The Sun Also Rises: Heroism of Innocence, Heroism of a Fallen World

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway read The Great Gatsby with admiration shortly after meeting Scott Fitzgerald in the spring of 1925. By the summer of that year, after a disastrous return to the fiesta in Pamplona, he had begun work on a novel that, whatever its characteristics as a roman-à-clef, bore a striking resemblance to Gatsby. Hemingway had already worked with Ford Madox Ford on The Transatlantic Review. In a special supplement to that quarterly on the death of Joseph Conrad he had printed the famous tribute that, could he bring Conrad back to life ‘by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine, dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Conrad’s grave’, he would ‘leave for London … with a sausage grinder’.² The spiritual as well as structural kinship between The Sun Also Rises and Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and The Good Soldier, is hardly accidental. Yet when Hemingway refashions the familiar pattern to suit his own design, he transforms it as well. As with our other narrators, Jake Barnes is lame and passive. Yet his disillusionment with traditional social values is not a discovery made during the tale: it is the ground for that tale, shared with a generation wounded by the war and alienated from the past.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed.¹