines, he wrote that "Hemingway, presiding at the head of the table, might have been a fatherly Mars delighting in the happiness of his brood."  Hemingway's marriage to Martha Gellhorn had difficulties from its outset in 1940, and its dissolution became certain when he met Mary Welsh, a member of Time's European staff, shortly after he arrived in England to begin covering World War II. Among Welsh's most alluring qualities was a willingness to flatter and cater to him. The couple's wartime courtship almost ended in Paris when, in a fit of jealousy over Welsh's estranged husband, a well-lubricated Hemingway shot up a hotel toilet bowl. When Hemingway left Europe early in 1945, however, he and Welsh were planning to be married.  Central in Hemingway’s life was Adriana Ivancich, member of an aristocratic Venetian family. From the moment he met this young girl during his Italian stay in 1948, he was smitten, and for several years he carried on a platonic flirtation. The advent of Adriana marked the end of a dry spell in Hemingway's writing, and their relationship became the basis for the May-December romance portrayed in Across the River and into the Trees. Adriana also seems to have had a part in the making of one of Hemingway's masterpieces, The Old Man and the Sea; it was her stay with the Hemingways in late 1950 that provided the energizing lift that the writer apparently needed to begin this tale. Hemingway's confidence in his own work was sometimes misplaced, but not in the case of The Old Man and the Sea. Life magazine published the novella in toto in a single issue, and within forty-eight hours, all 5.3 million copies were snapped up. Interestingly enough, the Life publication did not lessen demand for the work in hardcover, and for six months it remained on the best-sellers' list. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, was The Old Man and the Sea's rapid acceptance into the canon of American classics.

Hemingway had by the early 1950s become a celebrity of the first rank. As one Hemingway student has put it: "He once made news because of what he did; now he made news because of who he was." One indication of the truth of that statement was Look magazine's offer in 1953 to defray $15,000 of the expenses for Hemingway's forthcoming African safari if it could send a photographer along. For 3,500 words from Hemingway to run with the resulting pictures, it threw in $10,000 more. The deal was hard to refuse. When Hemingway's safari set out on September 1, 1953, Look's photographer Earl Theisen was on hand to record it. And there was much to record of Hemingway on his 1953 safari. Drinking heavily, he took up with a native girl under the eyes of his own wife; he shaved his head in the name of "going native"; and, dyeing his clothes a rusty color to match the hue favored among the local Masai people, he went hunting with a spear. The early 1950s yielded a number of noteworthy honors for Hemingway. In May 1953, The Old Man and the Sea earned him the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The following spring, the American Academy of Arts and Letters bestowed on him its prestigious Medal of Merit. Then, in October 1954, word came to him in Cuba that he had won the Nobel Prize in literature. Hemingway had often professed disdain for that ultimate honor, but when it came his way, there was no doubt that he was pleased. Claiming ill health, he said he could not go to Sweden to receive the award. Instead, the Swedish ambassador to Cuba came to his home outside of Havana to present him with the Nobel medal and citation. On July 21, 1959, Hemingway turned sixty, and to mark that watershed, his wife Mary threw an elaborate party at the spacious home of a millionaire friend who was serving as their host during their stay in Spain. Hemingway enjoyed himself immensely, but the celebration produced some indications that all was not well with him. Among them was a nasty flash of ill temper directed at his frontline pal from World War II, General "Buck"

Lanham. Having come from Washington for the party, he left Spain certain that Hemingway was a very troubled man.  Hemingway's stability did not improve over the next few years, and on July 2, 1961, following several rounds of electroshock therapy, he killed himself at his home in Idaho.  A Definition of ModernismThe most basic meaning of the term modern is that which is contemporary or characteristic of the present moment in time. In traditional literary discussions of twentieth-century literature, the term modern has frequently been (miss)used more or less synonymously with the terms modernist and modernism, and even then in a rather narrow range of meanings of what might count as modernist thought and writing. We see this, for example, in Harmon and Holman’s A Handbook to Literature, where they define modern according to the negative connotations passed down by some of the canonical writers of the period:

For much of its history, "modern" has meant something bad. . . . It is not so much a chronological designation as one suggestive of a loosely defined congeries of characteristics. Much twentieth-century literature is not "modern" in the common sense, as much that is contemporary is not. . . . In a broad sense modern is applied to writing marked by a strong and conscious break with tradition. It employs a distinctive kind of imagination that insists on having its general frame of reference within itself. It thus practices the solipsism of which Allen Tate accused the modern mind: It believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it. Modern implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair. It rejects not only history but also the society of whose fabrication history is a record. It rejects traditional values and assumptions, and it rejects equally the rhetoric by which they were sanctioned and communicated. It elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward, and it prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious. The psychologies of Freud and Jung have been seminal in the modern movement in literature. In many respects it is a reaction against REALISM and NATURALISM and the scientific postulates on which they rest. Although by no means can all modern writers by termed philosophical existentialists, EXISTENTIALISM has created a schema within which much of the modern temper can see a reflection of its attitudes and assumptions. The modern revels in a dense and often unordered actuality as opposed to the practical and systematic, and in exploring that actuality as it exists in the mind of the writer it has been richly experimental. (325-26)

