First, she has grown truly capable of loving someone besides Jake - an important step if she is to live a life less than utterly miserable. Unlike Jake, who is in the same boat at the book's conclusion as he was on the first page, Brett has changed by the end of The Sun Also Rises. She is merely realistic about, and accepting of, the power she has over men. This does not mean that Brett is selfish, however, or narcissistic. Brett cannot relate to Jake's Catholicism partly because she herself is an object of worship and dislikes sharing the altar with other deities.
She is the "sun" around which the other characters orbit, starstruck, in the way that the Basque peasants place her on a wine cask and dance in adoration during the fiesta, as if Brett were a goddess. Notice that immediately after Jake tells Brett he loves her, she says she is in love with Romero, as if to bury her powerful, reciprocal feelings for Jake.Īlthough Jake Barnes is the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, Brett serves as the novel's center, its objective focus.
#First page of the sun also rises ernest hemingway serial
In fact, her serial affairs can be seen as attempts to fill the void created in her by Jake's unavailability.
She has been ostracized by her female peers for her brazen sexuality.) Finally, Brett is nearly as tormented by their unrequited love as Jake is. (This may partly explain her lack of relationships with women. Second, there is no place in her society for a woman like Brett - a female Don Juan, if you will. Though she of course did not see combat, Brett served in a military hospital, an experience that was surely harrowing just the same, especially considering the newly-brutal weapons employed in World War I. First, like Jake, Mike, and the Count, she is a war veteran. After all, he is only a teenager, in a very conservative society.īrett is unhappy for three reasons. Romero may be "clean" in another way, a virgin. Also, Brett seems to feel dirty, as evinced by the number of baths she takes during the story indeed, she may be attracted to Jake partly because he is "clean" - that is, asexual. She often tells Jake that she's miserable. Yet Brett's breezy style and the way in which she is game for any experience (remember that she doesn't flinch at the carnage in the bullring) hardly indicate personal happiness, much less inner peace. Jake and Mike love Brett so passionately, in fact, that they are willing to allow (and in Jake's case, encourage) the object of their affection to pursue affairs with other men. Notably, Brett seems not to have any female friends she is a "man's woman." As a result, nearly all the men in the book fall in love with her: not just Jake and Cohn, but Mike, Romero, the Count, and even the drummer in the Paris nightclub and the Basque peasants who see her on the streets of Pamplona. And yet she strikes all those who meet her, even Bill Gorton, as attractively feminine. She's one of the boys (she refers to everyone she knows as "chaps"), whether the boys are the group of gay men in whose company Brett is first seen, or Jake, Cohn, Mike, Romero, and the Count, all of whom she has attempted affairs with. She even wears her hair cut short, like a man. She is unapologetically sexual and aggressively promiscuous. If she were made real and somehow transported to high-society Paris, London, or New York of the present day, she would fit right in.īrett parties hard. In her book Terrible Honesty, the writer Ann Douglas points out that the 1920s is the earliest decade that seems modern or contemporary to us. Other first edition points for books by Ernest Hemingway include: The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon, Across the River and into the Trees, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, Men Without Women.What's most remarkable about Brett, Jake Barnes's love interest in The Sun Also Rises, is her utter modernity. Picture of the first edition Charles Scribner's Sons boards for The Sun Also Rises. Picture of the back dust jacket for the first edition of The Sun Also Rises. Picture of dust jacket where original $2.00 price is found for The Sun Also Rises. Picture of the first edition copyright page for The Sun Also Rises. Picture of the 1926 first edition dust jacket for The Sun Also Rises. Other Time 100 Novels include The Great Gatsby and The Bridge of San Luis Rey The Sun Also Rises is one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels.
Dust jacket front says "IN OUR TIMES", which is corrected in later issues to "IN OUR TIME". Book is bound in black cloth with gold paper labels. The word "stopped" is misspelled as "stoppped" on page 181, line 26. Copyright pages has the Scribner's seal, and lacks any mention of subsequent printings. Pages: 259 The title page matches the 1926 on the copyright page. First Edition Points and Criteria for The Sun Also Rises