A Story of the Lesser Men: Male Characters in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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Martin Klekner

English and American Studies

Course: English Skills and Cultural Communication

Time: Wednesday, 19.10 – 20.40, P111

Lecturer: Stephan Delbos

Word Count: 1920

A Story of the Lesser Men: Male Characters in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

                There is no greater tragedy than losing the aim of your existence. Many authors have spent their entire lives focusing on this topic. Among them Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest American novelists of all time. A great number of his stories is populated by characters caught up in a never-ending search for life's purpose, by strange individuals, staggering from place to place, always searching, yet never finding. This feeling of insecurity and inferiority is a driving  force for his novel The Sun Also Rises. Here, the main characters are ex-soldiers, those men, who  – after their terrible World War I experience – were left physically and emotionally crippled.  Some called them veterans, others named them “a lost generation”. Their lack of respect for anything (including themselves) made their lives fake, inauthentic. While staring in the faces of the ones superior to them they had no other choice but to crumble and become enslaved by anyone who had emotional power over them, all the while willingly sacrificing anything that was left of their own values. And so the the loss of purpose and driving force inevitably resulted in that tragic feeling destroying the whole male generation – the feeling of being less than a real man.

                It begins with the main hero, Jake Barns. He is a typical example of a member of the Lost Generation – he's always on the move, a heavy drinker, careless and deprived of real emotions.  Apart from that, he is an observer, he judges others from a distance and he always remains seemingly objective and neutral as a character. That's why others often trust him enough to reveal their secrets to him – for example Cohn, a jewish writer and Jake's long-time friend, at the very beginning of the book. He reveals to him that he'd like to travel to South America, to experience adventure and live his life fully. What follows is a very important statement by Jake: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” He's judging Cohn, but in the process he reveals a painful truth about himself and his friends, for they all regularly travel all over the world (Spain in Jake's case, Vienna and Prague in Bill's etc.) in search of meaning of life. This is a perfect representation of how Jake reveals his own insecurities – he exposes them in others.

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                Other examples are numerous and it is no coincidence that they are often connected with the topic of sexuality.  In the first chapter Jake implies that Robert Cohn is rather insecure with women, thus ironically stressing his own problem. When he meets homosexuals, he remarks: “Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one . . .” In this case his anger results from his fear, because the condition of gay people somehow reminds him of his own problem, a problem which strongly decreases ...

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