Throughout the course of reading The Sun also Rises it's fair to say there was quite a lot of drinking. However all but two incidences of drinking I can name off the top of my head were plot essential, and not merely an atmospheric touch. Namely the bus ride with the basques, and the final scene with Brett and Jake. These two scenes revolve around the drinking taking place. Granted there are quite a fair bit of scenes within a bar but they could have taken place within a 1920's apple-bees and while not exactly the same the plot would have still moved forward. This really intrigued me the more and more I read the book, how it seemed to be the idling activity of choice for most characters.
I originally was thinking this gave them a feeling of decadence a functioning member of society couldn't afford to be drunk 24/7, but as I read more and more of the book I began to think it made the characters feel like they were trying to escape the world around them. No-one really seems truly happy but Bill and even then he speaks with such /irony that you can't be sure. But Brett who is truly miserable, despite the front she may put on in public she is never really truly satisfied with her life, and easily one of the heaviest drinkers in the novel. Jake too, Jake is constantly drinking some type of alcohol, and usually not happy with the current state he is in, unless he is off in the country with bill away from all his problems the happiest we see him, I think, throughout the novel.
This escapism these characters pursued really intrigued me as well, especially with the blurb on the back of the book calling it the quintessential novel of the lost generation. Most of these characters truly do feel "lost". Take Brett, I am unable to name exactly what she wants to do at most points throughout the novel. Sure she wants to sleep with Romero, I get that, but she has no driving goal nothing that applies to more than one facet of her life.
The escapism I feel throughout the novel seems to drive a lot of my opinions in characters as well, I pity someone like Jake who can't find meaning in a life due to a condition that was forced upon him, yet Brett seems to have forced herself into he state we can find her throughout the novel.
1 comment:
Good points. The "escapism" you identify is one way to think of this as a "war novel" (or a postwar novel--a fictional world shaped by the legacy of the war)--what looks like decadence and hedonism is really self-medication for pain and confusion and loss of identity. But observe how characters rarely talk of "needing" a drink, and they rarely drink alone. Part of the self-deception, I think, is the *act* that they're all just having a good time; it's one big party; won't you have another? Significantly, the only time I can think of where one character warns another about their drinking, or even calls attention to it as a potential problem, is when Brett tells Jake he doesn't "have to get drunk." In light of the preceding 250 pages, where Brett is *always* the first to ask for a drink, this is a remarkable development. She can actually *see* that Jake is trying to numb himself to the pain she causes, and she's trying to reach out to him.
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