The Sun Also Rises Report

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Content to drift through life, desperately seeking some sort of personal redemption through various forms of indulgence, these people had abandoned their old value system and heroes, only to find difficulty in finding new ones. A great deal of new literature was spawned in an effort to capture the attitudes and feelings of such individuals to reinvent a model of sorts for a people sorely lacking any satisfactory standard to follow. At the forefront of these writers was Ernest Hemingway, whose Novel, The Sun Also Rises, became just such a model, complete with Hemingway’s own definition of heroism. Many of the characters in the novel represented the popular stereotype of the post WWI expatriate Parisian: wanton and wild, with no real goals or ambitions. Mike Campbell, Robert Cohn, and Lady Brett Ashley, and even the protagonist Jake Barnes all demonstrate some or all of the aforementioned qualities throughout the novel. All seem perfectly content to exist in their own oblivious ...

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Jake accepts his situation with a great deal of integrity, despite the scathing pain of his unfulfilled love. As is consistent with the realistically human portrayal of Jake’s character, his role as a heroic figure is stifled somewhat by the constraints of society. Rather than exhibiting gallant feats of bravery consistent with the romantic definition of a hero, Jake’s valiance is displayed in a subtler, less tangible manner. By displaying the virtues of tolerance, honesty, patience and understanding, Jake proves himself to be as much of an heroic figure as can reasonably be expected in the real world under conventional circumstances. Jake’s maturity and ...

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