Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya (Autonomous), Latur

Syllabus

B.A. Third Year

DSE English

(Semester Pattern) (MCQ + Theory)

w.e.f. June, 2019

Curriculum of DSE Course Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya, Latur (Autonomous College) B.A. Third Year DSE English (MCQ + Theory Pattern) Semester – V Paper Code Course Title Lect. Lect. per Marks per Sem. Internal External Total Week U-ENG-501 Reading Prose- IX 04 56 20 30 50 U-ENG-502 Literary Theory 04 56 20 30 50 Ancient to Modern - X U-ENG-503 American 04 56 20 30 50 literature- XI U-ENG Indian Writing in 04 56 20 30 50 English-XII Semester - VI Paper Course Title Lect. Lect. per Marks Code per Sem. Internal Externa Total Week l U-ENG- Reading Prose- XIII 04 56 20 30 50 601 U-ENG- Modern Literary 04 56 20 30 50 602 Theory - XIV U-ENG- American Literature- 04 56 20 30 50 603 XV U-ENG Indian Writing in 04 56 20 30 50 English-XVI

Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya (Autonomous), Latur English B A Third Year (Semester-V) Paper Code- U- ENG-503 Course Title –American Literature- XI Max. Marks: 50 Credits: 02 Total Lectures: 56 Lectures: 50 Practical: 06

Objectives: 1) To introduce the students to the American Literature. 2) To acquaint them with major literary works of American Literature. 3) To develop the interest of the students to read various genres of American Literature. 4) Enable them to comprehend the cultural and social values through American Literature. Outcomes: 1) The students will acquaint with the American Literature 2) They will acquaint with the major works of American writers including Poet, Dramatist, and Novelist etc 3) The students will develop the interest of reading various genres of American Literature. 4) They will enable to comprehend the cultural and social values through American Literature

Unit I Background: Poetry, Drama, & Novel

Unit II: Poetry: Robert Frost: Road Not Taken, Acquainted with the Night Langston Hughes: Let America Be American Again, Life is Fine

Unit III: Drama: Tennessee William: The Glass Menagerie

Unit IV: Novel: Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

References:- - S. C. Mundhra A Reader's Guide to American Literature: Prakash Book Depot; 4th edition (2012) - Mundhra, S.: Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises (A Critical Study): Paperback – 2017 - Tennessee William: The Glass Menagerie: Penguin UK Edition (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 31 Aug 2011 - Frost, Robert. Selected poems of Frost: Penguin Classics, 2004 Robert Frost , Edward Connery Lathem : The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, - -Complete and Unabridged: Henry Holt and Co, 1979 - Hughes, Langston. Poetry of Hughes: Blackswan paperback 2012

Robert Lee Frost (1874 -1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime and is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont. Themes In Contemporary Literary Criticism, the editors state that "Frost's best work explores fundamental questions of existence, depicting with chilling starkness the loneliness of the individual in an indifferent universe."[44] The critic T. K. Whipple focused on this bleakness in Frost's work, stating that "in much of his work, particularly in North of Boston, his harshest book, he emphasizes the dark background of life in rural New England, with its degeneration often sinking into total madness." [44] In sharp contrast, the founding publisher and editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, emphasized the folksy New England persona and characters in Frost's work, writing that "perhaps no other poet in our history has put the best of the Yankee spirit into a book so completely."[44] She notes his frequent use of rural settings and farm life, and she likes that in these poems, Frost is most interested in "showing the human reaction to nature's processes." She also notes that while Frost's narrative, character-based poems are often satirical, Frost always has a "sympathetic humor" towards his subjects.[44] Influenced by Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, John Keats Influenced Robert Francis, Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, Edward Thomas, James Wright

Poet laureate of Vermont In June 1922 the Vermont State League of Women's Clubs elected Frost as Poet laureate of Vermont. When a New York Times editorial strongly criticised the decision of the Women's Clubs, Sarah Cleghorn and other women wrote to the newspaper defending Frost. Frost was named Poet laureate of Vermont by the state legislature through Joint Resolution R-59 of the Acts of 1961, which also created the position. Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times.

The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

In the poem - ‘The Road Not Taken’, the road symbolizes our life. The poet says that the path that we don’t choose in our life is ‘the road not taken’. He describes his feelings about that choice that he had left in the past. The path which we have chosen, decides our future, our destination. The important message that the poet wants to give is that the choice that we make has an impact on our future and if we make a wrong choice, we regret it but cannot go back on it. So, we must be wise while making choices.

