The Sun Also Rises (1)
I recently started The Sun Also Rises (TSAR). The author is Ernest Hemingway, the author I am researching for my author study. Since I have already researched the author a bit, I was interested to see if this book would live up to the hefty praise Hemingway has received. I only read the first chapter and was very impressed. In the past month, I have not read a book of substance. I have been reading teen fiction by authors who have not even graduated college yet. Delving into this book was a huge change for me.
This first chapter is basically a character sketch of Robert Cohn. This sketch is given by a close friend of his whom Cohn knows from tennis. The sketch begins with declaring that Cohn was “middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” In the style of Hemingway, that declaration did not impress me. But what did impress me was that the author knew that describing Cohn in the same manner that he himself would, reveals a lot about his character. The fact that Cohn would tell people about this title shows that this means something to him. It shows it means that he can stand up for himself and that no one will mess with him because of his Jewish background. Since this means so much to him, we can assume there is some history of being picked on or hurt because of his religion. The narrator continues to describe Cohn as coming from a combination of the richest and oldest families in New York. The way the distinction is made in the book reminds me of a comparison between old money and new money in “The Great Gatsby.”
Hemingway surprised me on the second page. His narrator had talked all about Cohn being a middleweight boxing champion for two pages and then all the sudden he writes, “He… was married by the first girl who was nice to him.” He then goes on to talk a little bit about the marriage but the story isn’t nearly as detailed as the boxing story. This is surprising because I would have thought Hemingway would have dragged out the details of the wedding and how they met. Maybe Hemingway was trying to show that the marriage did not mean as much to Cohn as being the middleweight boxing champion meant to him. Since the narrator only seems to know what Cohn has told him, I am sure he has heard many more stories about the boxing than the marriage so it is proportionately represented in the narrator’s character sketch of him.
I find it intriguing that you are reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway because I was struggling to choose between Hemingway or Hawthorne for my author study. I had actually started reading this story on a day I had forgotten my own reading book and what I found to be interesting was how Hemingway sort of combines a character to his initial description of the setting. It’s an extremely short account of the boxing character instead of a multiple page description of the setting before diving into any characters. In writing this way, Hemingway seems to set off at a brisk pace and then several pages later, there are now several characters in Paris eating a late dinner at a cafe or restaurant. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I have gotten although I would say that the reason he doesn’t spend as much time describing the character’s marriage is because he introduces it to the reader as something insignificant, by saying that he married the first woman that was nice to him which he considers was expected due to the character’s personality. There’s something about the way he writes, or how all these characters are emerging so soon that it makes the reader, or at least me feel as though I’m not only witnessing the interactions, but I’m being whisked around like anyone of them and I feel more connected to the text. The only thing I was wondering about is what you believe is Hemingway’s style and why you were not impressed when he declared Cohn as a middleweight boxing champion?
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