Group B 11/11

In this weeks blog post, I want to discuss the repeated theme of alcohol in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.  Alcohol is prevalent in almost all of the characters' social lives.  When they go out, the night is often consumed by the use of alcohol, many times leaving characters overly intoxicated.  For instance, when Jake goes out with Cohn and Brett in chapter 3, after hitting a couple bars, he describes his state as being "a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless," (Hemingway p. 29).  We can further analyze this quote by dissecting why and what impact alcohol has on the characters.

In my opinion, the characters use alcohol as a means to wash away the pain of their miserable lives.  Jake, along with others, constantly expresses the dissatisfaction that he has with his life.  He is always complaining and has a bleak view on the world.  Brett is similar to Jake, and when see this when she tells him, "Oh, darling, I've been so miserable," (Hemingway p. 32).  For the most part, the characters live their lives with discontent, which is why Jake is jealous of Cohn for just the tiny amount of happiness that he has.  Jake and Brett use alcohol as a way to escape from the reality of their lives.  They use alcohol as a coping mechanism.  We also saw Bill Gorton, his alcohol use, and his awful character, further proving the negative effects that alcohol can have in this novel.

Comments

  1. Jordan SilversmithNovember 11, 2018 at 7:13 PM

    I agree with your point, as it is clear through the actions of many characters that alcohol can be a necessary escape for these characters. However, there are almost no situations where a character actually does something that they regret while they are drunk. This makes me question the fact that Hemingway feels that escape through alcohol is a bad thing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Group B Blog Post

I felt like analyzing Midnight in Paris was one of my most enjoyable classes of the year personally. It was good to get away from literature and briefly touch on film for a change, so I enjoyed it. From the article we only really talked about topic, the left to right duality with left being "good" and right being "bad". Just in that one paragraph alone, so many film elements were mentioned and what they mean to the film. There are too many to talk about in just one blog post, but his class must have been intense analyzing all of the aspects he brought up. One of the film perspectives was the idea of dominance when someone is higher on the screen and this was reflected a lot in the movie. Gil's fiancee was often shown towering over Gil because she always got what she wanted in the movie and was a negative influence on him. Something else I found interesting was the color contrast in the movie. When he was in his regular life, everything was light and almost bland...
Read more

Norman Mailer on Boxing

All -- I've attached a message from a colleague of mine below; a more tragic end to this piece than to the Ali pieces. SS Here's another piece of boxing belles-lettres I've never forgotten: Norman Mailer -- who also wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle and features in that documentary, When We Were Kings  -- on the death of Benny Paret: Paret was a Cuban, a proud club fighter who had become welterweight champion because of his unusual ability to take a punch. His style of fighting was to take three punches to the head in order to give back two. At the end of ten rounds, he would still be bouncing, his opponent would have a headache. But in the last two years, over the fifteen-round fights, he had started to take some bad maulings. This fight had its turns. Griffith won most of the early rounds, but Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth. Griffith had trouble getting up, but made it, came alive and was dominating Paret again before the round ...
Read more

Iliad Blog Post Group B

The presence of divine intervention and the role of fate are themes that really struck me as we read the selected passages of the Iliad. Examples of divine intervention appear in the very beginning of book one when Chryse prays to Apollo to plague the Achaeans. Apollo answers his prayer and the Achaeans start to die of the disease. The presence of the Gods in the Iliad plays a major role in the plot progression. Athena also appears by Achilles size in book one and prevents him from killing Agamemnon. If the mortals were left to their own devices and the Gods didn't intervene with the plot then this piece of literature may have turned out much differently. The dream that Zeus sends to Agamemnon in book 2 is interpreted as a sign of fate, yet it is just a trick to harm the Achaeans. The interests of the Gods in the lives of the mortals are what drive the narrative forward. If Hera had not sent Athena to stop the Achaeans from sailing away, then there would most likely not be a story ...
Read more