The Intersection of Love and Economy

A Simple Exchange of Values

This summative post has some ground to cover, what with all the ends I've left open in my previous posts, but given the required word count for it I think I'll manage.

I'd like to begin with theme since I have no doubt that everything else will connect back to it, and starting here might save me some unnecessary rambling later on. As you might notice in the first three posts about my reading of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, relationships span the entire breadth and width of the novel. Beginning with Robert Cohn and his two failed first attempts at love, transitioning to Jake and his unattainable-yet-solid love for Lady Brett Ashley, then coming full circle and more with Robert and what seems like the whole world falling in love with Brett one-by-one, the prospect of love permeates this novel. Funnily enough, love never materializes--not in the way you'd expect it to, anyways. Every attempt fails, and seeing as all the efforts are directed towards Brett, perhaps it's inevitable, but that lack of finality in such a recurrent topic leaves the reader wondering: where is the love? As a matter of fact, I'm under the belief that it's where it was the whole novel long--with Jake, the impotent protagonist.

Very early on Jake makes it clear that he loves Brett, and while Brett professes her own love for him, she won't settle with him because he cannot provide what she wants. Jake doesn't fight this, knowing that he cannot change it, but he remains in support of Brett throughout the events of the novel despite what she puts him through. Brett never realizes what she has in Jake, but his love is Hemingway's archetype, the real thing. After all, what does he gain from being good to Brett? He can't have what every other man is after, and he certainly doesn't make money by it; he stands by her for what he feels for her, and his feelings don't change.

So then, what is the theme? Well, I say it's all to do with how people go about love, how they go about it physically and emotionally. Perhaps in a more general sense, it deals with how people strive for what they can't have.

Both have precedent in the text or I wouldn't mention them here, but the first I've got a clearer understanding of than the second. As I said in the previous post, every main male character except Bill Gorton falls in love with Brett. Michael, her fiance; Robert, who gets lucky (in a most unfortunate way); Romero, the bull-fighter; and of course, Jake, her impotent lover. Since Brett is the object of all this attention, she serves as something of a hub of misfortune for all her callers and dances one half of each of the mating dances that the story follows. Where the males' dances act out the first part of the theme more than the second, Brett's seems to play to both pieces, just as she plays to all of her suitors. The men all try for Brett's affection in different ways, showing not one but a multitude of ill-fated ways to go about love. Michael buys his way to her heart and bankrupts himself doing so (if he doesn't do so before the events of the story, that is). Robert finds himself with her once and then pesters her incessantly for his certainty that she loves him. Romero finds himself the object of Brett's attention, but soon redirects his own attentions towards her and away from his passionate bull-fighting, at which point she leaves him. Jake, in contrast to all the others, goes about his life without putting forth more than a passing effort to be with Brett, and yet she always ends up back with him, always leaves soon after. The sheer impossibility of anything beneficial coming from the lot of these efforts describes what Hemingway conveys through the novel, showing the fallibility of that amorous pursuit along with it's scant rewards. 

As for the second portion of theme, which has everything to do with what people value, evidence for it lies in dialog and in the courting of Brett. Jake says early on specifically that Brett "only wanted what she couldn't have," and that statement rings true both in his case and in that of Romero. With Jake, she can love him all she wants without ever getting what she desires out of love, making them a perfect match and an impossible one at the same time. With Romero, she goes after him first, only leaving him once he feels strongly enough about her that he is too accessible to be desirable. Many more references to exchanges of value and trade-offs pepper the text, especially with Michael, who bankrupts himself to get at Brett. Such is the value to him of getting what he wants that he spends what he doesn't have. Similarly, Robert bankrupts himself morally when he knocks out Jake, one of his few friends, over Brett. It just further develops the same idea, that the pursuit of desires costs each of them something they value. 

To break off on a tangent, the topic of alcohol finally finds its home at this place in the ideology of the book. After considering it quite a bit and finding a few rogue occurrences of sobriety--Brett telling Jake that he needn't get drunk, not to get drunk, at the end--I've found that drunkenness is something like a currency, a great equalizer for these by-and-large unhappy souls, that they use to drown out their lives. Perhaps it was a less common use of the substance when Hemingway was around than it is today, but more likely the author uses alcohol as another object of desire that the woeful characters of this novel pursue fecklessly. 

