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 is in a fight trying to survive in their hopeless world. In many cases, the fight may end up hurting their friends. Brett seems to be particularly good at hurting Barnes by accepting his affection, then rejecting him later. In the beginning of the book, Barnes says that he has suffered a “funny” wound in the war that has rendered him unable to have sex (Hemingway 27). This adds an extra layer of cruelty to Brett’s repeated desertion of Barnes. She is not deserting a man who happens to be impotent; she is deserting a man because he is impotent.
Brett is not actively trying to cause Barnes any pain, but she is a victim of her own desires and cannot help herself. When Barnes asks Brett why they cannot live together she replies that she would make him unhappy by being unfaithful and comments that “it’s the way [she] is made” (Hemingway 57). Like a bull slowly worn down in a bullfight, Barnes’s spirit is worn down every time Brett emasculates him by pursuing sexual endeavors with other men. Joseph DeFalco describes bullfighting in Hemingway’s books as “not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest . . . [but] a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played” (DeFalco 56). This describes perfectly Brett’s role as a matador who plays men with her seduction.
While Brett causes much of the destruction in Barnes’s life, Barns also has a vicious cycle of “emotional self-mutilation” (Djos 117). Instead of damaging others in his fight to survive, Barnes harms mostly himself, discounting “his own worth and his right to any substantive fulfillment or happiness” (Djos 117). By putting himself in such a state of hopelessness, he is able resign himself to circumstances and accepts the condition of his relationship with Brett. In order to maintain this state of resignation, Barns needs to resort to drinking and meaningless partying. During the fiesta, Barnes notes, “everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.” (Hemingway 142). In this state of suspended moral responsibility, morality for Barnes simply means avoiding “things that made you disgusted afterward” (Hemingway 137).
Not thinking much about consequences, Barnes ends up arranging for Brett to meet with a bullfighter named Romero, knowing Brett will try to sleep with Romero. When Cohn finds out Brett is missing he accuses Barnes of being a “damned pimp” (Hemingway 172). At this point, Barnes starts to feel some disgust and tells his friends that he “feels like hell” (Hemingway 200). Barnes is finally beginning to see the destruction “to himself and others . . . [caused by] his failure to see clearly the nature of his relationship to Brett.” (Daiker 42). For the first time in the novel, Barnes expresses the absurd relationship he has with Brett when he remarks to himself, “that was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back.” (Hemingway 216).
When he meets up with Brett, she informs him she made Romeo leave her against his will because she “didn’t want to be one of those bitches” (Hemingway 219). For the first time Brett is showing self sacrifice and self control in order to save a man from her destructiveness. Although both Barnes and Brett begin to see the destruction they are causing toward the end of the book, they both continue to act the same way. Barnes verbally recognizes the unhealthy relationship he has with Brett and then proceeds to go to her aid. Brett verbally recognizes how she has been destructive to men and then continues use Barnes’s shoulder for comfort. This shows how Hemingway has doomed his characters to being unable to escape their own destructive nature even after they have succeeded in finding some sort of morality.
This raises the question of weather Hemingway is glorifying the destruction caused by Brett and Barnes. When Barnes talks to Cohn about bullfighters, he says, “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” (Hemingway 17). This certainly seems to idealize bullfighters. Hemingway describes bullfighting in many of his novels and he always describes it as an art to be admired (DeFalco 57). The admiration for bullfighters is similar to the admiration men show towards Brett despite her obviously manipulative nature. Men like Cohn are desperately in love with her throughout most of the book. At one point, Barnes talks spitefully of Brett in front of Cohn and Cohn is immediately offended and orders Barnes to “take it back” (Hemingway 42).
When asked about bullfighting Hemingway once replied, “I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine” (DeFalco 58). In Hemingway’s mind, bull fighting is artistic, but it also saddens him. Following the parallelism between bullfighters and the characters in the novel, the destructive actions of the characters are not commendable, but it is also an unavoidable tragedy. The traditional values are now dead, but Hemingway has come to terms with the fact that the true nature of life involves destruction
In Hemingway’s view of the world, destruction is now an inseparable part of a society that has lost its values. Everyone must fight as a bullfighter would in order to survive. People once told with clarity which values to live by have suddenly lost their clarity. The world is an unpredictable place where things once thought to be true can change in an instant. Perhaps it is important then, to be mindful of things taken for granted so that sudden losses will not be as devastating.
Works Cited
Daiker, Donald A. “Jake Wins in Spain at the End of The Sun Also Rises”. Readings on Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Katie de Koster. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1997.
DeFalco, Joseph. “The World Cannot Tolerate the True Individual.” Readings on Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Katie de Koster. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1997.
Djos, Matts. “Alcoholism in The Sun Also Rises”. Readings on The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Kelly Wand. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 2002.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner Classics, 1954.