Absurdity In The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, successfully presents to the reader the image of a whole generation, the Lost Generation after World War One. The bloody "dirty" war collapsed traditional values and destroyed their rosy hopes. The world suddenly became absurd, unreasonable. The young European and American expatriates who served in the war were cut off from the old familiar values and yet unable to come to terms with the new civilization. The emotional upheavals of Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley, and their friends Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell, and Robert Cohn, provide a lively cartography of experience of the absurdity. This thesis interprets the novel from the perspective of the absurdity revealed in The Sun Also Rises, studying how Hemingway conveys his feeling and understanding of absurdity in the novel and how the novel demonstrates the characters' living conditions in the absurd world which will be illustrated by the following three perspectives: alienation, androgyny and futility.This thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction points out that this thesis will study the absurdity revealed in The Sun Also Rises. And the absurdity demonstrated in the Theatre of the Absurd will be briefly surveyed. Also the distinction in terms of writing techniques employed in the Theatre of the Absurd and in this novel will be discussed respectively.Chapter One deals with alienation presented in the novel. It will be discussed from two respects: why the characters get alienated from the environment and how the alienation is demonstrated. The absurd Great War is without doubt a stark factor for their being alienated from the society. After the war, they are seen to live a rootless and pointless life, adrift in European cities. Traditional values, such as church, country, family and so on, mean nothing to them. They intend to forget the"hell" suffering in drinking, cab-riding, fishing, bullfighting and love affairs. But in the end, none of the major problems have been resolved and they find themselves no better than before. The absurdity is reflected by the fact that the outside absurd world after the war renders the characters depressed, alienated and devastated.Chapter Two is concerning androgyny revealed in the novel. Androgyny, blurring of sex distinction, is a distorted form, which reflects the characters' inner turmoil and perversions in the face of overwhelming absurdity. There is a disparity between what they are and what they should be. Obviously they are self-alienated. Two androgynous characters are created to heighten the absurdity: Lady Brett Ashley is defeminized while Jake Barnes is unmanned. Brett almost plays a mannish role in public through her boyish appearance, cross-dressing, androgynous language and manners, which reflects her frustration towards the absurdity. However Jake goes to another extreme, he becomes a feminized man because he is rendered impotent by the Great War. The unreasonable, absurd world is really beyond their control, which results in their sense of abnormality. The gender reversal helps reinforce the absurd vision in the novel.Chapter Three is about futility sharply highlighted in the novel. In the absurd world that Hemingway experienced and revealed in The Sun Also Rises one unforgetale scene is that human beings' endeavors end in futility. Confronted with absurdity, the characters live in "the odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity"(Camus 1955:10). Yet these emotionally paralyzed characters refuse to exist with no values at all. Instead, they persist in holding on to love, the last hope to defend against absurdity. To their disappointment, love also did not survive through the Great War. Hemingway creates four major pairs of love seeking around Brett Ashley: Brett with Jake Barnes, Brett with Robert Cohn, Brett with Mike Campbelland Brett with Pedro Romero. But their en...