Love, Friendship, and Jake's Emancipation in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

As difficult as it may seem sometimes to characterize the features and delineate the exact time frame of the modernist period in American literature, there can be no doubt that Ernest Hemingway must be considered one of its most prominent figureheads. Among Hemingway’s many accomplished works, his first full- length novel, The Sun Also Rises, has won particular accolades in the years and decades since its publication in 1926. Sun has not only been hailed as a pillar of 20th century American fiction, but it has indeed also often been referred to as the “bible of the [Gertrude Stein-coined] Lost Generation,”2 as it achieved to singularly capture the psyche of an entire generation of American expatriate writers in the wake of World War I. A fine illustration of Hemingway’s “minimalist prose”3 and so-called iceberg principle in his narrative strategy, Sun presents its fair share of challenges to the eager literary critic. However, even a cursory reading of the novel will reveal that Hemingway’s primary concern in writing Sun was to depict, by literary means, the emotional confusion that marked post- WWI European society and the impact that situation had on love and friendship in personal relationships. More specifically, Hemingway shows in Sun how the complicated web of relationships among a group of Paris-stationed American expatriates develops, especially as they expose themselves to the intense heat and exhilaration of the Pamplona bullfights. It is in particular the complex relationship between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley that any analysis of the novel’s key relationship theme must focus on, and that, indeed, generations of literary critics have tried to make some good sense out of. It is the aim of the present paper to show that Jake and Brett, prevented by fate from being able to find sexual fulfillment, struggle with a peculiar relationship that both frustrates them sexually and yet sustains them emotionally. [...] 2 Sibbie O ́Sullivan, “Love and Friendship/ Man and Woman in The Sun Also Rises,” Arizona Quarterly (1988): 76. [all further references as: O ́Sullivan, “Love and Friendship”] 3 Earl Rovit, “On Psychic Retrenchment in Hemingway.” Hemingway. Essays of Reassessment. Ed. Frank Scafella (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), p. 181