Chung

Huma 202

Dr. Potter

Jan 17, 2007

The Unhappy Constant

        People take for granted some of the most important things in life until that thing is missing or replaced by something inferior.  For example, many people do not realize the value of spending quality time with family, until things start to deteriorate.  Similarly, the lack of clear-cut values can have some unforeseen effects in society.  Set in a time when past values once taken for granted are starting to fail, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway uses bullfighting imagery to demonstrate the inescapable nature of destruction in a society devoid of moral values.  

        Jake Barnes, who is the main character of the book, narrates The Sun Also Rises.  Most of the people he meets and interacts with throughout the book are writers from America and England.  All of them live in a post World War I era where the war has dashed to pieces their notions of virtue and morals.  Gertrude Stein describes this generation as the Lost Generation, and the characters in Jake Barnes’s narrative struggle to find meaning in their lives.

        Although Barnes is constantly observing other people in his surroundings, he reveals a lot about himself through his tone of voice and the manner in which he reacts to things.  When his friend Robert Cohn urges him to go to South America with him in order experience life, Barnes replies that “going to another country doesn’t make any difference . . . you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another” (Hemingway 18).  This statement is ironic because Barnes is being sarcastic about Cohn’s attempts to escape his life; yet, throughout most of the book, Barnes and his friends are also trying to escape the emptiness in their own lives.  

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Hemingway makes the hollowness and hopelessness of Barnes’s world very clear with numerous examples where outer joy masks inner misery.  When Barnes first meets Brett Ashley, a woman he loves, she seems happy dancing with her friends.  When they are by themselves in a cab however, she immediately says, “Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable” (Hemingway 29).  With the misery of his characters made obvious, Hemingway shows how their pursuit for a new morality affects the people around them.

Brett’s search for morality looks more like a search for happiness or self-satisfaction.  In one sense, every character in the book ...

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