Ernest Hemingway - The Novels to Read

Taboo Monkey on Three Novels:
1. The Sun Also Rises
2. A Farewell to Arms
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Suggested Reading Index

1. THE SUN ALSO RISES:

The Sun Also Rises gives us the world of the disenchanted, "lost" generation facing life after hope has died. Those who haven't lost hope are distrusted, even despised, by those like Jake who have lost their capacity for redemption. The Lost speak a language of petty bigotry and spite. As Jake learns to live with his despair, he learns to hate those who do not, or will not, know despair. Critics identify this attitude as Hemingway's own failure--perhaps noting a lack of narrative distance between author and narrator. In fact, there is plenty of sexism, anti-semetism, and racism throughout The Sun Also Rises. While unfriendly critics look to Hemingway for the source, friendly critics suggest that Jake (rather than Hemingway) and his ex-patriot community are the wounded, abandoned source of this bigotry.

One last critical note: Perhaps because of Ernest Hemingway's preoccupation with eliminating every unnecessary word from his prose, critics have occasionally taken Hemingway to task for the first chapter of this novel. Hemingway devotes the entire chapter to introducing Robert Cohn. The second chapter does the same, though this time Hemingway grounds the introduction as the temporal beginning of the story. Critics argue the following: having two introductory Cohn chapters is nothing more than redundancy; the second chapter, grounded in the present-moment of the narrative, brings the reader directly into the story's action while providing all the necessary background information of the first chapter; and finally, the bulk of the novel's action, while never completely forgetting him, proceeds with fewer and fewer Cohn-driven scenes (until the end).

These are reasonable arguments; however, I believe the first chapter supports the novel as a whole in two distinct ways that the second chapter, even with some editing, could never achieve on its own.

Chapter One serves the purpose of a true introduction: this is the only place in the novel that exists outside of the story's moment, and the only place where Jake Barnes as narrator separates himself from Jake Barnes as character. Every other chapter proceeds chronologically, and if the narrator were to separate himself throughout the novel, then the tension would too easily flutter and die. In the discussion of For Whom the Bell Tolls I'll explore some fundamental differences between the necessity of narrative distance in first-person narratives (in novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms) compared to the narrative distance required by third-person narratives (in novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls). In this particular novel, the reader needs an orderly progression of events to maintain a grasp on the story's sensibilities. Therefore, this first chapter allows the reader to manage a tantalizing glimpse of where Jake Barnes as narrator is telling the story; in the end, this chapter allows us to see how fundamentally Jake has changed.

This ties directly into the other significant affect this chapter has on the novel's whole. The narrative distance we experience only in the first chapter allows the reader to see why Robert Cohn is so significant to Jake Barnes. The scorn and bigotry Jake uses to describe Robert here is bitter and resentful--rather than justified. Only through the narrative distance can we understand the self-judgment this implies: the first chapter, rather than judging Cohn, actually is an admission of Jake's own terrible limitations.

Book Search for The Sun Also Rises

Taboo Monkey on Three Novels:
1. The Sun Also Rises
2. A Farewell to Arms
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Old Man Discussions:
1. The Story Before the Story
2. The Simple Story
3. Critics, Symbolism, Shit

Read Five Hemingway Stories
Full Text Stories

Suggested Reading Index