Once the poet was walking down a road and then there was a diversion, there were two different paths and he had to choose one out them. The poet says that as he was one person, he could travel on one road only. He had to choose one out of these two roads Yellow wood means a forest with leaves which are wearing out and they have turned yellow in colour – the season of autumn. It represents a world which is full of people, where people have been living for many years. They represent people who are older than the poet. The poet kept standing there and looked at the path very carefully as far as he could see it. Before taking the path, he wanted to know how it was. Was it suitable for him or no. He was able to see the path till from where it curved after which it was covered with trees and was hidden. It happens in our life also when we have choices, we have alternatives, but we have to choose only one out of them, we take time to think about the pros and cons, whether it is suitable for us or not and only then, we take a decision on what path we should choose.

The poet kept on looking at one path for a long time to check if it is the right path for him or not and them he decided and started walking on another path because he felt that the both paths were equally good. He says just as fair, so, he felt that both paths were equally good and started walking on one of them. He adds that maybe he felt that the path was better for him so he chooses it as it had grass on it which means that it was unused. Not many people had walked on this path earlier that is why this path was grassy. ‘And wanted wear’ means that it was not walked over by many people. After he walked on the path for some distance, he realized that both the paths had been worm out the same way. Both the paths were similar and worn out. Even in our life, we take any path or option but all of them have the same benefits, disadvantages, problems, challenges and we must face them. We think that we are choosing a better option, but it is not that way.

The poet says that both the paths were similar that morning. Both had leaves on them and no one had stepped on them as they were still green in colour. He decided that that day he would take one path and keep the other path for another day, although he knew that one way leads on to another way. He knew that he could not go back on the choice that he had made. Similarly, even in our life once we choose an option, we must keep on moving ahead with that option and we never get a chance to come back and take the other option that we had left earlier. He says that in the future, he will take a deep breath and say that once upon a time, he had reached such a point in life that there were two options for him and he travelled on that road which had been travelled upon by lesser number of people. That decision of his decided his future. Similarly, in future, when you grow up, then you will say that once upon a time, when you were young, you had two options. The choice that you made, made you what you became of it. This is a very strong message for all the students - that you should be wise and be careful while making choices out of the options that you have in your life because your future depends on the choice that you make today.

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of "The Road Not Taken" (1916) The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing. After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one day in order to try the other road. However, he realizes that it is unlikely that he will ever have the opportunity to come back to this specific point in time because his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and other decisions). The narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he chosen the other path.

Analysis This poem is made up of four stanzas of five lines, each with a rhyme scheme of ABAAB.

Along with “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” this poem is one of Frost’s most beloved works and is frequently studied in high school literature classes. Since its publication, many readers have analyzed the poem as a nostalgic commentary on life choices. The narrator decided to seize the day and express himself as an individual by choosing the road that was “less traveled by.” As a result of this decision, the narrator claims, his life was fundamentally different that it would have been had he chosen the more well-traveled path.

This reading of the poem is extremely popular because every reader can empathize with the narrator’s decision: having to choose between two paths without having any knowledge of where each road will lead. Moreover, the narrator’s decision to choose the “less traveled” path demonstrates his courage. Rather than taking the safe path that others have traveled, the narrator prefers to make his own way in the world.

However, when we look closer at the text of the poem, it becomes clear that such an idealistic analysis is largely inaccurate. The narrator only distinguishes the paths from one another after he has already selected one and traveled many years through life. When he first comes upon the fork in the road, the paths are described as being fundamentally identical. In terms of beauty, both paths are equally “fair,” and the overall “…passing there / Had worn them really about the same.”

It is only as an old man that the narrator looks back on his life and decides to place such importance on this particular decision in his life. During the first three stanzas, the narrator shows no sense of remorse for his decision nor any acknowledgement that such a decision might be important to his life. Yet, as an old man, the narrator attempts to give a sense of order to his past and perhaps explain why certain things happened to him. Of course, the excuse that he took the road “less traveled by” is false, but the narrator still clings to this decision as a defining moment of his life, not only because of the path that he chose but because he had to make a choice in the first place.

Acquainted with the Night I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Acquainted with the Night" (1928) The narrator describes his loneliness as he walks the isolated city streets at night. He has walked beyond the city limits and along every city lane, but has never found anything to comfort him in his depression. Even when he makes contact with another person (such as the watchman), the narrator is unwilling to express his feelings because he knows that no one will understand him. At one point he hears a cry from a nearby street, but realizes that it is not meant for him; no one is waiting for him. He looks up at the moon in the sky and acknowledges that time has no meaning for him because his isolation is unending.

Analysis

This poem is written in strict iambic pentameter, with the fourteen lines of a traditional sonnet. In terms of rhyme scheme, Frost uses the “terza rima” ("third rhyme") pattern of ABA CDC DAD AA, which is exceptionally difficult to write in English.

