The Sun Also Rises

*Trigger Warning: S*icude* 

 This book is like reading 3 suicide notes at once. 

 A quick glance at the Goodreads reviews for this book, and I'm certain that I must be the only one who understands it. The book is about trauma, and the things we should, or should not, do to alleviate that pain. If you don't know what that means, I'll state it a bit more plainly' The characters are awful people due to their experiences and their inability to deal with them. As I suggested before, the likely outcome for at least 3 of the characters is death. 

I've read this book maybe 6 or 7 times in my life, from high school to young adulthood to not-so-young-anymorehood. I've take different things from the novel depending on where I am in life. (You can imagine an immature, antisocial teenaged version of me coming away from this with a bad streak of "women are bitches and sluts@. A heavily intoxicated college college student version of me taking a way very wrong ideas about alcohol and hedonism.) Now that I'm a bit older than the characters in the book, I have settled on: pity. I can't imagine knowing these jobless, alcoholic, selfish people and treating them with anything but disgust, but knowing their backstory of how antisemitism and war messed them up, I just feel bad for them. 

(Side note here, I believe that the protagonist feels the same about them, but I'm not totally sure if it's intentional on the part of the author, or Hemingway subconsciously displaying his sense of superior over the reali-life company he kept in the 1920s Paris. The author stand-in character also seems apart from these people, but, Ernest, sorry to say that a lot of inferences can be made about you based on your friends.) 

Of the 5 characters in the book, 3 of them -- Brett, Mike, and Jacob -- have been through the war. Brett and Mike are barely keeping it together and have seemingly nothing to live for. Coupled with their trauma from the war, they are goners. I have hope for Jake though. 

One of the themes of the book is repetition; perpetual cycles. The opening quote and the title state it clearly: the sun sets and it also rises. But humans are not sunrises. We are not cyclical. We have the power to break our cycles, and the vulnerability to have our cycles broken. Mike and Brett have had their cycles broken. The war has caused irrepperable damage to them. They cannot settle down in a house in the countryside with a couple of kids and stable jobs. The war has already killed them, but just slower than usual. 

It's important to contrast them with Bill and Robert. (There's a lot to say about Robert. I would argue that his behavior is the product of the antisemetic treatment at the hands of his wealthy classmates. In fact, I think there's an argument to make that the book is showing that the wealthy are vile people, but that's an essay for another day.) Both of these characters are also terrible people, but they have hope for the rest of their lives. Bill goes off on his own, presumably to continue his writing. Robert will most likely get married and live miserably off his inheritance and writing. The sun also rises.

Jake is on the precipice. The war has damaged him, physically as well as mentally, but he has something to live for. He has a love of nature and things that he is passionate about. The final scene has him seemingly repeat his same mistakes, putting him in the same downward spiral he was on before, but I choose to read this as him smartening up for the first time. He is breaking his own destructive cycle, and I think he'll be fine. Not great, but, you know, fine.

So, the third suicide note. I think it belongs to Ernest Hemingway.

I think a lot of people know that Hemingway killed himself, but people might not know the circumstances leading up to his death. Hemingway's first novella was The Sun Also Rises from 1926 and his last, The Old Man and the Sea, was published in 1952. In 1954, he was in a plane crash that is rumored to have damaged his mental capacity at least slightly. From 1954 until his death in 1961, he never published anything else.

Say what you will about bullfighting, but the character of Jacob Barnes is living for it. He has aficion, remember. Knowing how damaged he is, this passion is the only thing keeping him alive. I can't imagine what it's like to love an activity so much, and to have it taken away from you, but Hemingway did. I think he knew how much writing meant to him, even in 1926, and wrote the characters of Brett and Mike to see himself without the thing that gave his life meaning. He couldn't have anticipated that he would lose that passion due to injury 3 decades later, and wrote his own suicide note without realizing it.