Despair Colors Both Genders in The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises portrays the floundering of what Hemingway terms as the “Lost Generation,” a generation that has lost its center, that is searching for truth, meaning and beauty and has become dissatisfied. Jake, the male protagonist of the The Sun Also Rises, is a quintessential member of the Lost Generation. The term protagonist in such a Modernist novel means a flawed character with issues of morality and direction that readers would not see in typical Romantic novels, like Moby Dick.

Jake lacks the inner masculinity that he attempts to display outwardly. He says, “Then all of a sudden I started to cry,” (Hemingway 39). His character is impotent from a “war wound.” Jake is a man searching for meaning and struggling to find it anywhere. He goes to church but cannot connect to it. His character flaws include drinking, rudeness, laziness, irresponsibility and lewdness. Jake admits,
“I could picture it. I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends (Hemingway 21).” When he does interact with females it is in a distant and detached way, “I picked her up because of a vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with some one” (24).

Brett Ashley is the female protagonist in the novel who is materialistic, slutty and trying to emphasize her gender difference by blurring social clothing conventions. Brett acts confident and forward representing Hemingway's idea of the “modern woman” that was emerging in society in the wake of womens suffrage. However rash and confident Brett seems, Hemingway reveals the insecurities that drive her with observations like when Brett asks Jake, “'I say, do I look too much of a mess?' She pulled her man's felt hat down and started in for the bar,” (Hemingway 35). Jake seems to judge Brett and her actions and attentions toward him harshly--he says, “I supposed she only wanted what she couldn't have,” (Hemingway 39). Mike Campbell, Brett's supposed fiance, refers to Brett repeatedly as a “lovely piece” (79-80). This reference to Brett as an object is supported almost totally by Brett's rash behavior and only contradicted by her occasional emotional moments with Jake that do more to emasculate him than anything else in the novel.

Jake and Brett are both flawed, ruined mortals that are searching for themselves. They both represent the search for realigning of gender definitions and conventions in a time of post-war turmoil and changing political climates. Jeffrey Hart writes that in The Sun Also Rises, "power and sense of identity [were] painfully undermined," (557). The search for meaning and truth that the Lost Generation struggles with that Hemingway describes in The Sun Also Rises bridges the gulf between the genders and displays both as fragile and detached.

Works Cited

Hart, Jeffrey. The Sun Also Rises: A Revaluation. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 86, No. 4. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. P 557 -62.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1929.