Ernest Hemingway’s novels are frequently pointed to for providing a clear example of the “Tip of the Iceberg” style of writing in which only the barest of details are provided to a story, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and understand for themselves the depth of meaning hidden between the lines. This was a common practice among Modern writers as they sought to interact more with their readers through their writing.
Hemingway’s book essentially tells a complicated love story in which one woman is desired by multiple men, including the main character, but it is she who decides the outcome thus taking on some of the traditional characteristics normally attributed to men in that time. Through the characters he portrays, Hemingway frequently explored the idea of what it means to be male – sometimes by showing what it means to be a handicapped male as he seemed to see himself and sometimes portraying what it meant to be the ideal male. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, the three main characters Jake, Robert, and Lady Brett Ashley reveal the sometimes contradictory roles of Hemingway’s male figure, demonstrating that none of them contain the ideal characteristics by themselves, but might when taken as a group.
Contents: Flyleaf Book One THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Book Two 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Book Three 19. HEMINGWAY, Ernest. The sun also rises. Read byWilliam Hurt. Simon and Schuster. Cardboard; plot, author, reader notes. SA. The trauma of WW I heralded the death of American idealism and gave rise to a disillusioned class of figurative and literal cripples.
About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. The sun also rises Free PDF novel (1930) by Ernest Hemingway Widely acknowledged to be one of Hemingway’s masterpieces, The Sun Also Rises is at once an indictment and an ode to the Lost Generation of writers and artists who came of age in the years just after World War I. It’s also a beautiful love letter to European travel and cafe li Review by Amanda This may be my favorite book of all.
Hemingway begins his exploration of the ideal male versus the faulty male at the surface level of a character’s appearance. Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn could not appear more different from each other unless you gave them the female curves that come in with the character of Lady Brett Ashley. Jake appears as fragile, a shattered World War One veteran clearly suffering from emotional and physical scars. His most defining characteristic is that he’s an alcoholic as his life is dedicated to a never-ending series of “We went in the bar and sat on high stools and drank whisky” (Hemingway 236). According to Nielsen with the Mayo Clinic, alcoholism is a chronic and often progressive disease that includes problems controlling your emotions and will eventually begin to show in your appearance, such as in the form of burst blood vessels in the nose or ruddy cheeks. However, Jake gives off a confident, decisive persona which gains him attention and admiration from women. While Jake appears frail and hurt, Robert was the college football player and the boxer which means he likely has a strong, large physical appearance. This makes him a lady’s man because he provides a sense of protectiveness for his women. “He was an attractive quantity to women, and the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle” (Hemingway 15). Robert lives off of his father’s money and notoriety so the images that are portrayed of him seem immature or spoiled and he has a hard time dealing with the everyday problems of the common man. Lady Brett Ashley, on the other hand, purposely adopts a more male-oriented look without necessarily hiding her feminine curves. She announces this with her appearance with her bobbed hair. The novel states that “She [Brett] started all that” (Hemingway 30) referring to the hair style but also to everything that it represented. “This idea that Brett started the trend of short hair positions Brett as not simply a symbol of the New Woman, but rather as an influential symbol within the realm of the novel” (Yu 177). The masculine side of her appearance makes her challenge the masculinity in the men she encounters.
From their appearances, Hemingway also exploits his character’s personalities to demonstrate how they either support or refute the male persona. Jake suffers from a personality disorder that makes him try to always seem in control. He can be very convincing, but he is also dominant, reserved, hostile, and can be very touchy. Even though these are elements of his personality, Jake feels detached, like a spectator, isolated but not actually alone. At the same time, he suffers sexually because of the war. “His own private tragedy is a war wound that emasculated him” (Neilson). Proving that this isn’t just a fictional device, the Citizen Commission on Human Rights indicates this particular effect of war has been documented since ancient times. Today, they say, some 80% of vets are labeled with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is treated with psychotropic drugs which affects a person’s mental state. While other veterans are also treated with antidepressant drugs, many choose to treat themselves with alcohol or drugs as a means of coping with their feelings. Because he needs this crutch and is not sexually active, Jake is a failed man. While Jake is struggling with his issues, Robert is mostly shy and withdrawn. His spoiled and immature behavior causes the others to dislike him, mocking him and embarrassing him as often as they can. “I misjudged you, you’re not a moron, you’re only a case of arrested development” (Hemingway 44). Robert’s personality is shy, awkward, and apprehensive. Unlike Jake who lives in his experienced past, Robert lives out the various ideas he draws from inside a book somewhere. Even though he has the physique, Robert is a failed man because he never fully grew up to take on the role. Lady Brett’s behavior reinforces the idea that she is challenging male ideas of women as she deliberately ignores Jake’s warnings about not watching the violence of the bullfights. Although she does admit some nervousness, “I’m a little nervous about it … I’m worried whether I’ll be able to go through with it all right” (Hemingway 166), but she comes through it just fine. “In all of these examples, Brett asserts herself in the primarily male arena, which further connects her to the historical figure of the New Woman who also asserted herself in primarily male fields” (Yu 177).
