Saturday, April 30, 2011

Essay on "Sun Also Rises"


The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is a book that has many different sides to it. A writer writing an analytical paper on it could choose many different topics in the book to analyze. In this book a writer could choose to write about alcoholism, feminism, psychoalanic, and many other structures that Hemingway might have been writing about in this book. The one structure I see the most in this novel is morality.
            The Sun Also Rises has a very non-moral story setting. Almost all the main characters are alcoholics and the main female character, Lady Brett, is not just an alcoholic but also a lady that likes to sleep around and go out with different men. The three main characters all have something wrong with them. Jake Barnes a war hero, who from the war suffered a wound that caused him to go impotent. Lady Brett Ashley a very promiscuous female that sleeps around with almost all the characters from the older man like Cohn to the very young like Romero the bullfighter.  Robert Cohn is the worn out boxer and he is one of the biggest alcoholics of the bunch always drinking his sorrows away. James Covert who wrote an article on the morality of Hemingway’s stories says that, “Hemingway’s fiction reflects and directs immediately the character of our times, its moral uncertainty. It surveys against this background the whole problem of conduct and value on the level of the individual (374).” For this Hemingway novel Covert is absolutely right. Again, almost all the characters have something wrong with them out of the social norm and that the time period is a reflection on why theses characters have low moral standards. This paper will be broken into three parts and over three different characters. The characters are Robert Cohn, Jake Barnes, and Lady Brett Ashley.
            Robert Cohn is a graduate of Princeton who boxed during college. Even though Hemingway starts off with, “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,” and devotes almost the entirety of the first chapter about Cohn, Cohn isn’t the main character of The Sun Also Rises (11). Cohn is actually an outsider to the coalition of people that travel around. He once had a fling with Lady Brett Ashley but he is merely tagging along cause of that and his friendship with Jake. Covert talks about Cohn more than any other character in this story, not because of his immoral ways but because how Cohn is so blinded in his meaning to find a way in life. Robert and Jake are very much in love with Lady Brett. Robert on the other hand and this is what Covert points out is that he is only fantasizing about his relationship with Brett. Covert says that “Cohn is incapable of being honest with himself or with others not because he deliberately uses dishonesty, but because he can not see through the illusions into reality. (381)” Covert sis right Cohn can not see that his relationship with Lady Brett will not work out and that the difference between Cohn and Jake is that Jake does realize that things can not work out between him and Lady Brett. Lady Brett is annoyed with Cohn too,  “Was I rude enough to him? My God! I’m so sick of him (Hemingway 185).” Besides drinking, dishonesty is Cohn’s moral downfall. He is not really dishonest with other people but with himself because he cannot tell himself that something won’t happen that he wants to happen. Like all of the other characters Cohn is a raging alcoholic. At one point someone asked, “Where’s Cohn” and Lady Brett replies, “He’s passed out. (Hemingway 161-162)” Another example of immortality of Cohn is in the first chapter of the book it talks about Cohn’s girlfriend Frances, but the whole time he is away he is trying to get with Lady Brett. In other words he is trying to cheat on his girlfriend and that’s a very immoral thing to do. Cohn to me is the least immoral person, he is not as big of a drunk as the others and his only vice is his lust for Lady Brett.

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