This poem is commonly understood to be a description of the narrator’s experiences with depression. The most crucial element of his depression is his complete isolation. Frost emphasizes this by using the first-person term “I” at the beginning of seven of the lines. Even though the watchman has a physical presence in the poem, he does not play a mental or emotional role: the narrator, the sole “I,” remains solitary. Similarly, when the narrator hears the “interrupted cry” from another street, he clarifies that the cry is not meant for him, because there is no one waiting for him at home.

The narrator’s inability to make eye contact with the people that he meets suggests that his depression has made him incapable of interacting in normal society. While normal people are associated with the day (happiness, sunlight, optimism), the narrator is solely acquainted with the night, and thus can find nothing in common with those around him. The narrator is even unable to use the same sense of time as the other people in the city: instead of using a clock that provides a definitive time for every moment, the narrator relies solely on “one luminary clock” in the sky.

Ironically, since night is the only time that he emerges from his solitude, the narrator has even less opportunity to meet someone who can pull him from his depression. His acquaintance with the night constructs a cycle of depression that he cannot escape.

Frost adds to the uncertainty inherent in the poem by incorporating the present perfect tense, which is used to describe something from the recent past, as well as something from the past that is still ongoing in the present. It seems as if the narrator’s depression could be from the recent past because of the phrase: “I have been…” However, the verb tense also suggests that his depression could still be a constant, if unseen, force. With that in mind, it is unclear whether the narrator will truly be able to come back to society or if his depression will resurface and force him to be, once again, acquainted with the night.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902[1] – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue," which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."[2] Growing up in a series of Midwestern towns, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio and soon began studies at Columbia University in New York City. Although he dropped out, he gained notice from New York publishers, first in The Crisis magazine, and then from book publishers and became known in the creative community in Harlem. He eventually graduated from Lincoln University. In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays, and short stories. He also published several non-fiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and works for children. With the encouragement of his best friend and writer, Arna Bontemps, and patron and friend, Carl Van Vechten, he wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, as well as translating several works of literature into English.

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!

"Let America Be America Again" focuses on the idea of the American dream and how, for many, attaining freedom, equality, and happiness, which the dream encapsulates, is nigh on impossible. The speaker in the poem outlines the reasons why this ideal America has gone, or never was, but could still be. For the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden, the reality of day to day existence makes the dream a cruel illusion. The poem explores the darker areas of life, the history of exploitation for example, and outlines the unique struggles of those who make up America, both black and white. Whilst pessimistic and hard hitting, the poem does have an optimistic ending and lights the way forward with hope. Langston Hughes was going through a difficult period in his life when he wrote this poem. He knew he wanted to earn a living through writing, but couldn't sustain his efforts, despite poetry book publication, most notably The Weary Blues. It was on a train journey through Depression-struck America in 1935 that inspired him to pen this classic plea for a resurgence of the true American spirit. Publication followed in the Esquire magazine and Hughes went on to become a noted if controversial figure in the world of black literature, following his earlier work in the so- called Harlem Renaissance, an upbeat black artistic movement peaking in the 1920s. "Let America Be America Again" reflects the many influences in Hughes's poetry - from the expansive work of Whitman to street language, from jazz rhythm to the steady iambic lines of earlier black poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar.

