uncond. love - sun also rises

In the novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway describes a set of friends who share a very strange and distant kind of love for each other. The setting takes place immediately after World War I, a time of great hardship. This hardship results in a digression of values both morally and socially. The love that Brett and Jake share is symbolic of the general decline in values, in that they tolerate behaviours in one another that would have been previously considered unacceptable.

It is clear that Lady Brett Ashley is anything but a lady. She is kind and sweet but extremely vulnerable to the charm that various men in her life seem to overwhelm her with. Brett is not happy with her life or her surroundings and seeks escape and refuge in the arms of these men. But her actions seem always to end up hurting her, and she inevitably always runs back to Jake. Jake knows that he will never be able to have her for his own, and he accepts this as a fact. This is clear when the Count asks them “why don’t you get married, you two? (68)” To this question, they give a lame half hearted answer which implies that it will never happen. Jake is particularly tolerant of her behaviour because he

loves her unconditionally and is willing to overlook almost everything and everyone she “does”. Jake’s willingness to endure and forgive Brett’s promiscuity and infidelity is an indication of the distorted values of the age. It was an “anything goes” era right after World War I, and Jake’s message to Brett seems to be the same: anything goes as long as you eventually come back to me.

Jake’s feelings toward his friend Robert Cohn are a combination of jealousy, compassion, understanding, and hate. These are a very unusual group of feelings for a person to have toward another person, but as stated; it was a very unusual time. Jake knew of Robert’s relationship with Brett, and it ate him up with envy in side. At the same time he knew how it had ended. He had been close friends with Robert, and had been through a similar situation with Brett, so he had both compassion and understanding for Robert’s position. The only problem was the way Robert chose to deal with his feelings. Similarly also Robert could not stand to see Brett with another man but himself, but he displayed his feelings much more differently. He would make it enormously obvious that he still longed for affection. Jake was extremely bothered by Robert’s presence after he found out about him and Brett’s affair, even though at one point at the early stages of the book, they had been close friends. Robert backs out of a fishing trip to find Brett, and Jake’s friend makes a comment about that being a good t

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