Backing away from the content of the text now, self-reflection finds it's place in this lengthy post. In the arena of my close reading skills, I think participating in class has probably helped me more than any of the metacognitive authors we've read have. Foster laid out my literary toolkit for me, but to be honest all of his material hasn't kept firmly in my head. Perrine helped some with my understanding of the scope of symbols, and Vendler did some good with my poetry analysis, but looking for things in class that I probably should have already learned to look for has helped me see what those notable things. In particular it's gotten me to understand how important patterns are to close reading as opposed to individual objects of interest. That's why I started this blog off looking for patterns, because they make up the foundation I had to lay before searching through this novel for meaning. Anyways, it's helpful to learn about new ways of looking at a text, or at any task for that matter.

I hope I haven't fully spoiled the book for anyone hoping to read The Sun Also Rises, and although I'm sure I have, I would still recommend it to anyone looking for a book with substantial content with the potential to challenge their perspectives on human behavior. It's very well written, and in a style I've not encountered before, which adds to the experience, so I would recommend it for that quality as well. I have to say that on the whole, although I thought it was a brilliant book, it put me in something of a bitter mood a few times. I attest this to the quality of the writing, but if you don't want a book to affect you then this one might not be for you.

Well, there it is, one book blog complete before the end of the quarter and only three more to go for the year. This should be an interesting project, and we'll see where it takes me. Cheers!

Go Sit in the Corner, Robert, and Think About What You've Done

I finished reading Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises not half an hour ago, and I'm just full of discordant thoughts in the aftermath. From those, for this third in-the-process post, I've pulled out a seemingly manageable quandary to look over, dealing this time with characters rather than themes or patterns. My question is, what's up with Robert Cohn? He's an odd character, certainly, but what makes him odd and what purpose does he serve in the text?

One glaring difference between Robert and his group, as presented in the book, is his faith--which Hemingway notably refers to as race. Robert is Jewish and the group makes quite a big deal about it, whether poking fun at him or discussing him behind his back. They attribute his "air of superiority" to his Jewishness and generally seem to consider it an unfortunate trait of his. This perspective on race comes from the era in which Hemingway wrote the novel, I think, but the question remains of why he would write a Jew into his book. The context of the same era gives an interesting answer to the question: Robert Cohn is a kind of scapegoat.

Hemingway writes this novel as a commentary or explication of some sort of universal human experience, and in the development of such a story he needs someone to do things just the wrong way or to play out the perfect storm to convey the hardships of that experience. It seems plausible to me that Hemingway would decide that a Jew fit such a character position well because of the era of his upbringing. Robert's Jewishness plays a heavy hand in assigning his overall traits in the story beyond simply his faith and his character role, though he breaks the established mold in at least one way. He is American born and raised, hailing from two of the richest and oldest families in New York, he graduates from Princeton, and he leads a less than extravagant lifestyle as a writer in Paris. As the story progresses he achieves some success with his writing and becomes somewhat overly self-assured. Robert's talent for boxing comprises his main diversion from the Jewish image.

That much establishes his background, but the troubles that befall Robert and cement his place in the story only riff on his Jewish heritage, they don't stem from it. Robert, through the second and third "Books" of this novel, falls quite hard for Lady Brett Ashley and that quickly comes to define him. This piece interests me, as I think it makes up the heart of this novel, but the notable issue here is the way that Robert falls for Brett. Every main character loves Brett except for Bill Gorton, but each loves her in a different way and each finds a different experience with her. Robert manages to sleep with Brett at one point, and thenceforth believes that she must feel something for him despite many clues suggesting otherwise. He becomes terribly hung up on the idea and does some regrettable things in pursuit of her (hint: he displays his boxing prowess), only coming to realize his blindness too late. 

Hemingway puts Robert in this position because he wants to show how love can detriment people, and because of this and the fact that Robert operates on essentially good intentions through all the damaging things that he does, he turns out to be something of a tragic hero in the novel. I'm only just now seeing this as I write, so I question the bit earlier about Hemingway's stance on Judaism, but perhaps he sets Robert as a Jew because of the generally positive traits he has--nice, smart, helpful--and only gives him an overabundance of romanticism as a fatal flaw to show that even the best men can fall prey to the same.

