The Moral World of The Sun Also Rises

The two most important insights that emerged out of this process are that (1) Jake is not a completely reliable narrator and (2) that every element of the text is subject to critique. This latter position is held by the doyen of Sun Also Rises criticism, Peter Hays, who says that “[n]o one in the novel escapes reader censure.”¹ However, even though many critics may censure Jake for pursuing Brett, this judgment of him as a character does not lead them to regard him to be unreliable as a narrator.² I personally do not fault Jake for pursuing Brett because, whatever suffering results from his doing this, his hopes of having some kind of relationship with her is in some measure what gives his life meaning. However, what I am primarily concerned with in this study is not Jake’s love for Brett but the way his emotions influence his judgments of her and Cohn. His judgments of Cohn are frequently biased because of scorn or jealousy, and his account of his relations with Brett are frequently couched in what might be called disingenuous contortions. That is, in trying to disguise his anger and frustration at her treatment of him to avoid making breaking off their relationship the only reasonable course, Jake frequently misrepresents his true feelings. In my opinion, it is the failure to see how Jake’s biases and his fear of losing Brett affect how he portrays what goes on in the novel that constitutes the most significant obstacle to understanding Hemingway’s text. The evidence of this is the point I just made: despite the fact that many critics see Jake’s pursuit of Brett as ill-advised, he is still generally accepted as a reliable narrator as may be seen in how what he says is interpreted. One possible reason for seeing him in this way may be the nature of Jake’s narration. As Donaldson says, “Jake Barnes tells the story of The Sun Also Rises so unobtrusively and convincingly that it never occurs to us to challenge his view of events…. ”³ What the “unobtrusive[ness]” that Donaldson points to does is to lure us into being satisfied with the novel’s already complex surface so that searching further becomes a work of supererogation. The dimensions of the text to which I am referring cannot be experienced, in my opinion, unless Jake’s biases are taken into consideration. Even though these biases do not materially affect the majority of his judgments, their being potentially present means that each of his judgments must be examined to see whether they might be refracting what he is describing in the text. Donaldson for his part seems to accept Jake’s perspective as normative, but Rovit holds a position close to mine. He says, because Jake is “a particularly opaque first-person narrator,” it is difficult for the “reader… to locate the norms of ‘truth’ in the novel…. ”⁴ This difficulty, that of grasping “the norms of ‘truth’” in this novel, is the most important consequence of Jake’s lack of complete reliability although it is also affected by the text’s willingness to critique each of its elements. Svoboda quotes a passage from one of Hemingway’s notebooks that speaks to this issue.

While Hemingway is addressing structural and thematic issues rather than the issue of Jake’s reliability, his diagnosis of the problem also applies here. Like the issues to which Hemingway is referring, Jake’s biases are not generally marked by the text, or if they are marked, they are not marked in such a way that leads the reader to see them as challenging his point of view because his point of view naturally predominates due to both his position as narrator and the way in which the text protects him by the very tactic described here, the submerging of the markers of his unreliability. His unreliability is not, needless to say, the unreliability of Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He has rather what I call perspectival reliability, a term I will discuss more fully below, but briefly what this means is that, as both narrator and protagonist, Jake is treated as though what he says is reasonable even if it is not. Under these circumstances, his positions will appear to be supported by the text, a different argument than Donaldson makes above but one which has the same result. Finally, it should be noted that the text begins by showing Jake making a mistake about whether Cohn was middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, thus, tacitly giving the reader permission to ask about the reliability of anything he says.

A key passage whose meaning is significantly altered when seen through the lens of perspectival reliability is the scene containing the oft-quoted statement: “All I wanted to know was how to live in it” (119; all unattributed page numbers are to the Hemingway Library Edition of The Sun Also Rises). This passage has been taken in every instance that I have found as a straightforward statement of Jake’s philosophy, but an analysis that does not automatically grant him cogency reveals a much more complex view of what he is doing here. The surface meaning of this passage does in fact reflect some of Jake’s basic ideas, but what lies beneath the surface reveals another story entirely. It shows Jake struggling with the consequences of his having heard Brett and Mike in bed together and having to contort his thinking to find some way out of the despair occasioned by being forced to confront the evidence for what has been patent for some time: that Brett is not going to return to him. (This passage is discussed towards the end of Chapter 7.) His dilemma here is not so much a quandary about which path to take but his forcing himself to adopt a position, in this case seeing himself as her “friend,” that he does not want to adopt. This means his difficulty is not primarily that his romantic and masculine selves are in conflict but that he cannot take the path he wants.

The combination of Jake’s lacking full reliability and the text’s critiquing all its elements leads to the novel’s having a singular dialectical nature although I should note that I am using “dialectical” here in an unconventional sense. The goal of dialectics ordinarily understood is to resolve problems by means of a discussion between contending parties, but the goal of The Sun Also Rises and the goal of this study are not to resolve the problems by reaching a solution that leads either to the right answer or to an answer that is the most reasonable given the circumstances but rather to clarify the problems by showing that reaching a stable conclusion is out of keeping with the nature of Hemingway’s novel.

