"The Sun Also Rises" is Hemingway's famous work, in which he successfully shaped a number of classic literary images, "a confused generation".
According to another memoir by Hemingway in his later years, The Flowing Feast, it was the female writer Stein who first proposed the concept. "You young people who served in the Great War are all of you. You are a lost generation. You don't respect anything, you're always drunk..."
The young writers and artists in the novel, and the women in their circles, are exactly such a group of people. They will never again pray as sincerely as their fathers did, they joke about great politicians, entrepreneurs and all celebrities, they use titles of nobility as ornaments, they certainly do not believe in love, they only want to have fun, they laugh at and even hate and dislike those who insist on pursuing love... Their signature language is—
"Want a drink?" "Let's have another drink!" "Let's have another bottle of Rioja Bar!"
Hemingway was not yet nineteen years old when he entered World War I. The fighting on the battlefield was tragic and cruel, and he was seriously wounded shortly after entering the war, and in the field hospital, the doctors performed twelve surgeries on him and removed more than two hundred pieces of shrapnel. He later recalled, "I was physically, mentally, mentally, and emotionally traumatized." The protagonist of the novel, Barnes, has a shadow of Hemingway himself. The novel writes that he suffered a spinal injury on the Italian front and has since lost his function as a man. After the war Barnes went into exile in Paris with young men who had also experienced the war directly or indirectly, ostensibly as writers or artists, but in reality doubted everything, denied everything, and lived aimlessly. As Hemingway's relatives later recalled when he returned from the war, "I didn't want to get a job, I didn't want to go to college, I didn't want to do anything." He became a man without a goal. ”
Without goals, there is no meaning and no value. What kind of life is this?
At the beginning of the novel, Cohen, who is also a writer, persuades Barnes to accompany him to South America. He said a lot of heavy words:
"In another thirty-five years, we'll all die, you know?"
"I have longed to make such a trip all my life, and before I can do it, I will be old."
"Haven't you ever felt that your years were passing and you weren't having fun in time?" Don't you realize that you've spent almost half your life? ”
One of the most serious things he said was, "I can't stand the thought that my life is dying so quickly and I'm not really alive." ”
So what does South America mean to Cohen? In fact, Cohen didn't know either. He came from the United States, stayed in Paris with a group of writers and artists, he wanted to go to South America because he didn't want to go back to the United States, and he "hated Paris, hated the Latin Quarter (the Cultural District of Paris)." ”
So Barnes replied to him, "It's the same with going to other countries." I've tried it all. Moving from one place to another, you can't liberate yourself. Useless. ”
Whether you're here or there, whether you do this or that, whether you love or not, everything is no different, nothing leaves a trace. You're like you've never really lived.
This is life without purpose.
Unlike the drunken dreams and deaths of those around him, Barnes, portrayed by Hemingway, is eager to find the strength to face the desolation of life. His whole effort can be summed up in four words, "trapped in the beast."
Barnes' most immediate dilemma is to love and not to be able to.
In the novel, the heroine Brett watery Yanghua, but she actually can't give up Ons in her heart. Once she took a new lover, a successful merchant and real earl, to Barnes late at night. They drank and chatted, and the count showed them the arrow wounds on his body. "There are two raised white scars under the last rib", "Above the waist of the ridge, there are also two raised scars, as thick as fingers", which is where the arrow goes out.
