The Sun Also Rises: Jake and Ashley

In Ernest Hemingway’s literary classic, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway not only conveys the angst felt during the Modern period, but also portrays his protagonists Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley in a manner not previously seen in American literature up until that point. Brett’s unapologetic attitude towards sex (coupled with her multiple lovers over the course of the novel) and Jake’s physical and emotional impotence cause the majority of the strife, and yet they provide the driving force for the actions these two characters take.

When the reader is first introduced to Brett, Jake describes her as “damned good looking” (Hemingway 29) and that she “was built with the curves like the hull of a racing yacht” (30). In introducing her character in this manner, Hemingway makes her the object of Jake’s sexual desire, yet Brett’s flippant attitude towards Jake and his feelings also provides much of the pathos he experiences over the course of the novel. At the end of Chapter 3, Brett tells Jake that she has “been so miserable” (32), implying that she hasn’t been happy without him around. In Chapter 4, she responds to Jake’s asking if she loves him saying, “I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me” (34), yet she tells him not to touch her, but then goes on to have some sort of sexual encounter with him (62). She then leaves Paris, only for Jake to see her next in the company of Michael, whom he discovers is her new fiancé. When the Jake and the gang finally meet up in Pamplona for the bull-fights, he is coerced by Brett into introducing her to Pedro Romero, the bull-fighter. As author Jeffery Hart states in his essay, The Sun Also Rises: A Revaluation, this act compromises Jake, making him “pimp and betrayer,” thus “betraying not only his self-respect but Romero himself” (558).

But what leads Jake to commit such a heinous act? Hart cites Jake’s “mutilated condition” as deciding factor:

“…we ought to notice the exact nature of Jake's wound. This is very much a part of the novel, part of its deliberate painfulness, its sharp-edged disruption of ordinary feeling. Hemingway does not specify the nature of the wound, but he requires the reader to infer it, to participate in imagining it Jake is not merely impotent but is mutilated…In chapter 4 Jake makes his condition almost explicit, but his account still requires – and Hemingway demands – the reader's participation…The novel requires that the reader fill in the details and at once resist doing so. By imagining that peculiar pain, the reader participates in it. (558)

In effect, Jake’s search for some sort of truth – or center in life, be it in the beauty of bull-fighting or not, is swiftly ended by this act. Jake becomes an antihero – a byproduct of Modernism.

Hemingway created these characters to illustrate the axiom of the Modern movement – there is no such thing as an absolute truth or moral center. Jake and Brett both seek to lose themselves acts of hedonism, compromising any sort of values they may or may not have held.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926.

Hart, Jeffrey. “The Sun Also Rises: A Revaluation.” The Sewanee Review. Vol. 86, No. 4 (Fall, 1978). 557-562. JSTOR. 8 April 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543481.