This whole poem is a crying out, a passionate plea for America to re-establish the Dream. It is a kind of personal hymn, a lyrical speech, to freedom and equality. To enable that plea to be heard and felt, the speaker has to take the reader through some dark times, through history, to explain just why that Dream needs to live again. Lines 1 - 4 Alternating rhyme, repetition and alliteration are all at play in this the first stanza, almost a song lyric. It's a direct call for the old America to be brought back to life again, to be revived. Note the mention of the pioneer, those first seekers of freedom who with tremendous will and effort established themselves a home, against all the odds. Line 5 Almost as an aside, but highly significant, the single line in parentheses reveals that, for the speaker, America as an ideal just hasn't happened. For him, this romantic notion of the American Dream never has been. Why is that? Lines 6 - 9 The second lyrical quatrain, with similar rhyme pattern, places stronger emphasis on the dream, the original vision people had for the USA, one of love and equality. There would be no feudal system in place, no dictatorships - everyone would be equal. Note the contrast of the language used here. There is the dream and love of those who would be equal, against those who would connive, scheme and crush. Line 10 Another line in parentheses, as if the speaker is quietly reasserting his inner voice - again making the point that this America hasn't existed for him, implying that he is far from the Dream. He is dubious to say the least. Lines 11 - 14 The third quatrain, with alternating rhyme for familiarity, highlights the outer ideals - the dressing up of Liberty merely for show, which is phoney patriotism. The capital L reinforces the idea that this could be the Statue of Liberty, the famous icon, based on a goddess, who holds the Declaration of Independence in one hand and the torch in the other. Broken chains lie at her feet. The plea continues, to make the dream possible, to make it manifest in opportunity and equality, for all. The suggestion that equality could be in the air people breathe, means that equality should be a natural given, part of the fabric that keeps us all alive, sharing the common air. Lines 15 - 16 The rhyming couplet in parentheses once again repeats that, for the speaker personally, equality has been out of reach, perhaps just has never existed. Same goes for freedom. (Homeland of the free - could be based on the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics 'land of the free.') Further Analysis Lines 17 - 18 In italics for special reasons, these lines, two questions, represent a turning point in the poem; they are a different aspect of the speaker's identity. These two questions look back, questioning the speaker's negativity (in parentheses) and also look forward. The metaphor of the veil has biblical connections (in Corinthians) alluding to a darkening of reality, of not being able to see the truth. Lines 19 - 24 The first of the sextets, six lines which express yet another aspect of the speaker, who now speaks as and for, one of the oppressed, in the first person, I am. Yet, this voice also expresses the collective, articulating a mass sentiment. And note that all types of person are included: white, black, native American, the immigrant. All are subject to the brutal competition and the hierarchical systems imposed upon them. Lines 25 - 30 The second sextet focuses on the young man, any young man no matter, caught up in the industrial chaos of profit for profit's sake, where greed is good and power is the ultimate goal. The ugly, unacceptable face of capitalism encourages only selfishness at any expense. Lines 31 - 38 Again, use of the repeated phrase I am brings home the message loud and clear in this octet: the system is cruellest to those who are poorest. From the farmer to the servant, from the land to the fine houses of the wealthy, for many the Dream means only hunger and poverty. Workers become de-humanized, become mere numbers and are treated as if they are commodities or money. Lines 39 - 50 The longest stanza in the poem, 12 lines, concentrates on the history of those immigrants who dreamt of fundamental freedoms in the first place. This is the cruel irony. Those fleeing poverty, war and oppression; those forced to leave their native lands, had this dream inside, a dream of being truly free in a new land. They travelled to America in the hope of realizing this dream. People from Old Europe, many from Africa, all set out for a new life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Thomas Jefferson). More Line By Line Analysis Line 51 A single line, another potent question. The previous twelve lines (the previous 50 lines) all led to this acute point. A simple yet searching ask. Lines 52 - 61 The next ten lines explore this notion of the free. But the speaker seems perplexed - where did this crazy question originate? It's as if the speaker doesn't know himself any longer, or the reasons why the question of the free should arise. Just exactly who are the free? There are millions with little or nothing. When labor is withdrawn and legitimate protest arranged, the authorities counteract with the bullet. Protest songs and banners and hope count for little - all that's left is a barely breathing dream. Lines 62 - 70 The speaker takes a deep breath and repeats the opening line, only with more emotional input.....O, let America be America again. This is a plea from the heart, this time more personal - ME - yet taking in many different types of people. In these nine lines the reader truly gets to know the speaker's intention and demand. Freedom for all. It's almost a call to rise up and take back what belongs to the many and not the few. Lines 71 - 75 No matter the abuse, the pursuit of freedom is pure and strong. Those who have exploited the poor and sucked out their lifeblood (note the simile - like leeches) need to start thinking again about ownership and rights to property. Lines 76 - 79 A short quatrain, a kind of summing up of the speaker's whole take on the American Dream. A direct declaration - the Dream will manifest at some time. It has to. Lines 80 - 86 The final septet concludes that, out of the old rotten, criminal system, the people will renew and refresh and rebuild something wholesome and sustainable. There remains hope that the cherished ideal - America - can be made good again. Literary Devices and More Analysis Let America Be America Again is an 86 line poem split into 17 stanzas, 3 of which are single lines, 2 of which are couplets. In addition, there are 4 quatrains, 2 sextets, 1 octet, a twelve liner, ten liner, nine liner, quintet, and a seven liner. The layout is quite unusual. On the page the poem looks more like an extended song lyric, with quatrains followed by single lines and very short lines turning up in mid- stanza. Let's take a closer look at the literary devices: Rhyme Scheme Rhymes tend to bring familiarity and help reinforce meaning. In poetry, there are simple rhyme schemes and there are challenging ones. In this poem the rhyming pattern starts in a conventional manner but gradually becomes more complex. For example, take a look at the first 6 stanzas:

 abab - (b) - cdcd - (b) - bebe - (bb) This is relatively easy to follow. There is an alternating pattern in the first 3 quatrains, with the strong full vowel rhyme e dominant: be/free/me/me/Liberty/free/me/free. The full end rhymes leave the reader in no doubt about one of the main themes of this poem - freedom and me. A strong pairing ensures a memorable bond. So, the first 16 lines are straightforward enough. After this the rhyme scheme gradually loses its regular pattern and becomes stretched.

