Pretty Thoughts of What Could Have Been: The Sun Also Rises

 

"'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, 'we could have had such a damned good time together.'

“Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

"'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'”

– The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Lovers, dreams, and “what could have been” are indelibly etched in each human mind. Like archives from the past, these relics continue to influence our behaviors and serve as tools to help us maneuver the road of life … both the curves and the straightaways.

“A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. Also, the sun rises and the sun sets, and hastening to its place, it rises there again. Blowing toward the south then turning toward the north, the wind continues swirling along, and on its circular courses the wind returns. All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again. All things are wearisome. Man is not able to tell it.”

– Ecclesiastes

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway follows a group of young American and British expatriates as they wander through Europe in the mid-1920s. They are all members of the cynical and disillusioned Lost Generation, who came of age during World War I (1914–18).

Two of the novel’s main characters, Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, typify the Lost Generation.

Note:

In the aftermath of the war there arose a group of young persons known as the "Lost Generation."

The term “Lost Generation” refers to the generation of people who reached adulthood during or immediately following World War I. In using the term “lost,” psychologists were referring to the “disoriented, wandering, directionless” feelings that haunted many survivors of what had been one of the most horrific wars in modern history. In a deeper sense, the lost generation was “lost” because it found the conservative moral and social values of their parents to be irrelevant in a post-war world.

Aimless traveling, drinking, and parties of the circles of expatriates in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises beckons to such a time. With ideals shattered so thoroughly by the war, for many, hedonism was the result. Lost Generation writers revealed the sordid nature of the shallow, frivolous lives of the young and independently wealthy in the aftermath of the war.

The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centwe of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.

Jake, the novel’s narrator, is a journalist and World War I veteran. During the war Jake suffered an injury that rendered him impotent. (The title obliquely references Jake’s injury and what no longer rises because of it.) After the war Jake moved to Paris, where he lives near his friend, the Jewish author Robert Cohn.

Jake’s former lover, Lady Brett, a thirty-four-year-old patrician, also lives in Paris. She is actually engaged to be married to Mike Campbell, a bankrupt Scottish war veteran who is constantly drunk. Despite this, Jake and Brett met and fell in love during the war, when Brett, a volunteer nurse, helped treat Jake’s injuries. Although it is not said explicitly, it is implied that they are not together because Jake is impotent and Brett is unwilling to give up sex.

“Damned good-looking” is how Jake describes Brett. (“Really hot” in the mind of Hemingway – the great economist of words.) Brett serves as the novel's center, its objective focus. She is the "sun" around which the other characters orbit, starstruck, in the way that the Basque peasants place her on a wine cask and dance in adoration during the fiesta, as if Brett were a goddess.

At one point, Mike compares her to Circe, a famous seductress of Greek myth, whose trick was luring men to her island and turning them into animals:

"He (Robert Cohn) calls her Circe," Mike said. "He claims she turns men into swine."

Brett parties hard. She is unapologetically sexual and aggressively promiscuous. She even wears her hair cut short, like a man. She neither looks like a lady nor acts with socially acceptable manners. Her androgyny is genuine and something she has freely chosen. By destabilizing the differences between men and women, Brett makes sure that neither gender has absolute authority over the other, and no one can place her in the position of a victim.

Jake, Brett’s impotent love interest, notes her appearance: “her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht.”

Moreover, Brett refuses to commit to any one man, preferring ultimate independence. However, her independence does not make her happy. She frequently complains to Jake about how miserable she is – her life, she claims, is aimless and unsatisfying. Her wandering from relationship to relationship parallels Jake and his friends’ wandering from bar to bar. Although she will not commit to any one man, she seems uncomfortable being by herself. As Jake remarks, “She can’t go anywhere alone.”

When Cohn confesses his romantic interest in Brett to Jake, Jake cautions him against pursuing a relationship with Brett, who is engaged to be married to Mike Campbell. Both Brett and Cohn eventually leave Paris: Brett sets off for San Sebastian (a small beach town in Spain) and Cohn for the countryside.

