The Sun Also Rises Critical Essay

In this excerpt, Cochran disagrees with the body of criticism which finds The Sun Also Rises overtly cynical, focusing instead on the circularity of the human condition.

Emphasis in the considerable body of criticism in print on The Sun Also Rises rests with the cynicism and world-weariness to be found in the novel. Although Lionel Trilling in 1939 afforded his readers a salutary, corrective view, most commentators have found the meaning inherent in the pattern of the work despairing. Perhaps most outspoken is E. M. Halliday, who sees Jake Barnes as adopting "a kind of desperate caution" as his modus vivendi. Halliday concludes that the movement of the novel is a movement of progressive "emotional insularity" and that the novel"s theme is one of "moral atrophy." ["Hemingway"s Narrative Perspective," in Sewanee Review, 1952.] In his "The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises," Mark Spilka finds a similarly negative meaning in the novel. Thus Spilka arrives at the position that in naming "the abiding earth" as the hero of the novel, Hemingway was "perhaps wrong... or at least misleading." [ Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, 1958.]

But if Hemingway was misleading in so identifying the novel"s hero, he was misleading in a fashion consistent with his "misleading" choice of epigraph from Ecclesiastes and consistent with the "misleading" pattern he incorporated in the text of his novel. Far from indicating insularity and moral atrophy, the novel evidences circularity and moral retrenching. Much Hemingway criticism—always excepting Trilling"s—demonstrates the reaction of conventional wisdom to healthy subversion of that brand of wisdom. Hence the often truly sad gulf which Trilling laments between the pronouncements of Hemingway "the man" and the artistically indirect achievement of Hemingway "the artist" ["Hemingway and His Critics," Partisan Review, 1939.] Jake Barnes, to deal with the central character of but one of Hemingway"s novels, is far more...