Overview of This Study

The first chapter describes in more detail the fundamental condition of this text, its moral instability. It also addresses how the text uses the bullfight, as both apotheosis and fantasy. It is an apotheosis in its glorious account of Romero’s fight with Bocanegra, the high-water mark in the text of the heroic masculine perspective. It is fantasy in that such glory is not to be had in ordinary life which is where everyone but bullfighters abide. This fight’s idealized presentation suggests that the text wants to see it as a bastion of hope for heroic masculinity, something that can in fact elude the critique to which all other phenomena are subjected, but this idealization, in its asymmetry with the rest of the text, also suggests that the text acknowledges that it is unrealistic to take refuge in such a fantasy.

The second chapter will begin by describing in more detail what it means to inquire into what I call the text’s view. This will be done through an examination of Jake’s conversation with the waiter about Vicente Girones. This chapter will then concern itself with some of the technical issues surrounding Jake’s role as narrator. I will then briefly discuss Booth’s idea of reliability and show how Defoe, Charlotte Brontë, and Conrad employed narrators who functioned in ways that presaged Hemingway’s.

Chapter 3 will deal with the way in which its epigraphs introduce the novel’s dialectic. Hemingway’s ambivalence about Stein’s comment, which he used as his first epigraph, augurs the dialectic to come. The second epigraph, a quotation from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, further compounds this conflict. First, it promulgates in itself a dialectical vision, contrasting the temporality of men and women with the eternality of the earth, but it then amplifies that dialectic by showing that the earth in itself manifests a dialectical tension between the contrast of its basic eternality with the changeable phenomena of winds and waters. Hemingway then adds yet another layer to the conflict by asserting in a letter to his editor that the “earth” is the “hero” of The Sun Also Rises and that the “point of the book” is that the “earth abideth forever.”⁶ It will be argued that not only are the novel’s epigraphs dialectical in themselves but also that they have a dialectical relation to one another. Furthermore, the relation between them is not simply that of the juxtaposition of opposites like comedy and tragedy but rather of the juxtaposition of positions that are themselves complex, constituting a preview of the kind of dialectic that will be found in the novel.

The attitude towards possibility that is implicit in the second epigraph, most clearly exemplified in the novel’s title from which it was taken, opens the way for another important element of the text’s moral world dealt with in Chapter 3: the notion of the good life. Needless to say, the version of the good life that Jake, Brett, Bill, and Mike pursue has nothing in common with what Plato, say, would have called the good life although it actually may be said to have something in common with the ideas of Stoics like Epicurus and Epictetus, both of whom wanted, in some way, to achieve happiness by neutralizing the unhappiness of life. Like their ancient predecessors, Jake and Mike, especially, seek with varying degrees of success to control the strong feelings that are for them the enemies of the good life insofar as they are the harbingers of emotional disruption and psychological vulnerability.

Chapter 4 will describe what I call Jake’s native worlds: the world of Burguete where he and Bill fish in glorious masculine isolation and the world of the aficionados where he communes with Montoya and his colleagues. In both of these venues, there are no women, a circumstance that allows things to proceed calmly without the distractions of desire. As seen in these episodes, the good life as understood in The Sun Also Rises is founded above all on being spared the necessity of expressing serious personal emotion, a fact that shows its relation to the masculine code. This code is related, needless to say, to Hemingway’s heroic code but it is one which is applicable to “family life,” a venue in which Delmore Schwartz feels the heroic code has no place.⁷ This is because the values of the code hero hinge specifically on his having “grace under pressure,” the pressure’s typically being in some way life-threatening.⁸ The goodness of life aimed at here is predicated not on such harrowing circumstances but rather on its enabling the individual to be free from intimate involvement with others, a situation that enhances one’s independence and facilitates one’s ability to control one’s self and one’s environment although there is, strangely enough, actually a premium on camaraderie in this approach to life. However, the desire to communicate almost intuitively with one’s comrades shows how important it is to control membership in these associations rigorously. The quest for control and seamless communication may be seen in the way, on the one hand, Jake is vetted by the aficionados and, on the other, in the way Jake adopts Montoya’s enigmatic views on how to judge bulls without comment. A circumstance somewhat akin to this, although less formally enacted, may be seen in the way Bill’s handles the unexpected discovery of Jake’s “accident” (93). These two worlds provide the kind of experience that, from Jake’s point of view, epitomize the good life.

Chapter 5 looks at a key passage which shows Jake’s narrative stance towards Cohn. This is the scene where Harvey Stone attacks Cohn mercilessly which Jake allows to proceed unabated for some time before stepping in, having apparently been struck by an attack of conscience. This supposition is corroborated by Jake’s subsequently attempting to rectify his not having shown Cohn “clearly” (37).

Chapter 6 is an account of Mike’s dealing with the suffering his relationship with Brett occasions him. He manages to scrape by on an occasional diet of sleeping with her until she decides to sleep with Cohn as a way to dissuade Jake from pursuing her. As a result of this, his anger gradually creeps into the light as he struggles with Cohn’s presence in Pamplona until Brett’s finally running off with Romero leads him to give voice to his agony plainly.

Chapter 7, the book’s longest chapter, is an analysis of Brett that shows how she wields the power her beauty grants her and how Jake responds to this power.

Chapter 8 analyzes Book 3 of The Sun Also Rises while Chapter 9 summarizes this book’s conclusions.

A Note on Research

In doing the research for this book, I found that the closer I got to 2021, the more the books and articles concerned issues that were tangential to the thrust of my book. The analyses were becoming more historically, biographically, and culturally oriented. While these are all valuable avenues of inquiry, they did not intersect with my interests which accounts for the fact that there are only a few items in the Works Cited written after 2000.