This definition of modern/modernism stems in part from a traditional (and I think limited) reading of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. By that, I don’t mean to suggest that this definition isn’t helpful, or that I don’t find The Waste Land a richly compelling modernist text. (First published in 1922 and edited by Ezra Pound, Eliot’s The Waste Land is perhaps the most famous modernist poem—a long, fragmentary poem which, according to Cary Nelson, should be read as both a "revolutionary, code-shattering text, the poem primarily responsible for making disjunctive collage central to the modern literary sensibility," and as a "conservative, even reactionary, [formalist] text, one that evokes the multiplicity of modern life only to condemn it and urge on us some reformulation of an earlier faith" (Repression and Recovery 239-240).) Rather, my objection to the narrow sense of modernism as defined by Harmon and Holman is against the way that that definition was disseminated by academic critics and teachers from the 1940s through the 1960s, who took this generally conservative reading of a very few modernist texts and proceeded to delineate a modernist canon around those terms, defining retrospectively the whole modernist period as a brief flowering of philosophical angst and formal experimentalism between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. With the rise of literary theory and revisionist literary history in the 1980s, new generations of literary critics have been rethinking the terms modern and modernism. They have sought to rethink the negative, disparaging tone and cultural conservatism adopted towards modernity and mass culture in canonical modernist literature and literary

criticism. And this has largely been achieved by revisiting much of the literature from 1910 to 1945 which had previously been excluded from the traditional modernist canon—works by "New Negro" or "Harlem Renaissance" novelists such as Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, as well as works by women and working class novelists such as Anzia Yezierska, Fielding Burke, Mike Gold, and Jack Conroy, just to name a few. Not all modernist works (that is, works engaging the conditions of twentieth-century modern life) were written in radically disjunctive experimental styles, and not all modernist works express a personal, moral alienation towards the state of modern, urban industrial existence. In fact, much of the work produced from the 1910s through the 1930s that is socially or aesthetically revolutionary expressed a conflicted ambivalence towards modern mass society and its failure to live up to the promises of the American Dream, and many works expressed the opposite of alienation: a utopian belief that it is the world of modern technology and mass culture that will make possible the ushering in of new societies capable of achieving unimaginable social, cultural and philosophical heights.  The term modernity, more recent critics now suggest, should be used to distinguish between the historical, cultural, economic and political conditions of the time and modernism, which signifies the literary and aesthetic representations of (or responses to) those historical conditions. Modernity defined in this way becomes the historical and cultural conditions of possibility that make modernism both necessary and possible in the first place. One way to think about it would be to say that the mass availability and rising popularity of the automobile from the 1910s through the 1920s is a condition of modernity, whereas car metaphors and the use of the automobile as a symbol of mechanical reproduction frequently appear as tropes in modernist writing. If, however, you allow that authors and artists (like everyone else) must to some degree be the product of the historical and cultural conditions of their own times, then you can see that this distinction between modernity and modernism is partly a rhetorical abstraction full of inevitable slippages and gray areas.  Nevertheless, distinguishing between modernity and modernism can be a productive starting place. Take the character of Brett in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Critics tend to agree that Brett is Hemingway’s representation of a "modern woman." But what specifically is it in the text that signifies her as such? To what conditions of "new woman" modernity does the text explicitly allude through her character? Or are some of those conditions only present as narrative subtexts unconsciously reflected through her outward character traits? And finally, what attitude towards those conditions of modernity does the text (not necessarily Jake the narrator) express through its treatment of Brett? If these questions sound too complicated or obscure, wait till we get to the opening scenes of the novel and we’ll work to clarify them when we look at the textual details describing Brett's entrance as a character. If these questions sound too obvious and straightforward, I would suggest that they are not. The way The Sun Also Rises represents modernity is symbolically complex and what this text ultimately says about the various modernities it invokes may turn out to be quite contradictory. But that can also be a good thing. For, in deciding how we as readers respond to Hemingway’s modernist narratives, we may become more self conscious regarding our own value judgments about our times and our modernity—which, if Richard Powers is correct, is very much the grandchild (or perhaps the time-warped twin) of their modernities in the Futurist moment of 1914.As with other literary periods or movements (the Renaissance, Romanticism, etc), "Modernism" is a not only a construction but it is also a site for various contested meanings and interpretations. The notion of modernism is forged out of a multiplicity of cultural and historical phenomena (science, music, fine art, etc--see Butler on interrelations) with perhaps the only common base being a rupture with previous ways of "seeing," or "knowing." It is at bottom an epistemological question--how do we get to "know" the world, or how do we construct our reality--how best do we represent reality? These are perennial questions, but from around the beginning of our century there was what could be termed a crisis in representation and this led to variegated experimentation in the arts in the hope of rendering "reality" in a mode more compatible with the "times" and its new understanding