At the end of the novel, Brett asks Jake to help her find bullfighter Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-old prodigy, with whom she says she has fallen in love. He does so, and Brett and Romero spend the night together. Yet, Brett realizes growing up, getting married, and family responsibility would all get in the way of things that matter most to her.

And Brett recognizes the inevitable and calls off her affair with Romero before it becomes permanently destructive.

Later, Jake receives a telegram from Brett, however, asking him to come meet her in Madrid. He complies, and boards an overnight train that same day. Jake finds Brett alone in a Madrid hotel room. She has broken with Romero, fearing that she would ruin him and his career. She announces that she now wants to return to Mike. Jake books tickets for them to leave Madrid.

"Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?”

These are the final lines of the novel, presenting Brett and Jake’s final dialogue, spoken as they ride in a taxi through the Spanish capital,

And Hemingway settled on a perfect final line. After Brett laments, “Oh Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time together,” the author at first had Jake respond, “It’s nice as hell to think so,” but later scribbled “Isn’t it nice to think so.” By the time the manuscript went to the printer, it had been altered again, to the sharp and sad and perfectly balanced “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

In this concluding passage, the lament over what could have been is truly poignant. Just as Brett voices, one last time, the dream that the two of them could have had a relationship, a policeman raises his baton and symbolically signals a halt. The car’s sudden deceleration presses Brett tantalizingly close to Jake, echoing a number of similar scenes earlier in the novel, but the barrier between them is quite clear now.

Moreover, Jake’s slightly cynical and bitter reply shows that he has no illusions about their relationship. He seems to appreciate the fact that a relationship between himself and Brett, if such a thing had been possible, would have been unlikely to end differently than any of her other failed relationships. Yet Jake’s subtle doubts only increase the pathos of the novel’s closing lines. Their relationship is revealed to have been merely a beautiful dream, a dream that is now slipping away forever.

Jake's response also indicates that he has changed, and is able to face some harsher truths. He realizes that the only reason that their love seems like it might work is that it can't actually work. He sees that if he were another ordinary man that Brett would tire of him just as she would tire of others. Yet he describes this false belief in a perfect love that is so close and yet unattainable as pretty. In other words, he expresses regret and pleasure at once, which defines the impossible nature of his era and experience.

The interaction represents the conflict between the ideological views of the lost generation and the harsh truth of reality. The cynical last line is a pithy representation of the apathetic lives of the Lost Generation – those disenchanted with America who went to Europe to escape all of their problems.

What Should We Learn?

Broken life experiences rip at our human existence. Shattered dreams, lost opportunities, unrequited love, unspeakable tragedies, crippling insecurities – reality places landmines in our pursuit of love, sex, and positive identity. Like the characters in The Sun Also Rises, we simply have to learn to live with our injuries and cope with our lost hopes. Wearisome experiences are part of real life.

The title of this novel and the biblical verses from which it comes capture the attitude that underlies The Sun Also Rises. It is an attitude that disputes Brett’s words and pervades not only this work but so much of Hemingway’s fiction – an attitude that says, with chin up and lowered eyes, that we are all fated from the start. We live with the knowledge of death and take some little comfort in the permanence of nature itself; generations pass away, but the earth abides.

The belief that people can ever be happy for long in any human relationship, even in joyous Spain, is to be smiled at a little sadly. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In our own minds, we contemplate the course of our existence – how a decision or a fateful turn here and there might have led to greater … or less … satisfaction. The reality remains no matter the fretful reminiscence. And, it is that reality with which we all must come to terms. Even those things that are “pretty to think” are fantasies without substance in the real world. For whatever reason, they were never actually consummated. Yet, they live on. Sealed within the confines of our memories, a more beautiful view plays its fantastic role and begs for an adoring audience