 However further down the line so to speak, there are still loose echoes of the familiar alternating pattern established at the beginning of the poem. Each of the larger stanzas contains some form of full rhyme, or full and slant rhyme: soil/all with machine/mean and become/free with lea/free. Slant rhyme tends to challenge the reader because it is near to full rhyme but isn't full rhyme to the ear, as in soil/all. It means things aren't clicking in full, they're a little bit out of harmony. As the poem progresses, rhyme becomes more intermittent and tends to condense in certain stanzas, as in stanza 13, pay/today and stanza 14, pain/rain/again. The poet's aim with such concentrated rhyme is to make the words stick in the reader's mind and memory. Literary Device Anaphora Repetition plays an important role in this poem and occurs throughout. When words and phrases are repeated this has a similar effect to chanting, reinforcing meaning and giving the feel of power and accumulation of energy. From the first stanza - Let America/Let it be/Let it be - to the last - The land, the plants, the mines, the rivers - there are repeats. Some critics have likened them to song lyrics, others to parts of a political speech, where ideas and images are built up again and again. Alliteration There are numerous examples of alliterative lines - when words with leading consonants are close together - which bring texture and interest to lines and a challenge to the reader. In the first four stanzas: pioneer on the plain/home where he himself/dream the dreamers dreamed/land be a land where Liberty/slavery's scars. Enjambment Enjambment, when a line continues without punctuation on into the next, keeping the flow of sense, occurs in several stanzas. Look out for the 'open' end lines which encourage the reader to not pause but go on straight into the next line. For example: Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. and again: We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. Metaphor Tangled in that endless ancient chain of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Life is Fine

I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered! I came up twice and cried! If that water hadn't a-been so cold I might've sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator Sixteen floors above the ground. I thought about my baby And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered! I stood there and I cried! If it hadn't a-been so high I might've jumped and died.

But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on. I could've died for love— But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry— I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

Summary: The speaker goes to the river and sits down by the bank to think. He cannot concentrate so he jumps into the water and sinks. He surfaces and cries out twice. If the water had not been so frigid he would have died, he says, “But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!”

He takes the elevator to the sixteenth floor of his building, where he thinks about his “baby” and considers jumping. He stands up there and yells, and if it had not been so high, he might have leapt off and died. “But it was High up there! it was high!” He says. He comments that since he is still living, he might as well live on. He might have died for love but he was born to live. He says to his baby that he would “dogged” if she were to see him die. He concludes, “Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!”

Analysis: The spirited and jaunty “Life is Fine” is not one of Hughes’s more well-known works, but has many similarities to his other poems. It tells the story of a man with a jubilant spirit and the ability to remain optimistic in the face of personal despair. It is energetic and musical, and the structure resembles that of a blues song. The poem has six stanzas with a varied refrain at the end of each one. Hughes utilizes frequent repetition to emphasize his message.

The speaker describes going to the river to think, but finding himself unable to do so. He decides to commit suicide by drowning himself. However, instead of sinking like a stone, he keeps returning to the surface and “hollering” loudly. The freezing temperature of the water awakens his mind and body, preventing him from surrendering to death. In the first refrain, he describes how cold the water is, painting a vivid image of himself shivering and ejecting himself from the water repeatedly; he cannot seem to let death catch hold.

In the third stanza, the speaker clarifies that his inner turmoil is due to a romantic relationship gone sour. He takes the elevator up sixteen floors and thinks about how sad he is about his "baby." He considers jumping down but realizes how high it is and decides to refrain. Like the water's temperature, the speaker uses the height of the building as the reason for his decision not to commit suicide.

The poem's tone shifts during the fifth stanza. Finally the speaker concedes that since his suicide attempts "failed," he might as well remain living. Sure, he says, he could have died for love, but “for livin’ I was born.” By staring death in the face, the speaker has rediscovered his sense of purpose. He acknowledges that he might never find complete peace from the vicissitudes of life, he might still holler and cry sometimes, but he has decided that he will persevere and not let his “sweet baby” see him die. His last refrain gives the poem its title: “Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!”

In this poem, Hughes revisits a common theme in his work: perseverance. He understands the plight of his people and crafts a vulnerable character here who often considers giving up on life, but can never quite follow through - meaning that he still has something to live for. By coming so close to death, the speaker in "Life is Fine" finds a renewed desire to live.

The poem “Life is Fine” by Langston Hughes is a poem in which the speaker expresses his view on the beauty of existence. The speaker articulates humanist values when he goes to the river and casts himself into its depths; however, during the process of drowning, the speaker sees a glimmer of hope. The idea of hope is manifest in the chilliness of the water. The speaker says, “If that water hadn’t a-been so cold/I might have sunk and died” (ln 7–8). The frigid water is simultaneously symbolic of hope and suffering. The cold water makes the speaker consider his actions from a new angle in the same way that a strong individual can use his suffering and the obstacles that he experiences as a means to develop strength and spiritual fortitude.

