The Sun Also Rises as an anti-war novel

¶ … Sun Also Rises as an Anti-War Novel

Ernest Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises as an Anti-War Novel

The Sun Also Rises is one of the major works that defines the "Lost Generation" of post-World War I. The generation that saw the War came back lost and confused, feeling an overwhelming sense of injustice in the world, which caused them to lose their faith in morality and love. Their lives were marked by seemingly fruitless wandering, aimless and lost without the guidance of these fundamental principles. The book shows us that war is not only damaging in the short-term to the physical structures and human lives, but it continues to reverberate through the people who lived to see remember what they saw. Though the Allied forces technically won World War I the generation who lived through it lost so much more than anyone could ever have expected. Hemingway showcases the continued casualties of war in The Sun Also Rises, and implies that no war is worth the loss of humanity.

The main character of Jake Barnes can be viewed as representative of the Lost Generation. A veteran of war, he has trouble dealing, both psychologically and physically, with what he witnessed and experienced during the war. His impotence reflects not only his physical injury, but also his inability to reconcile his growing feelings of emptiness. He is acutely aware of the moral vacuum that the war has created for his generation, and he is sunk deeply into that world. He has an acute sense of what is happening among the people around him, but he does not spend much time in introspection because of the pain it causes. Though he moves from place to place, he is acutely aware that, "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." He is trapped between knowing and understanding the problems that the world is facing and that the War has created for his generation, but he is far too close to the problem to do anything about it. His own injury from the War and from the unrequited love he has for Lady Brett keep him deeply mired in the psychological fallout that the First World War has brought on his generation.

Lady Brett is another showcase of the moral and psychological mess the War had created. Her promiscuity is representative of both the immoral lifestyle the veterans of the War had adopted, as well as the inability to connect with another human being on an intimate level that is the outcome of the loss of the belief in justice and morality in the world. Her relationship with Jake is especially poignant for the confusion of manhood that the War created. Brett is a woman who took part in the War, and lost her love in the War. These experiences seem to have developed her more masculine traits, while Jake's experiences have forced him to remove a part of what he perceived to be masculinity. The War created a confusion about the idea of manhood since the violence and trauma of the war seemed to be hyper-masculine, and seeing the definition of manhood pushed to such an extreme was exceptionally troubling for most involved in the War. For the women involved, they found that their femininity had no place in the War, and thus Lady Brett represents the how femininity was also confused as a reflection of the problems of manhood. Lady Brett's life is ultimately empty and unfulfilling no matter how many men she finds herself with, but she "can't go anywhere alone" as Jake points out. Her lack of commitment to any one man can be seen as a representation of how the War destroyed traditional ideas of love and romance. In the final lines of the novel, she muses on what a relationship between her and Jake could have been, but she is stopped by a policeman signaling the cab they are riding in to stop. This moment sums up the sad state that Hemingway found the world when Jake says, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Robert Cohn can be seen as the old values in a new post-War world. He is the only non-veteran among the characters presented in the book, and therefore he has retained his sense of dignity, romance, and morality. The problem is that these old-fashioned ideas have no place in the new world that the War has created. He cannot stand up against the immoral lashings that the group continuously subject him to. Though there is nothing fundamentally wrong with his traditional values -- in fact his is one of the most successful of the group, being a popular writer -- they are consistently beaten down by the cynicism and immorality that the world is now awash in after the War. Since he did not experience the War first hand, he is not morally lost himself, but he is lost in this new immoral world. His leaving Spain after an attempt to reconcile with Romero represents the defeat that old-fashioned morality has faced in post-War culture.