Text Rationale for The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Text Rationale for The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Rationale: The Sun Also Rises portrays the lives of the members of the so-called Lost Generation, the group of men and women whose early adulthood was consumed by World War I. This horrific conflict, referred to as the Great War, set new standards for death and immorality in war. It shattered many people s beliefs in traditional values of love, faith, and manhood. Without these long-held notions to rely on, members of the generation that fought and worked in the war suffered great moral and psychological aimlessness. The futile search for meaning in the wake of the Great War shapes The Sun Also Rises. Although the characters rarely mention the war directly, its effects haunt everything they do and say. Summary: On the surface the novel is a love story between the protagonists Jake Barnes a man whose war wound has made him impotent - and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. Barnes is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman. Brett, with her bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Book One is set in the café society of young American expatriates in Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Later, Brett tells Jake she loves him, but they both know that they have no chance at a stable relationship. In Book Two, Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett s fiancé Mike Campbell, who arrives from Scotland, joins Jake. Jake and Bill travel south and meet Robert Cohn at Bayonne for a fishing trip in the hills northeast of Pamplona. Instead of fishing, Cohn stays in Pamplona to wait for the overdue Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a few weeks earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. After Jake and Bill enjoy five days of fishing the streams near Burguete they rejoin the group in Pamplona. All begin to drink heavily. The others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks, resent Cohn. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces Brett to the 19-year-old matador Romero at the Hotel Montoya; she is smitten with him and seduces him. The jealous tension among the men builds Jake, Campbell, Cohn, and Romero each want Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he beats up. Despite his injuries, Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring. Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona; Bill returns to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastian in northeastern Spain. As Jake is about to return to Paris, he receives a telegram from Brett asking for help; she had gone to Madrid with Romero. He finds her there in a cheap hotel, without money, and

without Romero. She announces she has decided to go back to Mike. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been. Merit: The Sun Also Rises has been called Hemingway s greatest novel by many great literary critics. Its focus on setting as character and plot development makes it a perfect choice for students in the Sense of Place unit. Benefit to Students: From Marital Tragedy, in The New York Times Book Review Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: You are all a lost generation. This is the novel for which a keen appetite was stimulated by Mr. Hemingway's exciting volume of short stories, In Our Time. The clear objectivity and the sustained intensity of the stories, and their concentration upon action in the present moment, seemed to point to a failure to project a novel in terms of the same method, yet a resort to any other method would have let down the reader's expectations. It is a relief to find that "The Sun Also Rises" maintains the same heightened, intimate tangibility as the shorter narratives and does it in the same kind of weighted, quickening prose. Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily have become a spectacle with unexplained horrors, and disciplined it to a design which gives full value to its Dionysian, all but uncapturable, elements. On the face of it, he has simply gathered, almost at random, a group of American and British expatriates from Paris, conducted them on a fishing expedition, and exhibited them against the background of a wild Spanish fiesta and bullfight. The characters are concisely indicated. Much of their inherent natures are left to be betrayed by their own speech, by their apparently aimless conversation among themselves. Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford's records of talk. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks. No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature. Brief description of proposed classroom activities generated by text: This book will be one of two choices students may select for the Sense of Place unit in the second semester of English III. Both texts (In Cold Blood and The Sun Also Rises) are excellent examples of the guiding questions for the unit: How is our identity shaped by where we re from and where we want to go? How do your expectations and behaviors change as we move from place to place? How do we find places where we feel we belong, and how do we cultivate and protect that feeling?

In addition to their chosen seminal text, students will study the following classic short texts from American literature (using the textbook): The Devil and Tom Walker A Rose for Emily The Masque of the Red Death A Christmas Memory Hills Like White Elephants We will approach all works through the lens of rhetorical analysis rather than classic literary analysis. List of the TEKS the proposed text supports: (1) Reading/Vocabulary Development. Students understand new vocabulary and use it when reading and writing. Students are expected to: (B) analyze textual context (within a sentence and in larger sections of text) to draw conclusions about the nuance in word meanings; (2) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Theme and Genre. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) analyze the way in which the theme or meaning of a selection represents a view or comment on the human condition; (B) relate the characters and text structures of mythic, traditional, and classical literature to 20th and 21st century American novels, plays, or films; and (C) relate the main ideas found in a literary work to primary source documents from its historical and cultural setting. (5) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Fiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of fiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) evaluate how different literary elements (e.g., figurative language, point of view) shape the author's portrayal of the plot and setting in works of fiction; (B) analyze the internal and external development of characters through a range of literary devices; (C) analyze the impact of narration when the narrator's point of view shifts from one character to another; and

(D) demonstrate familiarity with works by authors in American fiction from each major literary period. (7) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Sensory Language. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about how an author's sensory language creates imagery in literary text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze the meaning of classical, mythological, and biblical allusions in words, phrases, passages, and literary works. (8) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Culture and History. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about the author's purpose in cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how the style, tone, and diction of a text advance the author's purpose and perspective or stance. (12) Reading/Media Literacy. Students use comprehension skills to analyze how words, images, graphics, and sounds work together in various forms to impact meaning. Students will continue to apply earlier standards with greater depth in increasingly more complex texts. Students are expected to: (A) evaluate how messages presented in media reflect social and cultural views in ways different from traditional texts; (B) evaluate the interactions of different techniques (e.g., layout, pictures, typeface in print media, images, text, sound in electronic journalism) used in multi-layered media; (C) evaluate the objectivity of coverage of the same event in various types of media; and (D) evaluate changes in formality and tone across various media for different audiences and purposes. (13) Writing/Writing Process. Students use elements of the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing) to compose text. Students are expected to: (A) plan a first draft by selecting the correct genre for conveying the intended meaning to multiple audiences, determining appropriate topics through a range of strategies (e.g., discussion, background reading, personal interests, interviews), and developing a thesis or controlling idea; (B) structure ideas in a sustained and persuasive way (e.g., using outlines, note taking, graphic organizers, lists) and develop drafts in timed and open-ended situations that include transitions and rhetorical devices to convey meaning; (C) revise drafts to clarify meaning and achieve specific rhetorical purposes,consistency of tone, and logical organization by rearranging the words, sentences, and paragraphs to employ tropes (e.g., metaphors, similes, analogies, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical

questions, irony), schemes (e.g., parallelism, antithesis, inverted word order, repetition, reversed structures), and by adding transitional words and phrases; (D) edit drafts for grammar, mechanics, and spelling; and (E) revise final draft in response to feedback from peers and teacher and publish written work for appropriate audiences. (15) Writing/Expository and Procedural Texts. Students write expository and procedural or work-related texts to communicate ideas and information to specific audiences for specific purposes. Students are expected to: (A) write an analytical essay of sufficient length that includes: (i) effective introductory and concluding paragraphs and a variety of sentence structures; (ii) rhetorical devices, and transitions between paragraphs; (iii) a clear thesis statement or controlling idea; (iv) a clear organizational schema for conveying ideas; (v) relevant and substantial evidence and well-chosen details; and (vi) information on multiple relevant perspectives and a consideration of the validity, reliability, and relevance of primary and secondary sources; Clarification of any potentially controversial segments and why the text remains a suitable choice, despite being potentially controversial: Violence (in the bullfighting) (or in the fight between the male characters Romero and Jake) Sexuality (between Brett and several male characters - though this is not really controversial, as it is indirectly mentioned, not directly described) Mild Language Anti-Semitism Similar Works: (both works also by Hemingway) A Farewell to Arms A Moveable Feast