of human nature (this is the main thrust of Woolf's essay). There is also during this period scientific discoveries such as the relativity of "truth" and the findings of Freud, both of which have repercussions, however mediated, on artistic form and content: experiment in point of view and a greater concern with subjective processes. But there is another side to modernism (which might be differentiated from modernist: that is to say, another way to look at a text's implication within modernism other than the purely formalist paradigm, the criterion of experimentalism which finds its zenith in the idea of the avant-garde. We can look as well at how a text is implicated in social modernity, how, without necessarily making radical experiments in form, nevertheless concerns itself with the crises inherent in modernity. We can now perhaps begin to reveal the plurality of the title of our investigation in English 179. For our purposes (and why not construct our own notion of modernism) it is best to read this period (from 1910 to about 1930) as being marked by a dual (if not at times dialectical) textual production: on the one hand, texts that respond to modern life with radical experiments in representation, and on the other hand, those which can be read as fictional counterparts to the crises in modern society. The texts on our list, although not specifically chosen with these criteria in mind, do nevertheless offer a spectrum of approaches to the narrativization of modern life. You may want to revise or take a stand with regard to these comments, arguing, for example, that another term is needed for those texts which do not experiment formally with narrative, but whatever that term is it certainly cannot be "modern," because some of the writers Woolf talks about in "Modern Fiction" (Galsworthy, Bennett, etc) were/are modern writers but, in Woolf's opinion, were not engaging in the "stuff" of contemporary life. To review, Modernism began in the late 19th century: •   as industrialization brought rapid and radical changes to the traditional way of life •   as railroad lines were built from the cities to rural areas •   as people moved from farms to the cities •   as workers (including children) in the factories, mines, railroads, etc. were forced to

work for subsistence wages  •   as Marx was showing that history was based on class conflict and that the vast majority

of workers were controlled by a small group of people who owned the means of production and     distribution

•   as Darwin's theory of evolution revealed that humans had an animal, rather than divine or rational, nature

•   as Freud illuminated the unconscious as the repository of socially unacceptable desires and the sex drive as the source of action.  The sexual instinct was seen as unrelated to reproduction and bringing individual gratification

•   as physical scientists were replacing causality with probability, unity with quantum gaps, certainty with relativity

•   as the English empire was reaching its limit and all of Europe was developing colonies in Africa and Asia

•   as the wealth of Western nations became more and more dependent, both directly and indirectly, on slavery

•   as advertising and popular culture were reaching the masses •   as education expanded and literacy increased •   as photography and movies became popular •   as women sought a voice in public as well as private affairs.

High Modernism

•   A group of artists, musicians, writers, and film makers, whom we have come to call modernists, found that traditional forms could no longer represent their experience

•   They sought to represent the flux, incoherence, conflicts, and alienation of modern life and the psychological depth of human thought by experimenting with new forms. But they also longed for the stability, unity, and values of the past--at least in the early years of the 20th century

•   As a result writers would anchor an incoherent, disunited representation (or story) with a stable, classical form. For instance, Joyce built Ulysses--a story of the life of an

ordinary advertising salesman, told in shifting and incoherent styles--on the superstructure of Homer's heroic Odyssey . And William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented the loss of a stable, coherent past and, following T. S. Eliot, present the modern world as a wasteland. 

•   As a result writers would anchor an incoherent, disunited representation (or story) with a stable, classical form. For instance, Joyce built Ulysses--a story of the life of an ordinary advertising salesman, told in shifting and incoherent styles--on the superstructure of Homer's heroic Odyssey . And William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented the loss of a stable, coherent past and, following T. S. Eliot, present the modern world as a wasteland. 

•   Nonetheless, this movement, called modernism, rejected the stable values of the contemporary middle-class, and appealed to an intellectual elite.

•   Modernism has come to include the art, literature, and music that called attention to social issues and sought ways for writers and artists who had been silenced or misrepresented by those in power to find and express their own voices:  These were: 

–    women

–    social activists concerned with working conditions

–    colonized people

–    African Americans, who were displaced and exploited in the U. S. 

–    different kinds of social or cultural revolutionaries

Why Literary Modernism? There emerged some major issues to which twentieth century literature responded in ways generally known as "Modernism."

They are:•     a sense of the loss of 'ontological ground‘ (defining what it means to “be”), i.e., a loss

of confidence that there exists a reliable, knowable ground of value and identity. A combination of factors contributed to this including:

–        the challenges to 19th century science and its confidence in its ability to explain the universe;

–        industrialization and the consequent displacement of persons from their previous physical and psychic groundings

–        the association of Christianity with capitalism, and with an oppressive often hypocritical moralism;

–        the critical historical study of biblical texts and the consequent challenge to revelation

•     loss of ‘ontological ground’

–       the popularization of evolutionary theory

–       a growing awareness of a variety of cultures which had differing but valid world-views

–       changes in philosophical thought which suggested that 'reality' was an internal and changeable, not an externally validated, concept

•     a sense that our culture has lost its bearings, that there is no center, no cogency, that there is a collapse of values or a bankruptcy of values. As Yeats wrote in "The Second

Coming", "Things fall apart ; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

•     this loss of faith in a moral center and moral direction is based both in the general loss of a sense of sure ontological ground, and in an equally important recognition that the traditional values have, after all, led only to a horrid war, industrial squalor, the breakdown of traditional rural society, exploitation of other cultures and races, and a society built on power and greed. W.W.I was a gruesome wake-up call.

•      a shift in paradigms [models of how the world works] from the closed, finite, measurable, cause-and-effect universe of 19th century science to an open, relativistic, changing, strange universe, and a (related) shift from an evolutionary.

