Jake Barnes In The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises tells the story of Jack Barnes, a wounded and broken expatriate in post-war Europe, desperately trying to figure out what makes life worth living and how to go on living as a damaged man. Hemingway introduces a host of colorful characters with whom Jake can interact, including the femme fatale Brett, the Jewish scapegoat Cohn, and the dashing toreador Pedro Romero. However, while the novel is ostensibly about Jake, it is these characters that are true actors within the plot. Jake Barnes is a passive character in his own novel: all he does is observe and judge, rarely acting on his own, of his own volition, and for himself. Jake Barnes is the sun, around which the other characters revolve; but, like the

He says “Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about” (152). Jake states, simply, that he wants to learn how to live in the world with his injury. What narrator Jake knows but the character Jake does not know is that he will find an answer, but it will not be the answer that he expects. The plot of the novel is Jake learning how to live, and he learns to live by learning to be active in his life, rather than living in the passive role that he has taken. Jake learns to live in San Sebastian. Jake learns to live through leisure. Jake learns to live through

Once he is extricated from the lifestyle of the fiesta, with its sexual implication and derivations, he can engage in leisure and live for himself, without having to worry about his injury or be filled with sexually motivated anxieties. It is in this solitude and this context free of sexuality that he becomes less of a narrator, simply observing and appraising, and more of a character who acts on his own and feels. This is shown when he takes a dive into the water. Hemingway writes, “I dove deep once, swimming down to the bottom. I swam with my eyes open and it was green and dark” (Hemingway, 239). This scene demonstrates a direct contrast between two Jakes: the Jake at the beginning of the novel is afraid of the dark, thinking and crying alone in it (Hemingway 39), the Jake that sleeps with a light on (Hemingway, 152). The new Jake dives into the deep, dark sea with his eyes open. The fact that his eyes are open as he dives is vital because it shows that he can face his fears, his depression, and his anxiety and live with it, dealing with it. It is almost as if Jake has become a toreador, with his depression and anxiety playing the role of the bull: he learns to face it head on and without fear. Jake, for the first time in the novel, is acting. He is changing. He is living for himself, and by