Now that all that is out of the way, I can discuss the book in a more appropriate manner. As much as I feel sorry for Jake, I feel equally as sorry for Brett. Jake and Brett obviously have feelings for each other yet a healthy relationship between the two of them seems impossible. Brett was the one who tended to Jake's wounds. In a sense, she's suffering emotionally as much as Jake. Plus, in the part when Brett tells Jake about her and Cohn, it became obvious to me that Brett is the one who has to make the tough decision, which is a burden that Jake doesn't have to carry (because he is basically powerless). Even though she comes off as a charming character, I definitely think there is something mentally off about Brett. For one thing, what kind of woman in her thirties parties on a regular basis? She must have seen horrible injuries from World War I and yet she acts carefree and promiscuous. I sense something something very deep with Brett under the surface. I think Brett serves as Ernest Hemingway's eyes, especially considering that they both offered medical services during World War I. I can't really explain it, but I feel like if we learn more about Brett, then we can learn more about Hemingway.
There's no question in my mind that The Sun Also Rises is a novel that protests the horror and suffering caused by World War I. However, in the part where the Count shows off his arrow wounds to Brett and Jake, I couldn't help but think that Hemingway believes that there is something bad-ass about going through a war. I think this scene brilliantly makes the reader draw a line between bad-ass and terrible. To me, I draw the line around losing a limb or being mutilated in any way. Maybe this is just Hemingway's macho personality showing through.
1 comment:
Sorry to hear about the nightmares (although they give some credence to Freud's theory!). Jake, too, would prefer not to think about it--as he says bitterly, "Swell advice. Try and take it sometime." At least it all remains safely fictional/imaginative for you.
You're right about the novel's ultimate ambivalence toward the idea of war as a "rite of passage." Jake would seem to work against that, but there's also this sense that he wouldn't *mind* being wouned, if it weren't in a way that made him feel like the butt of a joke ("Of all the ways to be wounded, and on a joke front like the Italian"). He does admire the Count's wounds--and the old-fashioned idea of manhood they imply (*arrow* wounds! what an old-fashioned wound after the carnage of WWI!). And he feels "cheated" in a way--he goes through a war, and all he gets is this awkward, unmentionable, deeply unnerving and even oddly "funny" wound. Not something he can boast about.
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