A Novel Without A Hero

Engl. 355, 7/9/90, Prof. Messenger

“Maybe a story is better without any hero,” scrawled Ernest Hemingway in an early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. He was well into a story in which his narrator, his omnipresent point of view, was a man who was made sexually dysfunctional from a war wound; at this point heroism, though it might have been difficult, still could have been reached by circumvention. But a line of thought had been running through Hemingway’s head and was already woven into the novel, and perhaps he already had in mind the epigraph to this thread: an opening passage from the book of Ecclesiastes. This, with that passage in mind, would have to be a heroless novel; it would have to continue in the direction of thought of Qoheleth, the biblical philosopher [Qoheleth is the Hebrew equivalent to the Greek “Ecclesiastes,” which means preacher or leader of the assembly], because after all, whether it was written down or not, the epigraph was already being followed.

Rather than scrutinize those several famous verses from which the novel’s title came, and from which the standard Hemingway theme of a generation passing away was also born, the point might be made as clearly by looking at the verses in Ecclesiastes all around those of the epigraph and seeing how Hemingway did in fact parallel the philosophy of Qoheleth. Consider the two verses preceding the epigraph’s source: “Sheer futility, Qoheleth says. Sheer futility: everything is futile! What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun?” (Ec. 1:1,2, New Jerusalem Bible)  In other words, the Hebrew preacher asks, How can a  story of a suffered life ever have a hero? “What was, will be again,” the preacher continues after the epigraph verses, “what has been done will be done again and there is nothing new under the sun!” (Ec. 1:9)

On the surface, Jake Barnes is not nearly as pessimistic about life; but then, as always, there is that Hemingway iceberg, looming largely under the surface. Jake Barnes only occasionally lets show the “feelings of things coming that you could not prevent happening” (146), but in the same breath he reveals an “ignored tension” built around a memory of the war; and after the war he is emasculated, a fact he rarely talks about in the novel. “It’s all right,” he tells Bill, who had touched on the subject, “I don’t give a damn anymore” (124).

Qoheleth continues, and it might have been Jake himself writing at this point: “What is twisted cannot be straightened, what is not there cannot be counted” (Ec. 1:15). And in the second chapter the preacher finds, with less than heroic gesture, an ever-temporal solution: “I decided to hand my body over to drinking wine, my mind still guiding me in wisdom; I resolved to embrace folly, to discover the best way for people to spend their days under the sun” (Ec. 2:3).

In The Sun Also Rises, chapter two is devoted to a comparison between the philosophies of Jake and Robert Cohn. They are in a bar, “a good place,” with “a lot of liquor” (11). Cohn opens the discussion:

  “Listen, Jake. . . Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”   “Yes, every once in a while."
  ”Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”
  “What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell?”
  “I’m serious. “
  ”It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.
  “You ought to. “
  ”I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or another. I’m through worrying.“ (11)

Qoheleth, too, had come to this. Everything, even worrying, is futile and even vain, and it is better just to eat, drink, and enjoy whatever lies under the sun.

In the same chapter, Robert Cohn wants to go to South America, and Jake discourages him.
“I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.... If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same” (11). As if one mirrored the other, Qoheleth writes “Better the object seen (the here and now) than the sting of desire; for the latter too is futile and chasing after the wind” (Ec. 6:9).

It is clear that Robert Cohn, a hopeless worrier and a futile dreamer, cannot be the hero of Hemingway’s novel, but there are several other possibilities, and in the course of the book Jake briefly considers each of them. Mike? He practically boasts that he is a loser with no medals, and most of the time he is “tight.“ Bill? He is a “lazy bum,” and usually ahead of Jake and Mike in the “utilization” of wine. Brett? No, Jake decides. “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley” (148).

Again the mirror: “This is what I think, says Qoheleth, having examined one thing after another to draw some conclusion, which I am still looking for, although unsuccessfully: one man in a thousand, I may find, but a woman better than other women---never. This alone is my conclusion: God has created man straightforward and human artifices are human inventions” (Ec. 7:27-29).

Then Jake considers the bullfighter Pedro Romero, and at first he idolizes him, standing him next to erstwhile hero Juan Belmonte, who doesn’t stand a chance. Pedro Romero, though, has an unseen iceberg himself: he will one day be, provided he survives the cycle, an aging Belmonte to some other rising star. Furthermore, even within the novel and on the surface, he is shown to be painfully human. His face swells up from Robert Cohn’s punches, and in the end even Romero cannot hold on to Brett for very long.

“Another thing I have observed under the sun,” muses Qoheleth once more, “that the race is not won by the speediest, nor the battle by the champions; it is not the wise who get food, nor the intelligent wealth, nor the learned favor: chance and mischance befall them all”(Ec. 9:11). 17.

In Jake’s story, Romero almost got away with becoming the hero. He did in fact fight the battle and win the race, and as in a stereotypical hero-novel he even left town with the girl, riding off, as it were, into the sunset. But Hemingway devised a staggered ending to work against Romero. First we learn that his victory gift, the ear of the bull, was allusively left behind in the back of a bed stand drawer. And then we are shown, after everyone has gone off in different directions, Bill here and Mike there and Romero and Brett together and Jake alone, that just as the title told us from the beginning the setting sun also rises and continues on its never-ending cycle. Brett comes back to visit Jake and Romero is left to his bulls. “How sweet light is, how delightful it is to see the sun!” (Ec. 11:7).

The two enjoy their impossible life together again, and in the end, for a brief moment, Brett considers how sweet---and heroic---it might have been if their own sun would never have set at all. “We could have had such a damned good time together,” she says, and Jake replies with the book’s famous close: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (247) In this we can hear Qoheleth’s closing comment, too, sounding less pessimistic and more matter of fact, concerning the mere prettiness of dreams and “couldabeens. “ ”Sheer futility,” he says once again, “everything is futile” (Ec. 12:8). There are no heroes, and isn’t it futile to pretend?

An Additional Thought for an Extended Paper

Certainly there is plenty to The Sun Also Rises that does not match directly with the book of Ecclesiastes, just as there is much in Ecclesiastes that doesn’t even get skimmed by the citing of several scattered verses, or the incorporation of four verses into a book’s epigraph. By the same token, there is much more that is comparable that1haven’teventouched on. For instance, Qoheleth’s and Jake’s ideas on fishing and solitude and companionship, on love and hate and on the contemplation and deference to God. But then, as Jake says, “You’ll lose it if you talk about it” (245), and as Qoheleth says, “Be in no hurry to speak. . . (and) be sparing of speech.”