Drunken Truths: The Unexpected Benefit of Being Tight

Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, written and set in the 1920s, is a novel featuring characters of the ‘Lost Generation’ that seem to use alcohol as a means of escaping a reality permanently tainted by the war. The number of times that alcohol appears in the novel is Hemingway’s response to Prohibition in the United States. Hemingway depicts a group of friends whose activities are strewn together with the common theme of alcohol, and the easy access they have to it. Hemingway takes an anti-prohibition stance in the novel, but in an unexpected way; while the events in the novel that romanticize drinking tend to be light and unimportant, it is the events that explore the less glamorous side of drinking that Hemingway uses to get his anti-Prohibition point across. These post-war ‘Lost Generation’ characters are adept at keeping their problems and feelings hidden while sober, so it is only natural that alcohol’s role in the novel is one that exposes truth. Ironically, the characters intend to use drinking to escape reality even though it is the backdrop that Hemingway uses to reveal it.

Hemingway attempts to balance the heavier drunk experiences his characters have with a handful of positive drinking episodes in order to create a more complete portrait of a life that involves easy access to alcohol. He achieves this balance due to the positive experiences either being interrupted by negative moments, or bearing little weight on the outcome of the novel, and therefore being unmemorable in comparison to his bigger truth-exposing drunk scenes. Hemingway’s only wholly successful attempt at a romantic depiction of drinking is on the bus ride to Burguete. Jake and Bill enjoy a great journey interacting with the Basque people on the bus, purely thanks to the icebreaking catalyst that is alcohol. Many of the interactions are a result of wine: “…I spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He [the Basque with the big wine bag] apologized and made me take another drink…They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles” (126-27). What could easily be a significant cultural awkwardness is remedied by a common interest in wine. Over the next nine pages wine is the catalyst for laughter, and conversation, and this bus ride is one of the few episodes of untainted enjoyment in the novel; Jake’s narration is completely uninterrupted by the usual thoughts of his injury, of Brett, or of being ‘lost.’ Hemingway’s other attempts at depicting an alluring kind of drinking are always somehow tarnished. The discussions of tender subjects cast a shadow on otherwise positive experiences, as happens on the first day Jake and Bill go fishing:

BILL. What about this Brett business?
…
JAKE. I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it.
BILL. You aren’t sore I asked you?
JAKE. Why the hell should I be?
BILL. I’m going to sleep.
(151-52)

Up to this point the trip has been peaceful and filled with drunken jokes, but Jake’s response to Bill quickly reminds the reader that these characters are not happy. At one of the less dramatic dinners, Jake enjoys himself because of the alcohol, yet the ominous feeling he describes taints the positive experience: “There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.” Jake implies that these are not nice people they just seem to be nice (180). These attempts might be unsuccessful in showing drinking as an enticing experience, but they are still significant to show that Hemingway covers all kinds of drinking experiences in the novel, not just negative ones. The pleasurable experiences one can have from drinking are present, but the less glamorous drunken sections in the novel drastically outweigh them.

Hemingway uses drinking as a means of exposing truth, and therefore depicts alcohol as a positive thing for these ‘lost’ people. Mike is the character that is most often drunk in the novel, but he still reveals insight on his true character when he reaches extreme levels of intoxication. While sober, or more appropriately in Mike’s case, less drunk, he claims that he isn’t bothered by Brett’s escapades with other men. The real truth is that he is extremely jealous and annoyed by what Brett does, it is predictable that he would feel this way deep down, but it does take a large amount of alcohol for Mike to finally reveal it himself. At other points in the novel Mike berates Robert Cohn for being Jewish, even though it seems more likely that Mike would be upset about Cohn’s affair with Brett rather than his ethnicity. The major outburst that reveals his jealousy occurs during the group’s lunch on the final day of the fiesta:

MIKE. Brett’s got a bull-fighter, she had a Jew named Cohn, but he turned out badly.
BRETT. I am not going to listen to that sort of rot from you, Michael.
…
MIKE. Brett’s got a bull-fighter, a beautiful, bloody bullfighter.
BRETT. Would you mind walking over with me? I want to talk to you Jake.
MIKE. Tell him all about your bullfighter, oh to hell with your bullfighter!
He tipped the table so that all the beers and the dish of shrimps went over with a crash.
BRETT. Come on, let’s get out of this.
(298)

Mike is clearly jealous and he is unafraid to reveal it due to his deep intoxication. In conjunction with the pattern of characters avoiding confrontation in the novel, Brett immediately looks to escape from a real conversation about her relationship with Mike. While Mike may drink to subdue his feelings even more, he reaches a point in his drinking where alcohol fulfills its divine role in the novel by showing a truer side of this repressed character.

