The Sun Also Rises portrays the lives of the members the “Lost Generation”, as named by Gertrude Stein. The young, post-WWI generation she speaks of had their dreams and innocence smashed by the war, survived as bitter and purposeless, and spent much of the booming 1920s drinking or partying away their frustrations. Jake’s character, in The Sun Also Rises, symbolizes the “Lost Generation”.
Jake doesn’t have love, faith, manhood, or purpose, so he substitutes them with different activities and desires.The "Lost Generation” did not know what they wanted and they lost their old values and they did not know what they needed in order to fulfill the emptiness in their lives as a result of the war. The main characters are no exception they too do not know what they need to be happy and they do not respect themselves. All of them drink too much and drink too fast.
Throughout the book, characters such as Jake, Brett, and Mike continually turn to drinking in order to excite themselves with the world.For that period of drinking, they are able to set their minds on drinking to the extent that it becomes a favored pastime. It connects them with the joys of life, the price to be paid later. Alcohol consumes their day to day lives.
Alcohol is their obsession, and their need to drink has become their purpose. For instance, even when Jake's companions have left him and he has a chance at peace, he continues to indulge in liquor. Beyond drinking, several other activities inspired by fancy and passion consume the minds of Hemingway's characters and give them hollow direction.Physically and emotionally wounded from the war, Jake apathetically drinks his way through expatriate life. He cares little about religion, work, or friends.
While others might have religion to fill the emptiness, Jake -though he says he's a Catholic- doesn't really believe in religion any longer. Bill asks “are you really a Catholic? ” and Jake replies “Technically” (Hemingway, 128). He believes that he should believe, but he can't. Jake, like his friends, is empty inside.Jake's fishing trips with Bill offer not only a retreat from his stressful life, but they are also spiritual and psychological rituals, where Jake is able to confront the darker aspects of himself, come to terms with himself, and ultimately grow into a stronger and more fulfilled individual. Water is often used as a symbol for a calming effect spiritually.
It is near the water where Jake is able to get in touch with his unconscious side, and achieve a state of spiritual healing. Jake feels a sense of peace within nature and within himself while fishing, and fishing possibly symbolizes his coming to terms with bad aspects of himself.The fact that he mentions he caught six trout is positive and shows that he has found a therapeutic way of dealing with the traumatic memories that fill his nightmares. He immerses himself in nature, which he finds spiritually uplifting, and deals with his problems as they come instead of repressing them.
The “Lost Generation” exchanged the values of love for the pleasures of sex. Unfortunately, Jake cannot have sex and, therefore, can never have the desirable Brett. He’s powerless in the sense that he’s in love with Brett, but he knows he can’t ever really have her.He can only offer her love, not sex, which seems to be more important to her even though she really does love him in return. Even though he knows he can’t have her, his love forces him to keep her in his life and endure the pain of watching her go around with other guys. He can’t have what he wants, but at the same time he can’t move on.
None of the characters seem to be able to “have” Brett either. She’s with them for short terms, for sex but not love, or at least not real love like she feels for Jake, making them almost as useless metaphorically as Jake is physically.If Brett could accept Jake’s “emasculating injury” and share a loving friendship between a man and woman empty of the cravings that infest her; the two could have found the mutual belonging they desired. Jake is a veteran that spends his time with superficial socializing; he admires bull-fighting, in particular, for its excitement and need for courage. The relationship between the bulls and steers symbolizes Jake Barnes and his acquaintance’s situation. Ironically, the "bulls" in Jake's circle of friends aren't masculine at all.
The two characters that are truly like "bulls" in the story are Brett and Jake. Both Jake and Brett could be considered "steers" in many ways, but they are also more masculine than the "bulls. " Although Jake is impotent, and therefore not physically considered one of the "bulls," he is much stronger, emotionally, than Robert and Mike. Jake has been in love with Brett longer than Mike or Robert, and yet, he is the only one who can stand to see her with other men. Jake, on the other hand, has returned from his confrontation with death feeling like less of a man, physically and emotionally.
Jake is even threatened by the homosexual men who dance with Brett in Paris; while not sexually interested in her, they have more "manhood" than Jake, physically speaking. Most of the male characters lack “manhood” in a milder way, because of the “liberating and yet confusing” process of blurring of masculine and feminine characteristics” (Curnutt, 107). Although the characters rarely mention the war directly, its effects shadow everything they do and say. Jake rarely intervenes in other’s affairs, even when he could help, and Brett carelessly hurts men.She considers herself powerless to stop doing so.
Yet they try: through alcohol, through sex, through any distraction that allows them to temporarily lie to themselves. They were purposeless; the old social norms and customs no longer applied, but the new ones were yet being formed. They looked to each other for freedom from loneliness. On the contrary, it leads to jealousy, anger, hate, suspicion, which develops as Brett continues her affairs with other men.
But Brett, like the society of alcohol guzzlers surrounding her, has no moral ground and no sense of direction or purpose.Sex is her alcohol, just as Jake’s self-pity is his. Jake and Brett lost the ability to love fully. While Hemingway reveals the superficial, empty attitudes of the “Lost Generation”, the other quote in the epigraph from Ecclesiastes “unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again,” expresses the hope that future generations may rediscover themselves. But there is little love, faith, and purpose in the lost world of The Sun Also Rises; and so, finally, the futile search for meaning shapes The Sun Also Rises.
