Masculinity In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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Masculinity in The Sun Also Rises
“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it” (Ernest Hemingway). In Ernest Hemingway’s renowned novel The Sun Also Rises he exhibits a form of this. This quote can be interpreted in many ways; one way being that there are clearly flaws people and this prevents relationships. Hemingway connects his personal life with this novel seeing that during his lifetime he has definitely had times where his masculinity is challenged and questioned. Throughout the course of this novel Hemingway illustrates a correlation between the fiction of the novel and the reality of his personal life. There are many interpreted themes of this novel, but one stands out more than others and that is masculinity. Hemingway …show more content…
Hemingway chooses to portray masculinity through the entire novel to depict one idea. That one idea is that Ernest Hemingway uses the flaws of each male character to display the perfect man in his eyes. He chooses to do this through the flaws and deficiencies of each male. Each male individual in the story has a flaw; whether it varies from relationship dominance, sexual duty fulfillment, or preventing relationships from getting too serious. In Robert James Reese’s article Hemingway’s Masculinity (2004), he states how the author uses his idea of masculinity throughout the novel, “By displaying their flaws in the men's interactions with Brett, Hemingway constructs an ideal of masculinity without explicitly describing it”(Para. 1). Hemingway implements a specific flaw in each male for a reason. There are many ways one can construct a theme of masculinity throughout a novel, but Hemingway chooses to do so in a specific way the means something to him. He achieves this task though the confrontations, arguments, and personalities of the primary characters. In the article Shmoop, it illustrates the specific way Hemingway implements his theme, “The insecurity of the central male characters produces an atmosphere of competition, rivalry, and mutual harassment, and we constantly witness petty arguments that are rooted in this sense of challenged masculinity”(para. 2). This article specifically describes how Hemingway went about portray a central theme of
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