On The Theme Of Spiritual Wasteland In The Sun Also Rises From The Perspective Of The Trauma Theory

Ernest Miller Hemingway is one of the most influential American writers in the twentieth century. In 1954 he was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature for his “mastery of the art of modern narration.” With the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became a spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called “a lost generation.” In this masterpiece, the small group represented by Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley were addicted to drinking, dancing, bullfight watching and love affairs only for pleasure day by day. Most of their time was spent on the pursuit for the so-called pleasure and nothing extraordinary ever happened during this time.To some extent, The Sun Also Rises has left readers an image of wasteland, both mentally and physically, with that of Jake Barnes the most typical. The emergence of the image of wasteland was primarily the consequences of traumas after the First World War. It is not difficult to find out that Jake’s war traumas or war-induced wasteland to a large extent came from his experiences in World War I, which left him wounds both mentally and physically. The corporal injury always reminded him of his emasculation and led to his loss of will and hopes as well as spiritual values. He started to reduce the interpersonal relationship to an “exchanging principle” and was degraded to drinking and wandering, living in a spiritual wasteland.With more and more attention being paid to traumas, the approach of combining literary studies and trauma studies has become a main trend in American literary circles. The Sun Also Rises is an obvious example. War is considered to be the most obvious and universal cause of Jake’s and his friends’ traumas. Jake’s identity, the beliefs about himself, the world and the future included, was fundamentally changed by his war experiences. Witnessing and taking part in battles, being involved in killing, being injured---all of these led to a breakdown in his belief systems and had a lasting impact on his identity. His positive beliefs about the world have broken down, and with the loss of those beliefs, the love of the family and friends and the concern about the future have also disappeared. Jake in this novel was unable to satisfy his beloved Brett after the First World War, and this war left him physically and mentally traumatized, that is, a living death in a spiritual wasteland. Thus a study from the perspective of the trauma theory can illustrate the intrinsic causes of Jake’s and his partners’ traumas and nothingness.Most previous studies have only noted that the small group is closely related to the physical or psychological casualties of the First World War, and their pointless, restless, impotent wandering was considered as a token of modern man’s spiritual impotence. However, little importance has been attached to their wasteland-like existence. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake got lost in will, traditional values and hope. He became a pimp from a lover; he even lost the will to live in the luxurious and noisy world; his beliefs, too, fluctuated. What’s worse, he forgot the kernel of the American Dream and lost morals in the contact with others including his friends; besides, he was lacking in masculinity for his behaviors were feminized. Even he realized that he should make some efforts to get himself changed, nothing tuned out to be meaningful and he couldn’t see a rare glimmer of hope. This thesis mainly explores the causes of Jake’s spiritual wasteland from the perspective of the trauma theory. It turns out that it is Jake’s corporal and spiritual traumas that have led to his wasteland-like existence.