Robert and his relationship with Brett are central to the story without a doubt, and his foolish actions in her pursuit are central to that relationship. Considering the entirety of the story, the role of a tragic hero fits him well; he goes wrong at a definite point but continues to act on his values for the duration of his time in the spotlight. With Robert, Hemingway says that even honest pursuits at love can fail terribly. 

More on this with the final post--plus a bit of end-tying for the other posts.

Happy Blogging!

Sometimes Hot, Sometimes Cold, Always Drunk

At this second way point in my reading of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway--the thirteenth chapter, specifically--I feel obligated to make a point of the fact that, even for Europeans, Hemingway's characters drink an astounding amount of alcohol. They go about their lives all the same, it being quite acceptable and apparently inconsequential for them to have a drink or three with every meal and at least one in between, but the fact remains that every drop of alcohol they consume is a another drop Hemingway has written. All that alcohol, and its only occasionally accompanying intoxication--it leaves me wondering.

Passing that thoroughly pervasive theme that I don't yet know how to handle, I've noticed a good deal more patterns and themes throughout this latest batch of chapters. The recurrence and tendencies of various descriptions held my attention with this reading, mostly because once I noticed the first I had a hard time avoiding the rest. That first pattern I found presents itself in the 12th chapter, during Jake Barnes' and his recently (as of the beginning of the 8th chapter, where this stretch of reading started) arrived friend Bill Gorton's fishing trip. I should interrupt myself for context's sake to say that the narrative of chapters 8-13 centers  itself on this fishing trip, but since the fishing itself lasts less than the entirety of chapter 12 the text affords much more weight to the travel and internal squabbling of the characters. As far as the description of the fishing itself, however, I quickly noticed that Hemingway describes things as hot or cold nearly every fifth line. The water is freezing, the sun is hot, the wind blows and the air begins to chill the pair of fishermen, and so on and so forth for the duration of the chapter. In addition, I noticed afterwards that the same chapter is full of words and phrases dealing with shade and light--though I picked up more shade than light--and I wonder if these two descriptive themes haven't got anything to do with the temperamental nature of the goings on of Jake's group at large.

I have to interrupt myself once more for the same purpose as before, which I suppose is quite inevitable given that I left off at my last post at a turning point of a chapter--in fact this section I've started is designated Book II of III, the third beginning with chapter 19. Anyways, I mean to inform you that "Jake's group," as I referred to it, consists at this point of Jake, Bill, Robert Cohn, Lady Brett, and Sir Michael (Brett's fiance). 

While I will undoubtedly return to this group's internal bickering at a later time because of its combined prevalence and relevance, for now I'll only say that it seems like a potential parallel for the repetition of the hot/cold mantra in Hemingway's description of Jake and Bill's fishing experience. Then again, I really don't have much to go off of with that claim because there I haven't noticed any direct connections between the two other than their similarity in vacillation. A better supposition might be that the hot to cold to hot represents Jake's overall experience in Europe, or perhaps even his experience with alcohol. Both have similar tendencies to fluctuate and both tie into the various scenes of the relevant chapter. The alcohol comes into action while the two are fishing, no less, and Jake cools it down from the ambient heat by setting the bottles in the frigid river. There's at least a direct connection; whether or not it ties the two themes inextricably, I wouldn't care much to gamble on. The other possibility of a connection to Jake's European experience, I'd say it's valid in the sense that the fishing trip and weather are a part of Jake's experience, but it's probably too general a relationship to mean much.

What does make sense to me at this particular juncture, however, is to consider in exactly what ways Jake's life fluctuates in an effort to tie together more of the symbolic patterns with specific issues Jake faces. I see alcohol affecting his interactions with his peers, I see Brett affecting his heart and sensibility, and I see Robert affecting his mood and inciting a degree of malice within him.

In parallel with that I see shifts between hot and cold temperatures during the fishermen's stay in the mountains, shifts between barren and fertile land as they travel to Spain from Paris, shifts between shadow and light especially in the woods where the two men go fishing, and not quite shifts, but a flux in the tone with which Hemingway portrays religion through the various characters' eyes.

I've got to bring this one to a close, but I think that definite connections exist between these themes I've found. I'm far and away keener to spot trends than analyze them, which will catch up to me with the last post for this book, but until then I'm satisfied to notice the details. I'll have time to synthesize later once I've taken everything in, and if that brings this blog down in the meantime, I'll take that detriment. What I won't do, however, is ignore feedback. I'd rather hear a critique and learn from someone else than try and judge myself on habits that will, for the time being, take me where I need to end up.