This same theme reappears in the poem when the speaker goes to the sixteenth story of the building, but decides not to jump, because of the building’s substantial height. One could interpret this as cowardice on the part of the speaker, but I do not believe that this is the point which Hughes is trying to convey. Hughes shows that, despite the speaker’s mental anguish, his subconscious drive to live is much more important. This idea is present at the close of the poem when the speaker says, “I’ll be dogged sweet baby/If you gonna see me die.” (ln. 25–26). With these lines, the speaker acknowledges that he has come to terms with his suicidal impulses. His suffering has not been cured, but he carries the proud awareness that he is able to overcome the intensity of his emotional turmoil.

Life is Fine is a playful ditty about a man who is clearly suffering and contemplating suicide but is able to see the beauty in life and seemingly does a 180 turn on his stance on life. It is for this reason that poem is called ‘Life is Fine’, with fine being the operative word. The narrator doesn’t believe that life is wondrous they have seen life’s darker side and decided that they still want to live. But they are clearly only partially sold on the beauty and splendour of life.

Form and Tone Life is Fine is free verse and is separated into 9 stanzas. There is a consistent pattern with two quatrains being followed by a single line. The singular line, whilst different every time follows a similar pattern. Almost acting in the way you would expect a refrain to act. In each quatrain the second and fourth lines rhyme with one another. This gives the poem an unexpected and playful feel despite being a bit gloomy in its content. The poem comes across as tongue-in-cheek.

Stanza 1 In this opening stanza of the poem, which can be read in full here, the narrator claims that they went down to a river. The reason for doing this is unclear. But as the stanza progresses they claim that they went there to think. Perhaps they figured that being around nature was a way to clear their mind. Often people will go to an area of natural beauty in order to attempt to do this. The reference to trying to think and not being able to may suggest that the narrator is suffering from depression. Depression sufferers often report feeling listless and having a racing mind that makes isolating thoughts difficult. This would certainly be consistent with the fact that they are contemplating taking their life and fits well with the theme of the poem.

Stanza 2 The first two lines of this stanza give the impression that the narrator is in fact drowning. They paint a picture of them coming up for air due to the use of exclamation marks. As the poem continues we see that these lines are paraphrased throughout the poem. Hollering gives a suggestion of a call for help and the use of the word crying throughout could once again be a reference to the idea that the narrator is a depression sufferer. What is amusing about this stanza is the concept of the narrator’s suicide attempt being interrupted by the fact that the water is cold. What is interesting here is that many depression sufferers have suicidal thoughts but don’t go through with them as they fear pain. Clearly this guy’s mental anguish is not as prominent as the physical pain from their suicide attempt.

Stanza 3 But it was Cold in that water! It was cold! This line repeats the sentiment about the water temperature as if the narrator is trying to justify not going ahead with their attempted suicide. This in itself is quite amusing as most people would be trying to justify the idea of taking their life in the first place not the fact that they didn’t go ahead with it.

Stanza 4 This stanza starts with the narrator taking the elevator up to a high floor with the insinuation being that they are going to jump off the sixteenth floor. This continues the theme of committing suicide but what is really interesting about this stanza is the third line “I thought about my baby” The meaning of this is unclear. Is the narrator using the term baby as a term of endearment for a partner or more probably an ex-partner of it is literally referencing a child. I think it being a reference to an ex is the most likely answer.

Stanza 5 These lines almost mirror the first two lines of the second stanza but have been altered slightly as now the narrator is standing atop a building rather than swimming in a river. On the face of it the height prompts yet another moment of cowardice and the narrator refuses to jump, presumably to their own death. But the word high could signify a subtle double entendre here. Perhaps they are feeling somewhat elated and therefore reconsidered. I think this is unlikely but worth mentioning.

Stanza 6 But it was High up there! It was high! Again we see a one line stanza repeating a pattern set with the first three stanzas and once again the content of this line follows the pattern repeating what had been said in the third line of the previous stanza, albeit in a paraphrased manner.

Stanza 7 In this stanza it seems to confirm that the baby that was previously referenced was a love interest. The narrator seemingly reluctantly decides that they will carry on living before claiming that they could have died for love. This phrase raises all sorts of questions. Why would they die for love? To make the other person feel guilty perhaps. Or maybe it’s just because they feel that they can’t continue living without the other person .It’s hard to know with a line that is so ambiguous.

Stanza 8 In this penultimate stanza the narrator seems almost defiant. It is like they are saying they are down but not out. This stanza seems to be addressed directly at their loved one, their baby. They are effectively saying that they have not been broken. That they will show their partner and the world that they are upset but that they have not been destroyed. If the poem ended here it would seem to be an entirely positive poem that chronicles a person dealing with and overcoming their suicidal urges.