As it does with Mike, Alcohol reveals jealousy within Jake even though he works hard to contain his feelings. It is hard to know how Jake is truly feeling about Brett from scene to scene because he refrains from talking about it outside of the dialogue Brett and Jake share. As Chapter XIV opens Jake self-proclaims that he is “quite drunk,” and he becomes angry after he hears Brett and Mike laughing together in their room: “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley” (181-82). Earlier in the novel, Jake develops an unfounded anger with the group of gay men that Brett enters the bar with: “I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure” (24). He admits that he, “was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless,” in the following page, which makes sense since Jake only shows large amounts of emotion when he is drunk (25). It is a testament to how wildly he must feel for Brett if he becomes jealous when he sees her hanging out with gay men. His anger may come from a realization that these gay men have the capacity to please Brett sexually; if they so chose to, they could fulfill her in ways he cannot. Insight into Jake’s feelings for Brett and Jake’s abuse of alcohol go hand in hand in the novel, and it is interesting to note that Jake, “was very drunk. [He] was drunker than [he] ever remembered having been,” directly after watching Romero’s final bullfight and witnessing first-hand the way Brett and Romero connect (278). Jake is trying to escape the pain and jealousy that he feels from his love for Brett by getting drunk, but this only results in a pattern of drinking that the other people in his life will eventually notice, if they have not already. Drinking again fills its role of bringing the truths to the foreground of those who are trying to drown reality within it.

The insight alcohol brings to Brett’s character isn’t as explicit as that of Mike’s or Jake’s, yet it is just as present. Brett hides her trust issues behind her man-eater façade, and possibly does not mind being ‘lost’ since she never drinks to the point that would cause her to accidentally reveal her issues. It is Mike’s drinking that brings her issues out from hiding; he drunkenly reveals a crucial piece of Brett’s backstory:

“‘Ashley, chap she got the title from, was a sailor, you know. Ninth baronet. When he came home he wouldn't sleep in a bed. Always made Brett sleep on the floor. Finally, when he got really bad, he used to tell her he'd kill her. Always slept with a loaded service revolver. Brett used to take the shells out when he'd gone to sleep.’ ” (252-53)

Brett’s work in the military hospital during the war would have been scarring enough, but her real issues derive from having had to deal with her husband’s post-war trauma; Brett could no longer trust and feel safe with the person she married. Brett surrounds herself with people that she doesn’t particularly love or invest in because it creates a sense of security for her, she knows that they will be unable to hurt her since she doesn’t value them highly enough. Brett has fleeting fun with Cohn and Count Mippipopolous, and she always comes back to the predictable Mike, who she will likely remain simply engaged to forever. Brett does value Jake, but she is not afraid of him because their relationship is heading nowhere, and when Romero brings up the idea of marriage she convinces him to leave her. Brett is another character that has become a master in the art of hiding from her feelings, but given that she does not seem to mind being ‘lost’, she is the only one that might succeed in hiding from them forever.

Out of the core group of five, Cohn is the character that drinks the least in the novel; it is not a coincidence that the reader therefore gets little insight into his true character. “Mike was a bad drunk. Brett was a good drunk. Bill was a good drunk. Cohn was never drunk” (212). Most of the novel’s action is centered on Cohn’s affair and, from that point on, all of the information received about Cohn is to do with the affair. Information on the affair is all the reader receives so it makes Cohn one-dimensional. Since he is already compartmentalized in Mike, Bill, Brett, and Jake’s minds for not having been in the war, the affair only demonizes and excludes him further. Due to this exclusion, and the fact that he rarely drinks, it makes sense that the reader is left to guess what lies beneath Cohn’s exterior.

Hemingway uses alcohol to shape the characters in his novel, and reveal things about them in an extremely sensible way; these characters are not people that would waltz around openly discussing their issues in a sober state. Hemingway sees the insights that his characters are able to have because of extremely drunk moments as a valuable part of life, and something that is missing from the lives of people living in America. On the surface the novel seems to portray drinking in a negative light, but upon deeper inspection the drunken experiences these characters have reveal truths that they otherwise would not have exposed. Under prohibition, how are people in the United States expected to deal with the heaviness that comes with seeking a post-war identity? How do they deal with being part of the “Lost Generation?” Hemingway’s novel is definitely anti-prohibition, and pro-reconstruction through the use of outlets like alcohol that aid people in confronting their fears, whether or not they are falsely expecting to escape from them.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2006. Print.