‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ : hope, desire and the dread of inevitable despair in Hemingway’s ‘The sun also rises’

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to approach Ernest Hemingway‘s The Sun Also Rises with a rather broad cultural point of view with the intention of attempting to understand the polarizing ideas of hope and despair and how they are both products of desire. The introduction will contextualize the age historically and explain how Paris became the artistic centre of the peak of modernism and how this led to Hemingway and many expatriates to end up working there. The first and second chapters are split as such based simply on the geographical shift that happens in the novel; mainly having chapter one exploring the zeitgeist in Paris and the way that atmosphere was complemented by these lost individuals who seem to be losing their faith in hope, and chapter two moving on to Pamplona where Hemingway‘s passion for bullfighting is not simply crucial to the development of the plot but to the understanding of Hemingway‘s particular view on life, and his fascination with having contact with some sort of 'violent death‘. The backdrop to both of these chapters is the idea of yielding to desire and the consequences that are almost never considered at such moments of despair in one‘s life. The conclusion then seeks to look at the significance of the novel in the light of the relationship between the two contradicting iconic epigraphs, and to relate its very Sisyphean sentiment to other works of literature from the twentieth century, finally bringing together this particular sense of absurdity with this celebrated perplexing notion of 'lost generations‘.