Finally, Hemingway reveals the nature of man in the lifestyles of his characters, showing how all of them fail to be proper men. Jake is a single man working as a journalist in Paris. He enjoys socializing and having drinks with his friends. He jumps from bar to bar from Paris to Pamploma trying to forget the horrible images he still carries with him from the war but is never able to get past them. Robert’s lifestyle reflects his continued dependence on his wealthy Jewish family. “Robert Cohn was a member through his father, of one the richest Jewish families in New York” (Hemingway 12). He was also the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton during his college years and tends to draw on that for his identity. Although he’d been married for five years and had three children, he is now alone since his wife left him to be with a miniature painter, further emasculating him. Lady’s Brett’s lifestyle is more comparable to the ideal man. Lady Brett emerges as more of a typically male predator as Jake or Robert, maybe more so. “Throughout the novel, Brett selects the men with whom she desires to have a sexual relationship and then pursues them only to later forcibly end the affair” (Yu 178). Although she insists she is not in control of her interests in pursuing the men she seeks out, it remains true that Brett, more than any of the other characters in the book, is in control of when her relationships begin and end, is more assertive in her actions, and is more a man than anyone else.
Thus, Hemingway demonstrates the fall of the masculine character and the rise of the feminine as the new masculine in his book. While all of the male characters have tragic flaws that keep them from being the ideal male candidate that Hemingway envisions, Lady Brett emerges as the most ideally male among them. However, she cannot be the ideal male for the simple fact that she is a woman who eventually does need some form of rescue from a man.
- Citizen Commission on Human Rights 1995-2014. Web. www.cchr.org/documentaries/html
- Hemingway, Ernest. “The Sun Also Rises:” New York, New York: Scribner, 1926 print.
- Neilson, Keith. Master plots, Fourth Edition; November 2010, p1-4 Web. http://www.Mayoclinic.org
- William, Martin. “War With End” Texas Monthly Article, Vol.42 issue 6 June 1, 2014. Print.
- Yu, Xiaoping. “The New Women in The Sun Also Rises.” English Language Teaching. Vol. 3, N. 3 September 2010. Print.
The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night are two books written between the 20s and 30s. Even if the story is different they have common characteristics. This essay will analyse the anxiety of the characters through the two books.
The Sun Also Rises written in 1926 by Ernest Hemingway is about a group of American and British expatriates. They travel from Paris to Pamplona where they are going to watch the bullfights. According to Jeffrey Meyers, The Sun Also Rises is recognized as Hemingway’s greatest work. The novel is considered as a roman à clef because it “has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.” The birth of psychoanalysis began with the work of Sigmund Freud. It was initially used to diagnose neurotic conditions, but soon after the rise of post-structuralism the same methods were found useful in literary theory. Psychoanalytic theory also uses Freud’s work in connection with other theorists, such as Carl Jung, his student, in order to create the organized school of literary. The diagnostic practices of psychoanalysis allow critics to interpret literature that depends heavily on the mental processes of characters, such as the work of Ernest Hemingway. Thanks to Hemingway a better understanding of the human mind and the effects of trauma in the modern society have been observed. Using the work of some major theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Joseph Campbell, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Lacan helped to analyze the general PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) that caused the alienation of WWI veterans that earned them the title of “the lost generation”. It also helped to understand the specific damages that hinder Hemingway’s protagonist, Jake Barnes, from living a normal life in post-war society. Famous Hemingway characters written into this novel serve as the perfect examples to analyze neurotic conditions induced by trauma that Freud’s original work was used to diagnose, and the psychoanalytic theory becomes the tool for diagnosis of the characters. According to Cole, “Hemingway’s novel primarily addresses the psychological trauma of WWI, and the effects on veterans that attempt to re-assimilate into post-war culture”. Individual damage is examined through Jake, who suffers from castration (to render impotent or deprive of vitality especially by psychological means) caused from a war injury. This prevents him from normal sexual relationships with his love interest, Lady Brett Ashley. Jake’s mental health brings up the question of the effects of realizing Freud’s theoretical castration anxiety, which manifests itself, among other things, in Jake’s obsession with Spanish bullfighting. The war has not stopped, and men and women have not only suffered physically but also mentally The increasing awareness of PTSD is the result of well-researched medical reports, but wide-spread publication of literature that addresses the lives of veterans attempting to assimilate back into American society reaches a larger audience. The interpretation of this literature through psychoanalytic theory helps to inform the public on the issues that continue to affect modern culture.