With that I bid you good readings and good writings--and myself the same for the upcoming addition.

Chapters 1-7: Initial Noticings

The very first thing I notice about Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is the focus of its introduction. That the novel, narrated by and focusing on Jake Barnes, should begin with a sentence about one of Jake's friends, followed by a chapter or so about him, strikes me as odd.

A good thing that it strike me as such, though, because at the core of our English class lies the notion that a good author loads meaning into every part of their work. If everything in this book means something, then Hemingway must have wanted to make something blatantly clear by standing his first chapters off against the rest of the book in such a way. Having noticed such a diversion from the norm, I have little choice but to pursue an understanding of the author's intent.

Before engaging the material, I ought to expound on what all stands out in the first chapter. As I said, Hemingway ostensibly focuses on Jake's friend Robert Cohn, but what does he write about him specifically? Well, he writes of Robert that he is nice, but shy and self-conscious, that he is well born, well educated, and well versed in the sports, and that he has an unfortunate time of making relationships. 

Of these pieces, the relationships stand out from the rest. This is due in part to their spatial dominance, taking up three of the first four pages that comprise the first chapter, but also to the persistence of the theme throughout the book, which follows the love interest between Jake and a Lady Brett Ashley for as far as I've read. The gist of Hemingway's portrayal of Robert says that he fares poorly with women, being too inexperienced with them to tell whether they care for him or his finances. Beyond that inability to divine intentions, however, Robert displays a propensity for being easily influenced that Hemingway makes particularly evident with women. Jake professes to the reader at one point that "internally [Robert] had been moulded by the two women who had trained him." I would be hard-pressed to deny the effect of the words "moulded" and "trained" in nailing Robert down as little more than clay to be worked by their hands. A more directed example appears immediately afterwards when Jake says that Robert's previously superb tennis game goes "all to pieces" once he falls in love with Brett, Jake's love interest. This introduces a tendency of Robert's to not only be affected directly by the women in his life, but also indirectly. What could Brett have to do with Robert's tennis game, after all? 

My question now is this: what could Hemingway's purpose be in presenting Robert as such a love-blind individual, given that he writes through Jake's perspective? 

While I'm sure I haven't  yet read enough of the story to have more than a wisp of understanding, I suspect that Hemingway present's Robert as a sort of character foil to Jake, the sexually disabled protagonist. Where Robert is inept, Jake appears confident; in the beginning of the third chapter he engages a french girl walking down the street as easily as he might greet an old friend. Despite this gracefully casual demeanor, however, he struggles while alone with Brett for being unable to consummate their love.

The similarities and differences between these two characters keep ringing alarm bells in my head, but I have yet to discern Hemingway's intent in playing them off of each other. I'll offer my guarantee, though, that by my final post on this book I'll have an answer or a change of opinion as to what's going on here.

Bear with my rambling as I slough my way through understanding this reading--I'll take on something more concrete with the next post and leave the overarching thematic elements until I reach the last page. Comments are appreciated and if anyone wants a suggestion for content, I could definitely use feedback on the mix of literary analysis and personal musing I'm working with. Thanks for reading!

Quarter 1 Independent Reading

For Ms. Romano's 4 English AP - Literature and Composition

To start off this blog, I'd like to note that it is, at it's foundation, an extended English assignment. My task for this quarter involves reading a novel of my choice, actively processing what I read, and making a number of posts expressing my thoughts as I progress through the text. While I did not create this blog of my own volition, I am looking forward to working on it and I think that the blog format is a great way of enticing students to invest some of their personality in their writing. After all these are our blogs (although ETHS manages the Google accounts...) and they reflect the work we put into our English class at the least, and our education at the most. Plus, it's always more fun to do things your own way when you get the opportunity, right?

Passing that necessarily introductory paragraph, here's what I'll be reading and posting about between now and (hopefully, since it also coincides with certain college app deadlines) October 14th: 

The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

I've read several chapters through already and I'd like to get to the actually assigned posts now, so I'll ask you fine, obliging readers to excuse my brief conclusion as I move on to begin digging into this literary analysis.

Note: Just because I'm interested in the reading and the blogging, doesn't mean that I won't procrastinate obstinately throughout the process. Three cheers for time management!