Stanza 9 Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

Although this line roughly follows the pre-existing pattern it slightly subverts it. Adding the comment about wine may just hint that the narrator is self-medicating themselves. Does this undo the positive vibe? Drinking to deal with the pain is a destructive road itself. This means the poem leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.[1] After years of obscurity, at age 33 he became suddenly famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.[1] Much of Williams' most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

The Glass Menagerie The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in Chicago), Williams had deep doubts about the production - the theater did not expect the play to last more than a few nights, and the producers prepared a closing notice in response to the weak advance sales. But two critics loved the show, and returned almost nightly to monitor the production. Meanwhile, they gave the play enthusiastic reviews and continued to praise it daily in their respective papers. By mid-January, tickets to the show were some of the hottest items in Chicago, nearly impossible to obtain. Later in 1945, the play opened in New York with similar success. On opening night in New York, the cast received an unbelievable twenty-five curtain calls. Tennessee Williams did not express strong admiration for any early American playwrights; his greatest dramatic influence was the brilliant Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Chekhov, with his elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters, and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Tennessee Williams' work. Additionally, the novelist D.H. Lawrence offered Williams a depiction of sexuality as a potent force of life; Lawrence is referenced in The Glass Menagerie as one of the writers favored by Tom. The American poet Hart Crane was another important influence on Williams; with Crane's dramatic life, open homosexuality, and determination to create poetry that did not mimic European sensibilities, Williams found a great source of inspiration. Williams also belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English. Like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams wanted to challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre. Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), and The Glass Menagerie (1944), among others, provided some of the early testing ground for Williams' innovations. The Glass Menagerie uses music, screen projections, and lighting effects to create the haunting and dream-like atmosphere appropriate for a "memory play." Like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character. Tom, as narrator, moves in and out of the action of the play. There are not realistic rules for the convention: we also see events that Tom did not directly witness. The screen projections seem heavy-handed, but at the time their use would have seemed to be a cutting-edge innovation. The projections use film-like effects and the power of photography (art forms that are much younger than drama) in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a powerful representation of family, memory, and loss. The Glass Menagerie is loosely autobiographical. The characters all have some basis in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams: Edwina is the hopeful and demanding Amanda, Rose is the frail and shy Laura (whose nickname, "Blue Roses," refers directly back to Williams' real-life sister), and distant and cold Cornelius is the faithless and absent father. Tom is Williams' surrogate. Williams actually worked in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis, and there actually was a disastrous evening with the only gentleman caller who ever came for Rose. Thomas was also Tennessee Williams' real name, and the name "Thomas" means twin - making Tom the surrogate not only for Williams but also possibly for the audience. He is our eye into the Wingfields' situation. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as he faces an agonizing choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.

The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for Laura. She is oddly beautiful and, like her glass pieces, easy to destroy. The fire escape is most closely linked to Tom's character and to the theme of escape. Laura stumbles on the escape, while Tom uses it to get out of the apartment and into the outside world. He goes down the fire escape one last time at the end of the play, and he stands on the landing during his monologues. His position there metaphorically illustrates his position between his family and the outside world, between his responsibility and the need to live his own life.

The play is non-naturalistic, playing with stage conventions and making use of special effects like music and slide projections. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important: for Amanda, memory is a kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom who narrates the events of the play, memory is the thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by memories of the sister he abandoned years ago.

The Glass Menagerie Character List Amanda Wingfield Once a Southern belle who was the darling of her small town's social scene, Amanda is now an abandoned wife and single mother living in a small apartment in St. Louis. She dreams of her past and of her daughter's future, but seems unwilling to recognize the painful harsh realities of the present. She is a loving mother, but her demands make life difficult for Laura and unbearable for Tom. Amanda finally senses Tom's stirrings to leave and makes a deal with him - that if he can find a suitable replacement for himself in the form of a husband for Laura, then he can disappear for good. In all reality, then, Amanda is holding her son hostage - threatening his future in order to ensure her own. Laura Wingfield Crippled from childhood, Laura walks with the aid of a leg brace. Laura is painfully shy, unable to face the world outside of the tiny Wingfield apartment. She spends her time polishing her collection of tiny glass animals, her "glass menagerie." Her presence is almost ghostly, and her inability to connect with others outside of her family makes her dependent on Tom and Amanda. Jim's nickname for her, "Blue Roses," suggests both her odd beauty and her isolation, as blue roses exist nowhere in the real world. She is in many ways like Rose, Tennessee Williams' real-life sister. As a parallel to Rose, then, Laura becomes helpless and impossibly passive - rendered to a fate entirely dictated by Tom's own decisions. Laura's passivity, meanwhile, incurs a tremendous amount of guilt and repressed rage in Tom, who has trouble leaving as long as he thinks of his sister. Tom Wingfield Tom is an aspiring poet who works in the Continental Shoemakers warehouse. He is the narrator of the play and the action of the play is framed by Tom's memory. Tom loves his mother and sister, but he feels trapped at home. They are dependent on his wages and as long as he stays with them he feels he can never have a life of his own. Nightly, he disappears to "go to the movies." As the play continues, Tom feels increasingly imprisoned and his mother begins to sense his stirrings. She makes him a deal - as long as he finds a husband for Laura, he's free to escape. But Tom is trapped by his own guilt for leaving and his own repressed rage for being put in a position where his freedom comes at the expense of his own conscience. Jim O'Connor Jim is the long-awaited gentleman caller for Laura - and the supposed prospect for her matrimony. He is outgoing, enthusiastic, and believes in self-improvement. He kisses Laura and raises her hopes that they might be together, before he finally reveals to her that he is engaged. Tom describes him as a person more connected to the real world than any of the other characters, but Jim is also a symbol for the "expected something that we live for."