•      the basis of judgment and “|reason” moves from the traditional idea -- consensus, social authority and textual authority -- to individual judgment and phenomenological [lived experience] validation, hence to the locating of meaning (and, in a sense, 'truth') in individual experience.

•      the development of studies and ideas which have as their focus the nature and functioning of the individual: the discipline of psychology; psychotherapy; a growing democratization in politics; in art, movements such as impressionism and cubism which focus on the process of perception.

•      a discovery that the forces governing behavior are hidden: this in the realms of psychology, economics, politics -- Marx, Freud, Neitzsche, etc. This leads to the search for underlying, hidden structures, which motivate behavior.

•      a move to the mystical and the symbolic as ways of recovering a sense of the holy in experience and of recreating a sustainable ontological ground (Brett Ashley-  “That is what we have instead of God.”

 Characteristics of Modernism in Literature • a lack of concern with conventional morality (Woolf, Joyce)• modern characters constantly contradict themselves; they are guided by irrational

betrayals through plots in which nothing very much happens (Woolf, Hemingway)• a focus on the inner lives of characters and their felt responses to experience (Woolf)• a lack of concern with chronology (not immediately evident in these stories)• a disjointed, terse, telegraphic style (Hemingway)• a sense of radical newness, of the apocalyptic and of destruction and desolation

(Hemingway)• a feeling of alienation (Hemingway)• motives that are hinted at rather than explicitly explained (Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway)• symbolism (e.g. Woolf’s animal imagery, Hemingway’s machines)• shocking themes (Joyce)

The “Lost Generation”

Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American materialism, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World War I years. Paris was the center of it all.

American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the expression "lost generation." Speaking to Ernest Hemingway, she said, "you are all a lost generation." The term stuck and the mystique surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us.

Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.

There were many literary artists involved in the groups known as the Lost Generation. The three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others usually included among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation's leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in the novel. Hemingway volunteered to fight with the Italians in World War I and his Midwestern American ignorance was shattered during the resounding defeat of the Italians by the Central Powers at Caporetto. Newspapers of the time reported Hemingway, with dozens of pieces of shrapnel in his legs, had heroically carried another man out. That episode even made the newsreels in America. These war time experiences laid the groundwork of his novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929). Another of his books, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was a naturalistic and shocking expression of post-war disillusionment.

 John Dos Passos had also seen the brutality of the war and questioned the meaning of contemporary life. His novel Manhatten Transfer reveals the extent of his pessimism as he indicated the hopeless futility of life in an American city.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age. Though not strictly speaking an expatriate, he roamed Europe and visited North Africa, but returned to the US occasionally. Fitzgerald had at least two addresses in Paris between 1928 and 1930. He fulfilled the role of chronicler of the prohibition era.

 His first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a best-seller. But when first published, The Great Gatsby on the other hand, sold only 25,000 copies. The free spirited Fitzgerald, certain it would be a big hit, blew the publisher's advance money leasing a villa in Cannes. In the end, he owed his publishers, Scribners, money. Fitzgerald's Gatsby is the story of a somewhat refined and wealthy bootlegger whose morality is contrasted with the hypocritical attitude of most of his acquaintances. Many literary critics consider Gatsby his best work.

The impact of the war on the group of writers in the Lost Generation is aptly demonstrated by a passage from Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1933):

"This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer...See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."

 The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence in 20th century literature. Their innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and paved the way for subsequent generations of writers.

 Hemingway and the “Lost Generation”

When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris late in 1921 to take up residence in the Anglo-American enclave  of avant-garde artists and intellectuals there, his literary aspirations were purely speculative. Yet at twenty-two, this would-be writer somehow engendered credibility; even before he published anything major, many of the enclave's expatriate literati, among them Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, regarded him as a significant talent. The belief in him proved well founded. With the publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, Hemingway emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation. Over the next several decades, many of his short stories and novels would be embraced as classics almost overnight.

In his own lifetime, Hemingway's fame rested nearly as much on his personality as it did on his art. Between his expertise as an outdoor sportsman, his stints as a war correspondent, and his enthusiasm for bullfighting and boxing, he became a symbol of virile glamour, and his celebrity even among those who never read his books was a phenomenon unique in American letters. His most enduring legacy, however, is his crisp, direct storytelling prose, which has been a shaping influence for countless writers of the twentieth century.

The Hemingway Code HeroHemingway defined the Code Hero as a “man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.” The Code Hero measures himself by how well he handles the difficult situations that life throws at him.  In the end the Code Hero will lose because we are all mortal, but the true measure is how a person faces death. The Code Hero believes in nothing.  Along with this, there is no after life. The Code Hero is typically an individualist and free-willed.  Although he believes in the ideals of courage and honor he has his own set of morals and principles based on his beliefs in honor, courage and endurance.  A code hero never shows emotions; showing emotions and having a commitment to women shows weakness.  Qualities such as bravery, adventurousness, and travel also define the code hero. A final trait of the code hero is his dislike of the dark.  It symbolizes death and is a source of fear for him.  The rite of manhood for the code hero is facing death.  However, once he faces death bravely and becomes a man he must continue the struggle and constantly prove himself to retain his manhood.