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Tender is the night is the story, largely autobiographical, of the decomposition of a being made to be loved, too romantic to be able to resist its time, too tender, despite its apparent casualness, to know how to age wisely. It is more particularly the story of Dick and Nicole’s love, which we get to know through the amazed eyes of a young actress who cannot resist Dick’s charm. This very united couple hides a secret. Nicole was treated by Dick, a psychiatrist. Her love for Dick made their union a necessity.
The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway Free
But behind the pomp and union of this couple, hides a completely different reality. The second part of the novel illuminates the first by taking up the story of Nicole and Dick, by the very mouth of the latter. If Dick thus seems to us an inaccessible god at the beginning, he quickly becomes familiar and one quickly understands the generosity but also the fragility of this man who married a somewhat difficult woman.
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Fitzgerald’s talent is not so much to tell a story – even if it is a beautiful love story, very sad – but to reproduce an atmosphere, that of excess, of money, mixed with creation and genius in France in the 1920s. Between Paris, Switzerland and the Riviera, the novel gives us a glimpse of the life of this lost generation, a generation of writers wandering across Europe seeking inspiration and oblivion. Inspiration for their works and forgetting the atrocities of the Great War.
Throughout the novel, we learn that Nicole was a patient of Dick’s, and things begin to fall apart. Dick becomes an alcoholic and Nicole falls in love with someone else. This novel has a very bleak outlook on psychiatry, much more than what we are prepared for. Dick is a terrible psychiatrist, renowned only for writing textbooks. He does not have a lot of interaction with his patients until Nicole arrives. He meets her while she is living at a clinic in Switzerland. He goes to talk to Dr. Franz Dangeu, a man who eventually becomes his partner in another clinic and meets her. She falls in love and writes him a series of letters, some of which are barely coherent. By the time he comes back to the clinic, Dr. Dangeu’s suggestion is that her transference to him is great and that they should get married. It’s completely irresponsible, and every mental health decision in the novel is like that. He sees his few patients as allegories and characters, not actual people. Even Nicole is not a real person, just an idea to protect. He never does any actual therapy with her (though we see it with Dr. Dangeu), and never actually helps her. The fact that he’s her therapist comes as a surprise to everyone in the story, and rightly so. Dick is not the best person to be her therapist because they confuse private life and professional life. Dick is supposed to be her doctor and not her partner. Since they’re a couple they should have picked another psychiatrist for Nicole, it’s better for her mental state. She’s a really interesting character, a complex but at the same time a complete person whose illness is only a small part of her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s female characters are a projection of one or another side of Zelda, but that none of them can successfully portray his wife with veracity. Nicole Diver’s portrayal begins with her childhood history, when her father raped her after her mother’s death. She remains a child in the Diver marriage largely because she transfers her feelings of paternal authority to Dick Diver. Dick plays in some way two roles in the book, one of the partner and the other of the father. At the end of the novel, she seems to outgrow Dick. She is actually only placing herself in bondage to another, less worthy, man. She lives out the song which she plays to Dick on the hospital grounds before their marriage, for the lyrics conclude: “Just like a silver dollar goes from hand to hand, / A woman goes from man to man.”
Nicole Diver’s illness is drawn from Zelda Fitzgerald’s own case history, a fact which weakens her in many ways because Fitzgerald seems unable to distance himself sufficiently from his own wife to draw a credible fictional creation. Nicole is revealed first by her letters to Dick, letters which initially exhibit serious instability, then gradually lead to her confession that she would like someone to love her, a sign that she has improved because usually when a woman is raped she doesn’t feel anything for men anymore.
When Nicole has an affair with Tommy, she completely changes. The affair releases her sexual energy, and she approaches Dick for a major confrontation. At this point in the novel, Fitzgerald describes Nicole as being filled with arrogance because of her wealth and a detestation of Dick’s past attempts to minister to her, she has used Dick the physician, flaunting her wealth and beauty before him. What makes her character even more confusing is that after she has finally triumphed over Dick, she tries in the last Riviera scene to go back to him but is restrained by Tommy. Either she has not rejected Dick as completely as she thought she had or, what is more likely, she is an inveterate victim, a pawn of men who hand her, like a shining silver dollar, from one hand to the next.
Classic books are classic for a reason, and Tender is the Night certainly lives up to its reputation. It encapsulates one very biased viewpoint of psychiatry at one point in time, a very clear view of a very angry point of view. The novel is an interesting look at psychiatry from the upper class, white point of view in a time dominated by psychoanalysis, and for that, it’s worth reading.