All of the characters drink heavily during the fiesta and generally throughout the novel. In his essay «Alcoholism in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises», Matts Djos says the main characters exhibit alcoholic tendencies such as depression, anxiety and sexual inadequacy. He writes that Jake’s self-pity is symptomatic of an alcoholic, as is Brett’s out-of-control behavior. William Balassi thinks that Jake gets drunk to avoid his feelings for Brett, notably in the Madrid scenes at the end where he has three martinis before lunch and drinks three bottles of wine with lunch. Reynolds, however, believes the drinking is relevant as set against the historical context of Prohibition in the United States. The atmosphere of the fiesta lends itself to drunkenness, but the degree of revelry among the Americans also reflects a reaction against Prohibition. Bill, visiting from the US, drinks in Paris and in Spain. Jake is rarely drunk in Paris where he works but on vacation in Pamplona, he drinks constantly. Reynolds says that Prohibition split attitudes about morality, and in the novel Hemingway made clear his dislike of Prohibition.
Masculinity and gender
Critics have seen Jake as an ambiguous representative of Hemingway manliness. For example, in the bar scene in Paris, Jake is angry at some homosexual men. The critic Ira Elliot suggests that Hemingway viewed homosexuality as an inauthentic way of life, and that he aligns Jake with homosexual men because, like them, Jake does not have sex with women. Jake’s anger shows his self-hatred at his inauthenticity and lack of masculinity. His sense of masculine identity is lost—he is less than a man. Elliot wonders if Jake’s wound perhaps signifies latent homosexuality, rather than only a loss of masculinity; the emphasis in the novel, however, is on Jake’s interest in women. Hemingway’s writing has been called homophobic because of the language his characters use. For example, in the fishing scenes, Bill confesses his fondness for Jake but then goes on to say, «I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot.»
In contrast to Jake’s troubled masculinity, Romero represents an ideal masculine identity grounded in self-assurance, bravery and competence. The Davidsons note that Brett is attracted to Romero for these reasons, and they speculate that Jake might be trying to undermine Romero’s masculinity by bringing Brett to him and thus diminishing his ideal stature.
Critics have examined issues of gender misidentification that are prevalent in much of Hemingway’s work. He was interested in cross-gender themes, as shown by his depictions of effeminate men and boyish women. In his fiction, a woman’s hair is often symbolically important and used to denote gender. Brett, with her short hair, is androgynous and compared to a boy—yet the ambiguity lies in the fact that she is described as a «damned fine-looking woman.» While Jake is attracted to this ambiguity, Romero is repulsed by it. In keeping with his strict moral code he wants a feminine partner and rejects Brett because, among other things, she will not grow her hair.
Antisemitism
Hemingway has been called antisemitic, most notably because of the characterization of Robert Cohn in the book. The other characters often refer to Cohn as a Jew, and once as a ‘kike’. Shunned by the other members of the group, Cohn is characterized as «different», unable or unwilling to understand and participate in the fiesta. Cohn is never really part of the group—separated by his difference or his Jewish faith. Barry Gross, comparing Jewish characters in literature of the period, commented that «Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew.» Hemingway critic Josephine Knopf speculates that Hemingway might have wanted to depict Cohn as a «shlemiel» (or fool), but she points out that Cohn lacks the characteristics of a traditional shlemiel.
Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, a fellow writer who rivaled Hemingway for the affections of Duff, Lady Twysden (the real-life inspiration for Brett). Biographer Michael Reynolds writes that in 1925, Loeb should have declined Hemingway’s invitation to join them in Pamplona. Before the trip, he was Duff’s lover and Hemingway’s friend; during the fiasco of the fiesta, he lost Duff and Hemingway’s friendship. Hemingway used Loeb as the basis of a character remembered chiefly as a «rich Jew.»
Writing style
The novel is well known for its style, which is variously described as modern, hard-boiled, or understated. As a novice writer and journalist in Paris, Hemingway turned to Ezra Pound—who had a reputation as «an unofficial minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary talent»—to mark and blue-ink his short stories. From Pound, Hemingway learned to write in the modernist style: he used understatement, pared away sentimentalism, and presented images and scenes without explanations of meaning, most notably at the book’s conclusion, in which multiple future possibilities are left for Brett and Jake. The scholar Anders Hallengren writes that because Hemingway learned from Pound to «distrust adjectives,» he created a style «in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective.»
F. Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway to «let the book’s action play itself out among its characters.» Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin writes that, in taking Fitzgerald’s advice, Hemingway produced a novel without a central narrator: «Hemingway’s book was a step ahead; it was the modernist novel.» When Fitzgerald advised Hemingway to trim at least 2500 words from the opening sequence, which was 30 pages long, Hemingway wired the publishers telling them to cut the opening 30 pages altogether. The result was a novel without a focused starting point, which was seen as a modern perspective and critically well received.
Wagner-Martin speculates that Hemingway may have wanted to have a weak or negative hero as defined by Edith Wharton, but he had no experience creating a hero or protagonist. At that point his fiction consisted of extremely short stories, not one of which featured a hero. The hero changed during the writing of The Sun Also Rises: first the matador was the hero, then Cohn was the hero, then Brett, and finally Hemingway realized «maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better without any hero.» Balassi believes that in eliminating other characters as the protagonist, Hemingway brought Jake indirectly into the role of the novel’s hero.
As a roman à clef, the novel based its characters on living people, causing scandal in the expatriate community. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker writes that «word-of-mouth of the book» helped sales. Parisian expatriates gleefully tried to match the fictional characters to real identities. Moreover, he writes that Hemingway used prototypes easily found in the Latin Quarter on which to base his characters. The early draft identified the characters by their living counterparts; Jake’s character was called Hem, and Brett’s was called Duff.
Although the novel is written in a journalistic style, Frederic Svoboda writes that the striking thing about the work is «how quickly it moves away from a simple recounting of events.» Jackson Benson believes that Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices for life in general. For example, Benson says that Hemingway drew out his experiences with «what if» scenarios: «what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?» Hemingway believed that the writer could describe one thing while an entirely different thing occurs below the surface—an approach he called the iceberg theory, or the theory of omission.
Balassi says Hemingway applied the iceberg theory better in The Sun Also Rises than in any of his other works, by editing extraneous material or purposely leaving gaps in the story. He made editorial remarks in the manuscript that show he wanted to break from the stricture of Gertrude Stein’s advice to use «clear restrained writing.» In the earliest draft, the novel begins in Pamplona, but Hemingway moved the opening setting to Paris because he thought the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to the later action in Spain. He wrote of Paris extensively, intending «not to be limited by the literary theories of others, but to write in his own way, and possibly, to fail.» He added metaphors for each character: Mike’s money problems, Brett’s association with the Circe myth, Robert’s association with the segregated steer. It wasn’t until the revision process that he pared down the story, taking out unnecessary explanations, minimizing descriptive passages, and stripping the dialogue, all of which created a «complex but tightly compressed story.»
Hemingway said that he learned what he needed as a foundation for his writing from the style sheet for The Kansas City Star, where he worked as cub reporter. The critic John Aldridge says that the minimalist style resulted from Hemingway’s belief that to write authentically, each word had to be carefully chosen for its simplicity and authenticity and carry a great deal of weight.