Ideas to ConsiderConsumership:All the characters are consumers of something:Brett consumes men, Bill and Mike consume alcohol, Robert Cohn consumes himself, in a sense, in the gradual dismantling of his manhood.  Robert ostensibly possesses all the traits of a “man,” yet in reality these are sham.  He is a boxer, but he cannot rely on brutality without asking for forgiveness.  He is a writer, yet he cannot produce after his initial work.  He falls in love with a woman who immasculates him, and he makes himself pathetic.  In fact, Cohn is fuzzy.  There are no absolutes, and so his tory is not finished for the reader. Emasculation:Jake Barnes is in reality emasculated, but, perhaps because he is thus insulated from Brett’s destructive nature, he is ironically the most manly in the novel.  He is the code hero, and he is the moral center.  It is Jake’s story that is completed for the reader, and it is only Jake at the end who rises above Brett. Morals and Morality:Reflecting on his friends and especially on Robert Cohn, who is becoming a major annoyance, Jake reflects on his moral code, “That was morality; things that made you

disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality.” Jake is more interested in his own concerns and, secondarily, Brett’s. Cohn was fortunate enough to have a holiday with Brett but he is not smart enough to accept that it meant nothing. Because Cohn cannot create his own version of the group’s code, he becomes the subject of persecution. Jake is bothered by it but he is more disgusted when he knowingly violates the code of aficionado by setting up Brett with Romero. This disrupts his friendship with Montoya and with Cohn. Respect is betrayed and lost. The garbage that is visible at the end of the fiesta only compounds his self-disgust. However, instead of leading to an epiphany he simply decides to develop his own code of style more thoroughly. That style is a hard-boiled self-centeredness.Brett is lost throughout the novel. She is disgusted with herself and those around her, especially Jake—through no fault of his own. The only moment she exerts herself in terms of morality is to get rid of Romero. Throughout the novel, Brett defies conventional morality by having short, meaningless affairs. Because of her self-centeredness and unhappiness, she is unable to stop this self-destructive behavior and is often passive to events. The affairs are meant to escape her unsatisfactory relationship with Jake, whom she truly loves but who is unable to physically consummate their relationship. Meaning of Life:The theme of life’s meaning turns from the question of essence, “what it was all about,” to existence, “how to live in it.” However, the reason for this polarity is the inability of the main characters to rise above that mediocrity. They must reject the life of the hero as impossible for themselves. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” To which Cohn replies, “I am not interested in bullfighters. That’s an abnormal life.” Cohn’s idea of life is romantic—a life of literary fame and adventure with a beautiful mistress who happens to have a title. But the group despises Cohn’s notions and Brett finally judges that he is “not one of us.” Instead, the key to life is a development of one’s ability to wisely utilize the full worth of one’s money. This can take many forms but only Jake, the Count, and to a certain extent Bill Gorton, are able to do this. Brett, and especially Mike Campbell (who is ever an “undischarged bankrupt”), will never be happy even if they become rich because they are incapable of utilizing money well. Bill relies on exchange value and use. When he first enters the narrative he wishes to buy Jake a stuffed dog, “Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.” Bill’s philosophy is to use money to buy moments as well as to show one’s stature. His motto is “Never be daunted.” Possibilities for bliss, such as a pub or a bottle, must be utilized to their full potential. Jake, meanwhile, is developing a more sophisticated attitude full of tabulating expenses which keeps his mind off his main problem of impotence. “I paid my way into things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in.” Then he adds that he might change his mind in five years. In other words, “the lost generation” can get their kicks by a wise expenditure of money (even if they are not rich) until a semblance of reality has been reconstructed and the war is in the past. A possible future philosophy is hinted at when Jake reads Turgenieff and knows he will remember what he reads as if it was his experience. That is, Turgenieff writes truthfully about experience in a way Hemingway agreed with. “That was another good thing you paid for and then had.” But payment here is the effort of reading literature which you can then use to recover from war.  Related to this theme is the concept of the loss of ontological ground.

Historical Background

When Hemingway went to Paris in 1921, he experienced a culture shock. Gertrude Stein’s phrase “lost generation” referred to the prevalent attitude of the day. The phrase came into usage because “all maps were useless and . . . they had to explore a new-found land for themselves—this generation was lost” (Mizener 122). In essence, these people could accept nothing about current attitudes.  They wanted to begin over through experience to work out a code of conduct to live by and respect. Members of the Jazz Age included painters, writers, rioters, artists, and the idle rich all living decadent lives. These people were American expatriates who had come to Paris as a haven for creativity and Bohemian lifestyles.Actually, many were escaping conservative American attitudes. After World War I, politicians seemed untrustworthy, and Prohibition was politically popular. There was an upsurge of fundamentalist ministers, book and movie censorship, and groups like the KKK. Paris streets, in contrast, were filled with silent movie stars, beautiful people, and lots of liquor. Days of cars, installment loans, and refrigerators had changed women’s roles, too. They now sported short skirts, sheer dresses, bobbed hair, and lipstick. Instead of binding their waists, they now bound their breasts. This was the first generation of women to drink, smoke, dance wildly, and deal with marital problems by divorce. Paris provided those quick divorces and diversions for this “lost generation.” Writers of the time had “energy and optimism” (Mizener, 122). They were idealists who scorned conservative, American attitudes. They were dissatisfied with their own country and preferred to live elsewhere. It is said all writers eventually passed through Paris because the European world allowed them “to discover the possibilities in themselves as Americans” (Mizener, 124).

