I am currently re-reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises for the second time (which will make it my third reading altogether).
As I have likely mentioned in previous posts, The Sun Also Rises holds a special significance to me, in that I think it is really the one book which demonstrated my growth as a reader and lover of literature. When I first read the book, my junior year in high school, I loathed it and found it difficult to complete. I wish I could offr more of an explination as to why this was, but my teenage brain and thought process is quite alien to me now and thus, in all honesty, I really am unsure as to what it was specifically that I disliked about the book back then. What I can say was that at the time I was quite satisfied with the notion of never picking up Hemingway again.
My first re-read of The Sun Also Rises occurred during my junior year of college, four years after I had had my first painful encounter with the book. In truth I had not intended to re-read the book at all, but a professor of mine challenged me to give it a second chance and see if I still hated it. I didn’t. In all honesty it was almost a mystical experience or something. I breezed through the novel the second time (which really isn’t much of a challenge considering tha tit is quite a short story) and found myself enjoying every moment of it. I discovered a humor to the book that I had comepletely missed the first time around. I also found myself enjoy the tact and skill with which Hemingway had committed words to the creation of a story. Nothing seemed wasteful with Hemingway’s writing style. The man had written exactly what he intended to write without needing to over elaborate or becoming clumsy with his style. As a writing major at the time I found myslef greatly appreciating the use of language that Hemingway had employed in the story and how it maintained a steady motion and consitent sense of character. Four years prior I had been greatly mistaken, The Sun Also Rises was indeed a fantastic novel.
So that brings us to my current reading. I had bought the book some weeks back in a used copy of The Hemingway Reader which I had found at a GoodWill store. This past Sunday I picked it up in the morning as I sat out on my porch and drank a cup of coffee. It was very relaxing beginning the story again. I was familiar with it, comfortable with it. Whereas during my second reading I had picked up the story with a cynical belief that I’d find no more joy in it than I had with my first read, this time around I knew that the story would be a pleasure to work through again.
While I cannot avoid noticing again the magnificent use of language that Hemingway employees in The Sun Also Rises I find that so far during this read (I’m about halfway through currently) I have been paying far more attention to the characters in the story, especially the narrator Jake Barnes. I know that during both of my previous readings I was well aware of the personalities and characteristics of the main cast of the story, but this time it seems that I am far more interested in the intricacies that make them all at once compelling but also tragic. Jake has emotion, that much in unquestionable, yet he approaches the story with a certain stoic attitude which shapes our perception of the whole story. There is a kind of defeatist quality to Jake’s narration which makes us feel that even in the dazzling swinging times the characters might be having in appearance, that in truth there is a lingering sadness and malaise to all of their existences. In this way we, the readers, truly encounter that “Lost Generation” with which the book so intimately deals. To be lost is to be without direction and that is exactly what the different characters are, directionless, wanering around, pursuing the semblance of happiness and enjoyment all the while spiraling furthing into indifference and defeat.
I think it might be easy to enjoy the book solely for the nostalgic feel of the 1920s in Europe with lots of drinking, late nights, and parties but this approach to the story misses the key point which it that all those things were merely a shell or a mask put on over the real quality of the people who performed the parts. There is an existential note to it all, not necessarily the angsty existentialism which emerged after the second world war, but instead, agian, that defeatism in the face of reality. Jake, deeply in love with Brett knows there is no chance of happiness with her because of his injury in the war (WWI) and Brett, equally in love with Jake, knows that she lacks any ability at actually loyalty which would ever allow for them to be happy. Instead of seeking some kind of resolution the characters seem to avoid their problems by pursing outside entertainment and a ton of drinking. As such the story can come across as being without any real sense of resolution or closer, which I suppose might be frustrating to some, but in the end that is entirely the point, that there is no closer because the characters are completely incapable of making such a thing happen. Thus the story is a tragedy of characters and their inabilty to save themselves from their own directionlessness.
Truly fantastic. The Sun Also Rises is one of those books which I strongly suggest to anybody who enjoys good writing and storytelling but also likes the challenge of pulling more from a story than may initially be apparent about it. Hemingway has remained a classic for a reason and The Sun Also Rises is a great example of why that is.
