Stasis In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Sets in The Sun Also Rises

Stasis is often defined as a period or state of equilibrium or inactivity; however, Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, defines stasis in a new way. Throughout the novel, the storyline repeats itself, despite switching settings and characters. Despite the vast cast, many of the characters speak in the same way that Hemingway narrates the novel. The repetition of dialogue and action results in a torpid novel. Hemingway’s style serves to magnify the lack of joy and inactivity from the beginning to the end of the novel. The Sun Also Rises proves that there can be motion that leads to nowhere and that not all books have happy endings.

One of the most prominent occurrences in the storyline is Lady

Brett Ashley’s love life. She repeatedly has flings with men, seemingly simultaneously ignoring Jake’s and her fiancé’s advances. Brett has been married twice and seemingly has no real intent of doing it again. She never behaves differently in her various relationships, always staying the same capricious character, only adding to the redundancy of the novel. Brett isn’t the only character who is bland and one-dimensional. Many of the characters are described by simple adjectives, such as “nice” and “Jewish”. Jake describes Robert Cohn as “a thoroughly nice boy” (Hemingway 10) when he was in school and later summarizes Cohn after he spent time in New York, as a changed man and “not so nice” (16). Jake uses the word nice to describe many people, including Brett and Count Mippipopolous. He also uses it to describe the scenery around him.
To emphasize the lack of motion during The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway uses large blocks of mundane text to surround his dialogue. Hemingway adds his own bland descriptions to emphasize that the settings are very similar and that no matter where they go, nothing will ever change.
All of this repetition leads to a novel fraught with stasis.

The group of friends travels to various places in Spain and France. They start out in Paris, one of the busiest and modern cities of that time. Soon after, they go to Pamplona, which is known for the fiestas and running of the bulls, but they could still be in Paris by the way that they act. They’re moving, but their storyline isn’t going anywhere any time soon. For the duration of the novel, the group of friends (the term used loosely) seem to eat and drink non stop. Jake describes each meal and drink, all of which seem to be barely discernible variations on one another. And no matter what Jake and Brett do, they end up in the same cycle of drinking and flirting. Brett, as stated before, repeats her flings with men, but never ends up with any of them and it’s only lightly implied that she will marry Mike. Jake is often found getting drunk in bars and mulling over the fact that Brett will never truly love him. By the end of the novel, the reader is left is left with the sensation that the novel has gone nowhere. Ultimately, Hemingway starts and ends his novel with very similar scenes, which emphasizes the fact that the characters are stuck in an endless cycle of despair. The repetition and lack of joyous behaviour causes the optimistically titled novel to become a depressing and bleak one

instead.
Despite the fact that it seems like the novel is going somewhere, Hemingway brings the novel to a full circle of complete nothingness. In spite of the trips out of the country and frequenting many different bars, the group of friends repeat their actions, contributing to a repetitive structure and monotonous plot. Additionally, Hemingway creates superficial characters that only repeat his narrative descriptions, revealing that they have no deeper character development. His own writing style is tedious and dreary, exemplified by Jake’s inner monologues and the other characters’ banal dialogue. The combination of the three consolidates into a motionless and disheartening text. Hemingway utilizes his approach to writing to emphasize the bleak prospect of life in The Sun Also Rises. He proves that life goes nowhere, even if people go through the motions of living.