Narrative StyleThe first-person narration of Jake Barnes is sometimes referred to as a “roman à clef.” A roman à clef is a story understandable only to those who have a “key” for deciphering the real persons and places behind the story. The story of Jake Barnes resembles the real events of the summer of 1925 in the life of Hemingway and his friends. Still there is enough difference that no “key” is needed for understanding. That is to say, the novel stands on its own whether or not the reader knows on whom the character Lady Brett Ashley is based. In addition, Jake Barnes is not Hemingway because in real life Hemingway was married when he went to Pamplona. Jake is a blending of several real people as well as a fruition of Hemingway’s theoretic code-hero. There is enough similarity for comparisons but the novel is in no way an autobiographical event. It is a story attempting to speak truths to the present generation.

DialogueHemingway’s dependence on dialogue is just one mark of his modernity. Henry James, for example, felt dialogue was the climax of a scene and was to be used sparingly. Hemingway creates whole scenes solely from dialogue. However, Hemingway’s dialogue made the story an easy and fast read with effects similar to news writing. The author seems to disappear as the narrator allows his contact with others to balance out the story. It becomes a group conversation rather than a narration. Hemingway’s ability with this feature delighted many critics. Conrad Aiken remarked, “More than any other talk I can call to mind, it is alive with the rhythms and idioms, the pauses and suspensions and innuendoes and short-hands, of living speech. It is in the dialogue, almost entirely, that Mr. Hemingway tells his story and makes the people live and act.” The use of dialogue is one of the key features of Hemingway’s style.

HeroHemingway’s solution to the ennui, or disillusioned nausea, that marked his “lost generation” was the encouragement of each person in their path to being a hero. However, as is clear in the novel, his theory did not include bravery in war or sport but insisted that the individual create a moral code. One must “never be daunted.”

Jake Barnes and friends are the best examples of Hemingway pursuing his theories. Succeeding Hemingway heroes do have the humanity to inspire our sympathy and imitation. This code-hero was defined eloquently by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks while discussing Hemingway’s “The Killers.” They said that the code-hero “is the tough man . . . the disciplined man, who actually is aware of pathos or tragedy.” Lacking spontaneous emotion, the code-hero “sheathes [his sensibility] in the code of toughness” because “he has learned that the only way to hold on to 'honor,' to individuality, to, even, the human order . . . is to live by his code.” Romero provides the clearest example not through his bullfighting but through his ability to ignore the bruises Cohn gives him in order to perform as he is capable. The success of the fiesta depends on his ability to do so. Brett and Jake also satisfy this definition. Brett decides she cannot corrupt the young bullfighter but will continue to live in style hiding her frustrated love. Jake decides he has to live according to his own code with the help of his stoicism.

IdiomThe heavy use of dialogue, the terse, staccato sentences, and the minimalist tightness that characterizes descriptions and emotional expenditure are the marks of the style or idiom that Hemingway made his own. According to this idiom, carefully chosen language can relate fictional authenticity in such a way that it will never ring false, the goal being to carefully construct a world that has certitude and leave the uncertain unsaid. Thus the language appears often to refer to ideas beyond what is actually written. However, only the written words are to be trusted and only they are true. The effect of this new style is similar to Biblical genesis: reconstruct from the rubble of war a civilization of beauty and simplicity.  The bareness of the intention is best revealed on the fishing expedition, “Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.” Two sentences were used where previous writers would have expended chapters. Furthermore, it is an incredibly simple and stark contrast to the sleepless nights of Paris and it directly calls to mind the howls of the “Waste Land.”

Important Passages

1) “You are all a lost generation.” Epigraph This quote doesn’t occur in the novel, but instead before it begins in an epigraph. It is a famous description by Gertrude Stein of the post-World War I generation, who felt apathetic and disillusioned by the war. The characters in the book feel this way, as did some people of the time. They, like Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, became expatriates, leaving the Unites States for Europe. They could no longer relate to American values, and struggled to find meaning and definition. The Sun Also Rises not only gave a name to these people, it captured their experience. The book was Hemingway’s first big success. Whereas people couldn’t relate to their own lives anymore, they were able to relate to Barnes and Lady Brett. Bill Gorton tells Barnes, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” However, as hopeless as Jake seems to be, he isn't completely. He regrets losing religion and still tries for love with Lady Brett, and this too made the novel popular.  2) “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” Page 10Jake Barnes is one of the lost generation; he is a realist. Robert Cohn, on the other hand, is more romantic. Cohn wants to run away to South America, where he feels he could have an adventure. He says, “I can’t stand to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” But Barnes tells him only bullfighters reach that ideal, and that “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” This sets up Cohn and Barnes as opposites, but also presents the difference between finding adventure within yourself and hunting for it in books.