The woman exclaimed, "Oh, that's amazing. "Completely penetrated." Barnes asked, "Where did you get hurt?" The count replied, "In Abyssinia." I was twenty-one years old. "He went to the army to do business. Then the Count expressed his philosophy of life: "You see, Mr. Barnes, it is precisely because I have gone through hardships that I can enjoy myself today. Do you see it that way too? Barnes replied, "Yes, absolutely. ”
But in fact, Barnes's war wounds were much more serious than those of the Count. How old was he when he was injured? What was the specific situation when he was injured? What did he feel at the moment he was shot? He learned that he had lost the ability to be a man, and as a flesh-and-blood young man, what kind of despair and collapse had he had been? Especially when he later met Brett, who loved him deeply and loved him deeply, what kind of torment was his heart? All this, the author does not render and lay out at length, only for the plot to be concisely explained. But the reader can dive into Barnes's heart, with a flesh and blood body that has been deprived of a man's basic abilities by war, calmly listen to the count show off his "ups and downs", calmly watch his beloved woman and him go in and out, and calmly drink with them and listen to them talk about their outlook on life... Can you really be at peace? Reading this passage, you can feel the pain beyond Barnes's pain, the power of silence — the power to accept fate. Compared with him, what did the Count's arrow wound count? So then you'll applaud The Earl of Brett's words: "You don't have any opinion of the value of life." You're dead, that's it. ”
Barnes was not willing to die mentally from then on. He couldn't love this woman as much as the average man did, but he still loved her in his own way. He watched as she wandered into the hands of her friends, overcoming the jealousy, anger, and pain in her heart, giving her the freedom she wanted, helping her as decently as possible, comforting her, and even introducing her to the men she was interested in. When Brett eloped with the matador and all his friends had dispersed, Barnes made an excuse to stay in Spain, which he did not like, and waited calmly. What is he waiting for? The author did not confess. It was not until he received a telegram from Brett asking for help, and rushed to the rescue that the reader suddenly realized: he had expected Brett's fate long ago, and it turned out that he stayed in Spain in order to reach her in time when she was helpless! There's a passage in the book that resembles Barnes' self-deprecation: "That's it. Send a woman away with a man. Introduce her to another man and ask her to accompany him on the run. Now I'm going to pick her up again. And in the telegram it was written "Love you." That's the thing. "This is Barnes's love, the love of a real tough guy: let you turn me into an incomplete man, I can still love like a man!"
These drunken and confused people have actually been soberly in pain. Even when they are drunk, they still know what is going on. Bill, Barnes' most tacit friend, once drunkenly told Barnes, "Never be discouraged." The secret of my success. Never been discouraged. He then immediately added, "Never been discouraged in front of anyone else." "No matter how discouraged life is, you always have to put on a posture of never admitting defeat, which is also a kind of indomitable!"
Barnes, by contrast, saw in the matador a true unyielding tough guy spirit.
The victory of the bullfighter does not refer to his infinite scenery on the bullring, but to his momentum of dying in the face of his love enemy. Brett falls in love with the Matador, but Cohen is still obsessed with Brett. Cohen is a true middleweight boxing champion in college. Annoyed and angry, he did everything in his power to hit the matador. As he beat, he couldn't help but weep bitterly, for his love that had been rejected miserably, for beating a decent man so viciously. But the matador refused to shake Cohen's hand that had reached out to make peace, "he got up each time, and then knocked him to the ground", "He has been knocked down about fifteen times, but he still refuses to give up." He was weak, but Brett couldn't hold him down, and he stood up... He staggered toward him, and Cohen leaned back against the wall. "So you don't want to beat me up?" "Yes," Cohen said, "I'm embarrassed." So the matador punched Cohen in the face with all his strength... Cohen cried. ”
You can beat me to death, but you will never be able to beat me. This is the tough guy spirit that Hemingway advocated throughout his life, and it is also barnes's gesture to meet fate: I can't change the emptiness and desolation of life, but I despise you and vow to die and fight you to the end.
In fact, each generation has to go through its own "war", and each generation has its own confusion. We may not be able to tell what our generation is going through, but we know that life is dying fast and that many people like you and I are not really alive. We don't know what we've been knocked down, but the way we fell down is ugly and uncomfortable. We are bare-handed in the face of fate, and the only thing we can hold may be this bit of hard air to the end!
The sun rises every day as usual, with nothing new. But the indomitability of human beings is the only bit of dignity.