Student Summary Response: William Adair, "The Sun Also Rises: A Memory of War"

Kathleen Mita

 

           " The Sun Also Rises: A Memory of War" by William Adair presents the argument of his paper very nicely on page 72 and continues to state his thesis throughout the paper in a clean and reserved fashion to remind the reader often. “The following suggests that Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is much more than narrator Jake Barnes’s memory of war than has been recognized, in terms of landscape, imagery, allusions, and a recurring story of wounding. In this complex, poetic novel, war and wounding constitute a major pattern of allusion.” (Adair, 72)  This thesis works well within the structure of Adair’s paper and is also presented in such a way that the reader will not lose interest very easily. Adair suggests that there is an allusion to past events in the present tense on almost every page.

            Adair tells the reader about the recurrence of hills throughout the novel, representing “going to, traveling to a place of threat” (Adair, 73) for the narrator. This is part of the author’s idea of the book rising and falling in a number of three-part sequences. “This brief, three-part sequence of action starts with going to, traveling to a place of threat… Next comes and emotional wounding by Brett… which Jake associates with his unmanning sexual wounding during the war. The sequence concludes with his departure: usually it is a retreat to a room or bed.” (Adair, 73) This sequence does indeed take place more than several times in the context of the novel. When glancing at just a few of the mentioned sequences, the novel apparently does follow this structure just as Adair implies that it does. Adair also claims to see various representations of Jake’s “war-wounding” and how this wounding was “unmanning” for him, including his emotional rejections with women, (mostly Brett) and his hard time with other men, as Jake gets into several fights throughout the course of the novel.

            Because of Brett’s rejections and the obvious correlations and alliterations to Jake’s wound throughout the book, Adair claims that the novel is much more of a reenactment of Jake’s memory of being wounded that one would first imagine. It is also interestingly stated in Adair’s paper that a pivotal reenactment of wounding occurs on the same day that Ernest Hemingway received his own war wound. “…Cohn knocks Jake unconscious under a table… When Jake tries to get up he feels he does “not have any legs.” As mentioned, Aldridge calls this a reenactment of Jake’s war wounding. In fact, if we go by a calendar that accommodates the novel’s first fight (Ledoux vs. Kid Francis) here Jake is knocked out on July 8, the date of Hemingway’s war wounding.” (Adair, 83)

Adair ends his argument strongly with the statement, “…time present is imbued with time past, in terms of images and, often, situations and events. And in The Sun Also Rises, which is considerably more allusive to the past than has been recognized, suppressed memories of the prestory past seem implied on almost every page of the novel.” (Adair, 85)

            I believe that Adair’s argument correctly identifies a theory that people may have not at first glance noticed while reading the novel. It is not only interesting, but extremely plausible when presented with the examples that Adair almost bombards the reader with. Upon re-reading the mentioned scenes in The Sun Also Rises, I noticed that Adair’s three-part rising and falling action occurs within the text on, as he stated, almost every single page. Hemingway clearly intended for the novel to be one of memory, although he camouflages it enough to the point where not every reader may be able to correlate the text to the pre-text that is mentioned, (that is, the war-wounding) Adair’s argument is one that I can understand and also, most importantly, find examples of within the book itself.