 Bullfighters risk death every time they step into the ring with the bull, and it is a brutal, violent sport. Perhaps this is why Barnes says only bullfighters live life to the fullest: they risk death every day, instead of sitting around talking or wasting time. Hemingway himself was interested in bullfighting, and even wrote Death in the Afternoon about it. Some have likened Barnes’ injury to the bull in the ring; later, Mike says, “Tell him bulls have no balls.” While watching a bullfight, he observes, “each time he enters into the terrain of the bull he is in great danger.” The bull and bullfighter may be an analogy of Jake and Lady Brett, and the early reference to bullfighters serves as foreshadowing of Lady Brett’s romance with Romero, the 19-year-old bullfighter.  3) “Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” Page 22This is Jake’s description of Lady Brett the first time she appears in the novel. Cohn is clearly taken with Lady Brett, emboldened by his own recent successes with women and desire for adventure, but Brett turns him down to dance and leave with Jake. Brett and Jake have history and a connection, and admiration is obvious in Jake’s description of her not only as attractive, but strong and confident. Jake’s injury has emasculated him; he can feel desire, but can’t act upon it. This frustration echoes the frustration many people felt in the post-war turmoil, but also indicates how traditional values are changed. Lady Brett is described as more masculine; she has short hair, “like a boy’s,”and a traditionally male name. She surrounds herself with homosexual men, who Jake wants to beat up, because his own masculinity is threatened due to his injury. Later, Lady Brett is compared to Circe, the festival goddess who turned men to swine. She and Jake’s relationship is doomed because of his inability to consummate it. Instead, Brett has affairs, namely with a bullfighter.

4) “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” Page 148Jake is wandering, trying to find meaning in his life. He loves Brett but can’t have her. After the war, he takes on a more monetary outlook. During this scene, he is lying in bed, unable to sleep and not wanting to turn off the light, and he can hear Brett laughing with another man. He thinks that you have to be in love with a woman to be her friend, and that he had been getting “something for nothing” in their relationship. Then he talks about the presentation of the bill, and how life in general is an “exchange of values.” You pay with experience or taking chances, and hopefully you learn from it. What makes Jake a hero to many readers is his slight hope. He was not after empty experience. He was searching for meaning, and hoping that as he got older, he would discover that meaning. Of course, that hope is tempered with cynicism, as he realizes this current philosophy will seem silly in five years. Money is important to society, more so after the war, and Jake has adopted it because it's the only way he can define his hunt for a philosophy with meaning.  5) “Yes. . . . Isn't it pretty to think so?” Page 247This is the last line in the book. Brett has sent Pedro away so she won’t ruin him, and she and Jake are in a taxi, driving around Madrid. Jake puts his arm around her, and they are comfortable. Brett says, "We could have had such a damned good time together,” and this quote is Jake’s reply. The castration theme echoes throughout the book. While Jake is physically unable to perform, like the bulls, Brett symbolically castrates the men who chase after her. Cohn and Mike are left in shambles by the end of the book, and Brett foresees the same fate for Pedro, so she leaves him, calling herself a bitch.

Study/Discussion QuestionsBook IChapter 1

1. Describe Robert’s experiences with women. Why was he devastated by his divorce? How has Frances affected his life? How has their relationship changed? Why? How does this prepare the way for Robert’s relationship with Brett?2. Explain why Hemingway begins the novel with this chapter. Why is Cohn important enough to describe in detail? What clues does Jake give the reader to his negative feelings toward Robert?Chapter 23. Compare Jake’s and Robert’s views of life. Why does Robert think South America will cure his dissatisfaction? How have Robert’s interests and goals been developed? Jake’s?4. Discuss this quotation: “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” How does this foreshadow Jake’s afición values? Why does Jake feel life must be lived to the fullest? How does the “lost generation” fit into this attitude?Chapter 35. Show Paris as a wasteland. How are perversions of love demonstrated? How does Georgette fit into this? What is the significance of Jake’s anger in the dancing club?6. Explain Georgette’s comment, “Everybody’s sick.” How is this a statement on society? How does Jake’s injury represent society? Are there other “sick” characters in the novel?Chapter 47. Explain Brett’s quote, “Don’t we pay for all the things we do . . . ? Why does Brett feel she is being punished? How? To what extent are the wounds the result of external forces?8. How does Jake deal with his impotence? How do other people see it? Explain the quotation, “You, a foreigner . . . have given more than your life.” Does Jake agree? How is his impotence relevant to society’s? Chapters 5-69. Describe the relationship between Frances and Robert. How does Frances feel his leaving her demonstrates the aspect of his character of seeking adventures through books? Why doesn’t Robert defend himself? How was their relationship developed through his insecurities?10. Contrast the normal people presented in the reading with Jake’s Paris friends. How are Krum and Woolsey different from Jake’s other friends? Why does Jake walk to work? How do the characters presented as normal working people contrast to Harvey Stone? Frances?

Chapter 711. Describe Count Mippipopolous. What things does he value? What do all those things have in common? How does he represent the “lost generation”?12. Explain Brett’s statement, “You haven’t any values. You’re dead, that’s all.” How does this describe Paris as a wasteland in Book I? How does this relate to the count? Jake? Herself?Book IIChapter 813. Relate the incident with racial prejudice in Vienna. Why does Bill remember this so vividly? Why does Brett compare Vienna to Paris? How does she feel about this? Bill?14. Contrast Mike and Bill. How do they each handle alcohol? What is the difference between their finances? What are their topics of conversation (i.e., prejudice in Vienna vs. Brett’s hat)?Chapter 915. How does Brett’s revelation about San Sebastian affect Jake? Why had she gone? What does this tell about Brett? How does this drive a deeper wedge between Robert and Jake?16. Describe the scenes on the train. How does the “pilgrimage to Rome” of the Catholics on the train parallel to the pilgrimage of Jake, Bill, and Robert? What are they looking for? What is the relationship of Jake to the Catholic church?Chapters 10-1117. Compare Bill and Jake’s comments on surroundings with Cohn’s for appropriateness. How is this indicative of the way Robert and Jake approach life? How does this impact the deterioration of Jake and Robert’s relationship?

