The Empty World
——A Book Report on The Sun also Rises
The Sun also Rises was written by Ernest Hemingway, who still owns great reputation in literature field. It was Hemingway’s first novel and showed the basic characteristic in literature of the ‘Lost Generation’. The background of the book was the First World War.

It was about a group of young people wandering in Paris after the World War One. They were all badly hurt in mental by the war. Jake even got injured and became impotent. Then he lived in France with his friend Bill, working as a journalist of an American newspaper cooperation. He lost his goal of life and was overwhelmed by a strong frustrated emotion. Though he deeply fell in love with a beautiful woman, Brett, who was a nurse during the war and whose husband was killed in war, Brett seldom cared about him and just enjoyed indulgent life with other men. So Jake could do nothing except drinking, drinking and drinking. The main part of the story happened in Spain. The group of people went to Spain to join the bull-fighting festival together, expecting to find the passion they lost in the war. In the journey to Spain, Brett refused the court from Robert Cohn, a Jew, but instead, she was deeply attracted by the handsome bull-fighter, whose name was Romero, aging only nineteen and having good manners. After living with Romero for a period of time, Brett made Romero left because she thought she could not destroy Romero’s bright future and came back to stay with Jake, even though both of them knew that they could not live normally as other couple. There was a gloomy road ahead of them.

Hemingway once featured the style of his works as iceberg. ‘The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.’ He never directly gave his attitudes towards people and stuff, even the motivation of people’s action and psychological condition were no exception. Instead, he favored the ways that acted as a camera to picture every aspect of one thing and gave his readers a real scene about the activities of the characters. In this way, readers could get individual sentiment themselves and sensed the hidden emotion of the characters. This kind of writing technique made Hemingway’s works full of subtext.

The characters in the novel lived an abnormal life, where there was no sunlight, no ideal and no goal. They involved darkness when they looked back, and they were confronted with a cloudy world when they considered their future. So they thought that what they could do in that situation was to indulge themselves in bars, in love affairs or in fights—a totally chaotic world, yet empty. According to the description of their everyday-life scene, I could feel a strong sad atmosphere dominating the story. The atmosphere made me think about the original cause of it. And what is the cause? The answer was that the war was the underlying murder, which Hemingway said no word about and which readers could not understand easily unless re-read the work several times and then thought deeply. So the latent words of the novel were the author’s strong disapproval to the war, which was also the theme of this novel.

Except for the hidden theme, the simple language style gave me impression, too. The simple style presented great contrast with the deep thinking of the work. The words were so simple that I could hardly made sense that what the author actually wanted to convey. The moment I understood what was behind the words, I was given an ache that was gradually spread inside, along with my reading process. I thought it the special power of simple words. The simple style could show the deep thinking of a piece of work as the complex one did.

I didn’t like most of the characters, such as Jake, Brett, Cohn, Bill and so on, in the novel during my first reading because of their passive attitude towards life. They drank all kinds of wines, enjoyed love affairs, quarreled and even fought sometimes. They spent most of the time on entertainment. They sprayed their disappointment to the world where they lived. From where I stood, I pictured them as the failures in the battle of life. They escaped from what they had to face, had to struggle and had to fight. No answer could they get from themselves, from friends and from the cloudy and chaotic world about what could they do, what should they do to deal with their problems. Nobody told them where their future lay in. they lost so they became passive.

Compared with the characters mentioned above, Romero had a great difference from them. Romero was a beautiful and hot-blooded bull-fighter. He was strong and never to be defeated. One night he was hit by Cohn, a boxer, fifteen times. But every time he stood up and did not surrender. He wanted to fight with Cohn some more even though he was weak and seriously hurt at that time. After Cohn stopped knocking him, he staggered over to Cohn, hit Cohn on the face and turned down helps from Cohn firmly. Romero was an outstanding character indeed. He owned all the characteristics for which such Jake, Brett and Bill were thirst, for example, the passion, the doughty mind, the braveness and the spirit of fighting to the end. I thought that was the reason why Jake and Bill and Brett appreciated him and made good friends with him. He represented as the symbol, who Jake, Brett and Bill wanted to be. I favored this character Cohn.

But during my second reading, I changed my mind a lot. I thought that Brett, Jake and Bill shouldn’t be too blame for their escapes. They did fight with life in someway in fact. Take Jake as an example. Just as Bill said in the novel, Jake was a man lost the touch with the earth. Jake took the words seriously and tried to discover his touch with the earth again. So he decided to travel with his friend Bill to Burguete. He fished trout there, enjoying the beautiful scene of the nature in order to regain the courage and the quietness at the bottom of his hearts. But they failed. When they came back from fishing, they went to cafes to have a drink frequently. Here is another example. Jake was interested in bull-fights. In my opinion, the ring of the bull-fight stood for the battle field of Jake’s life. And the bull-fighter was the kind of man he wanted to be. The bull-fighters could face with the pain, the danger and even death alone in the ring. They had the spirits that a true man should have. So I’d rather say that Jake was in fond of the passion and courage passed from the process of bull-fights instead that he indulged himself in this kind of entertainment. These represented the forms of his struggles inside silently in some way. His failure to fight in life should be attributed to the war. So I thought they were not to be blame first. Either in the past or in the future, a war can change a lot: a person, a family, a society and a world. The war was the rooted reason for their corruption. They should have our readers’ sympathy because they were victims.

When I read the novel, I also found that wines, love affairs, fishing and bull-fight festival took up a major part.

There were many kinds of wine in the novel. Nearly in each chapter there would be three to four kinds. They knew such lots of wine because they drank a lot. They needed the wines to numb them, to prevent them from thinking, from pain and suffering in mental. It was well known that when one drunk, he could sleep to death and didn’t know what was happening in the world around. Inn this way, Jake, Brett, Bill and other characters always went to drink to forget everything that gave them heavy blows in mental. The worse they were hurt, the more they drank.

The second thing that could show their maze was the love affairs, centering on elegant Brett. They had no goal of life so they took love as life raft of their lives. They thought love could comfort their lonely souls. Robert Cohn was a model. He fought with anyone who dated with Brett. He gave priority to love so when he was refused by Brett, he felt extremely upset than before. When he lost love, he lost everything. And Brett was another extreme. She always went out together with men if she wanted. She needed love to hocus herself.

In the travel and bull-fight fiesta in Spain, I could sense their emptiness, too, especially at the end of the travel in Burguete and at the end of the fiesta when they were back to everyday life. Jake said the fiesta was like a wonderful nightmare and he was drunker than he ever remembered having been. Yes, the world was not wheeling anyone, leaving a dead silence behind. The courage and passion that he looked for severely went away with the end of bull-fight fiesta. He owned nothing again. At the end of the novel, there was a conversation between Brett and Jake. ‘Oh, Jake’, Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned goal time together.’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’

They lost themselves again. Tomorrow, the sun also rises no matter what one is glad or sad. The sun rises and sets down, day after day, year after year, routing the same direction, which is just like their lives in the novel—drab, dull and boring.