The Lost Generation Gets Wasted (aka Alcohol in The Sun Also Rises)
The
Sun Also Rises, taken at the very surface, is about a bunch of rich people
and their rich people problems – dating, drinking, parties, breakups, and so
on. At the surface, it’s about Jake's unrequited love for Brett – the oldest
cliché probably ever. But, as I think we have discovered in class, Hemingway’s
writing is never about the surface.
I think one of the large points
Hemingway is making, under all of this, is how destructive the war was. You can
say that Jake and all his friends live life loosely, they party a lot, they have
very trivial problems, but I think those problems are indicative of what’s
going on inside, and looking at characters' relationships with drinking is very revealing as to who they are.
Let’s take Brett for example, the
epitome of a party girl – she is perpetually drunk, has a lot of men, and is
just a fun person. A thing we know about Brett though was that she was a
volunteer nurse. Does the drunken, fun-loving Brett we know sound like someone
that would volunteer to be a nurse? Probably not. I believe that before the
war, Brett was a completely different person. Seeing the horrors of war
fundamentally changed Brett, and I think that is what drove her to drink and
party – as a way to cope with her surroundings.
Another example is this coping is Jake.
When we meet Brett for the first time (on page 28), and Jake sees her with the
group of gay men, he sits down at the bar and starts downing drinks like
they’re medicine. This clearly shows a skewed relationship with alcohol, where
he’s drinking not as just a social activity, but using it to calm down, or even
in place of fun. One thing specifically that I noticed throughout the book is
the sheer volume of alcohol Jake and his friends consume. Every scene includes
people “getting tight” or talking about who’s drinking what, or at least
mentioning alcohol. We see Jake and Bill down two bottles of wine in one
sitting in Spain. That’s alcohol equivalent to 14 shots, split between the two
of them it’s 7ish shots each, and they weren’t even in a club or a bar, they
were just fishing in broad daylight, on a hike.
In fact, Jake himself describes all this on page 150, in the bottommost paragraph. He describes how
drinking at the dinner table with Cohn and Mike was relieving the tension, just
as he used to do during the war. In those few sentences, a lot is explained and
confirmed – the fact that Jake and his friends use alcohol to manage stress, that this
habit developed during the war, and not to mention that the war literally drove
them to drink.
History books describe the roaring
twenties as being joyful because of so much celebration and happiness because
of the end of the war. But The Sun Also
Rises has made me consider the fact that it may not have been as fun as it
seemed, and that the vast amounts of alcohol and partying could have been used for coping with post-war
life.
This is a great point you make! It's easy not to pay as much attention to the amount of drinking the main characters do, just because they drink so much it's almost weird to see them having a conversation sober. I definitely agree that the main characters in the book use alcohol as a way to dull their feelings, both on the war and events from the present time. At the moment it doesn't seem to be a huge problem for them as they don't experience any big consequences due to their large amount of drinking, but I wonder if as the book moves on we will see any problems arise to this?
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting post! You make some very clear points in here that I also agree with! In the beginning part of your post you mentioned how Brett was most-likely a completely different person before the war. I also started to think about what type of person Jake may have been before the war. Like Brett, I think Jake was a complete opposite person compared to what he is today. I like to think that he was like Bill, funny and confident in his masculinity. I also think that he was a lot less bitter and condescending. In terms of drinking alcohol to drown out their sorrows, I agree with this wholeheartedly! We even see that when Jake gets upset, he has to go to a bar and get a drink. This also may be a reason that Cohn is “different” compared to all his friends. Cohn didn’t go through the war and doesn’t drink. Besides the fact that Cohn is Jewish, I think this adds to why Mike, Bill, Brett, and Jake don’t view him as “one of them”.
ReplyDeleteI also thought about the role of drinking in Hemingways work. At first, I was pretty annoyed with how much they drank everyday. Almost every page included something about them drinking, and it surprised me how throughout most of the book everyone is still pretty sane although they're drunk 24/7 (getting back to the idea of good drunks vs. bad drunks). But when you think about the time period, it does make sense that people have trauma and issues they're dealing with and they're just stuffing it all down surface level with drinks and numbing themselves so they don't feel the pain anymore. Its kind of sad, but at the same time its a lot more understandable. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI hardly ever thought about Brett's past as a volunteer nurse in WW1 because it does seem like an experience disconnected from the person we saw. Yet an experience as gritty as being a nurse on a war front surely would impact any person. I wonder if it is an experience Brett avoids on purpose, and whether she would openly discuss that time of her life or if it's something she's looking to leave behind.
ReplyDelete