18. Contrast France and Spain. How does each represent a difference in values? What do the churches that are described have to do with those values? How does Jake’s statement, “I only wish I felt religious and maybe I would the next time” fit this?Chapter 1219. Comment on Bill’s feelings about expatriates who lose “touch with the soil . . . drink yourself to death . . . become obsessed by sex . . . spend all your time talking, not working.” How does this describe Jake or his friends? Jakes’ attitude? Why is this good or bad?20. Show how Bill and Jake’s fishing trip is similar to a religious experience? How does the wine drinking resemble communion? How does Bill’s observation “Our stay on earth is not long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks” relate? What does this have to do with the theme?Chapter 1321. Discuss afición. How does Montoya treat aficións differently? How does this relate to Jake? Montoya? Bill?22. What is the difference between bulls and steers? What does this conversation represent in the values and characters of the people of Hemingway’s time? In Jake’s group, who are bulls and who are steers?23. Tell Mike’s story of the medals. What does this demonstrate about his character? How is this incident representative of the “lost generation”?Chapters 14-1524. Explain Jake’s statement, “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” What is “it”? Why is Jake more interested in how to live rather than why? Where does Jake’s relationship with Robert fit into this?25. Show Romero as a Christ figure. What are the circumstances when the reader first sees him? Explain the quote, “The others can’t ever learn what he was born with.” How does this fit the religious reference?Chapter 1626. Describe the setting up of Brett and Romero’s affair. What is the significance of it? Tell why Jake’s role in the affair violated his code. Discuss Robert’s charge that Jake is a “pimp.”27. Explain why Montoya wants to protect Romero. How does he do that? How does Jake react to the invitation from the American ambassador? How does his involvement with Brett and Pedro contradict this? How does Montoya react?

Chapter 1728. Describe Robert’s fights for Brett. How does this relate to Robert’s experiencing life through books? Why is Robert the loser though he badly beat Jake? Romero?29. Describe Jake’s awakening after Robert calls him a “pimp” and hits him. Why is the statement the truth? How does his walk show renewed sensations about life? What does the bath represent?30. Explain the quote, “All for sport. All for pleasure.” How does this relate to bullfighting? Relationships? The “lost generation”? Jake?Chapter 1831. Describe the ceremony before and during the final bullfight. Why does Romero wait to kill the bull? What are examples of the tradition involved? Compare Romero’s final fight with his fight with Robert.32. Compare and contrast the three bullfighters. Why does Romero’s attention to the old style make him more skillful? Why does Belmonte think “Pedro had the greatness”? Do their styles suggest other characters in the novel?Book IIIChapter 1933. Compare the bullfighters and bike racers. What is meant by, “They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.” How does his relate to the “lost generation”?34. Give reasons for Brett and Romero’s breakup. How does this show growth for Brett? What does the quote, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God,” mean?

35. Explain Jake’s comment, “Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right.” How does this relate to the final quote: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Does this show growth for Jake? What does it mean?  More Analytical Questions1.  According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway stated that The Sun Also Rises is not a "hollow or bitter satire," but a tragedy. Discuss this interpretation of the novel.2.  How does Hemingway employ the ritual of the bullfight in this novel?3.  How does Hemingway utilize vocabulary and syntax to achieve the "Hemingway style"?4.  What is the significance of the title of the novel, The Sun Also Rises?5.  Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.6.  State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.7.  Give your opinion on why The Sun Also Rises is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Hemingway as a Nobel Prize winner. 8.  Describe how the setting complements the primary themes of the novel.9.  Explain why Hemingway begins the novel with the first chapter. Why is Cohn important enough to describe in detail? What clues does Jake give the reader to his negative feelings toward Robert?10.  Show Paris as a wasteland. How are perversions of love demonstrated? How does Georgette fit into this? What is the significance of Jake’s anger in the dancing club?11.  How does Jake deal with his impotence? How do other people see it? Explain the quotation, “You, a foreigner . . . have given more than your life.” Does Jake agree? How is his impotence relevant to society’s?12.  Describe Count Mippipopolous. What things does he value? What do all those things have in common? How does he represent the “lost generation”?13.  Contrast France and Spain. How does each represent a difference in values? 14.  Consider Mike’s story of the medals. What does this demonstrate about his character? How is this incident representative of the “lost generation”?15.  Explain Jake’s statement, “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” What is “it”? Why is Jake more interested in how to live rather than why? Where does Jake’s relationship with Robert fit into this?16.  Show how Bill and Jake’s fishing trip is similar to a religious experience. What does this have to do with the theme?17.  Explain why Montoya wants to protect Romero.18. How are Oedipus Rex, The Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises all, to a certain extent, tragedies? What connections do you see between this novel and The Great Gatsby?

(Source: Mr. Platt’s www.bookteacher.org )