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 1 Summary:

Williams opens with extensive stage directions that set the scene of the play. He describes the Wingfield apartment, a small unit in a crowded urban area of St. Louis. Visible outside are a fire escape and narrow alleys flanking the building; through the transparent fourth wall, the audience can see the Wingfield living room and dining room. A large photograph of the family's absent father is on the wall. Also visible is a large collection of transparent glass animals, Laura's "glass menagerie," for which the play is named. There is a phonograph, along with some old records, and a stenography chart with a typewriter. During the opening, the transparent fourth wall ascends out of sight.

Tom emerges, dressed as a merchant sailor. In his first speech, he contrasts himself to a magician, giving "truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion," and establishes himself as a poet and the narrator of the play. He tells the audience that the play takes place in the thirties, when there was war in Spain and a different kind of turmoil in America. He warns that the play is a work of memory, and therefore is not realistic. There will be music, unrealistic lighting, certain events amplified and emphasized. He describes the characters: Amanda, his mother; Laura, his sister; a gentleman caller who will appear later in the play; and Tom's and Laura's absent father, who never appears, but is nonetheless an important figure in the play. Their father occasionally sends the family postcards from all over the world; the last one contained a two-word message of "Hello! Goodbye!" He abandoned the family many years ago.

As the action begins with Amanda calling Tom to the dinner table, the tension in the family immediately becomes apparent. Amanda is a sympathetic character, but she is also demanding of her children and often quite silly - instructing Tom, although he is a grown man whose wages support their family, how to chew his food. Laura tries to clear the table, but Amanda tells her to sit and be the lady while she does the work. As Tom goes out to smoke a cigarette, Amanda tells a story she has often told before, about one day in her youth when she received seventeen gentleman callers in a single afternoon. She names them, tells what they went on to do with their lives, and reminds her children miserably that she, who had her pick, chose their father. She then asks Laura when Laura's own gentleman callers are going to start arriving, and Laura responds nervously that she has none. The question clearly makes Tom uncomfortable. Amanda responds with incredulity to Laura's insistence that she is not as popular as her mother was back in the small town of Blue Mountain. The scene closes with Laura remarking wistfully to Tom that their mother is afraid that Laura will be an old maid. Analysis

From the beginning, the figure of the narrator shows that Williams' play will not follow the conventions of realistic theatre. The narrator breaks the conceptual "fourth wall" of naturalistic drama by addressing the audience directly. Tom also tells us that he is going to give the audience truth disguised as illusion, making the audience conscious of the chimerical quality of theatre. By playing with the theme of memory and its distortions, Williams is free to use music, monologues, and projected images to haunting effect. Tom, as narrator, tells the audience that the gentleman caller is a real person - more real, in many ways, than any other character - but he also tells the audience that the gentleman is a symbol for the "expected something that we live for," the thing for which we are always waiting and hoping. This naming of a character as both real entity and symbol is characteristic of Williams' work; both of these aspects of the gentleman caller are important to the overall impact of the play.

The allusion to Guernica and the turmoil in Spain, juxtaposed to the uneasy peace in America, establishes a tense atmosphere as the play's background. The Americans of the thirties lived in relative peace, if economic hardship, but for the 1944-5 audience of the play's first production, the thirties would have been seen as the calm before the storm of World War II. The allusion to Guernica (bombed by Germany, ally of the fascist forces in Spain; the carnage was famously depicted in a painting by Pablo Picasso) serves as a reminder that before long war will be coming to everyone, the United States included.

There is symmetry between the uneasy peace of the time period and the uneasy peace in the Wingfield house. Just as America stirs restlessly with the uneasy peace before the Second World War, Tom seethes with the need to escape his home and set out into the world, as his father did before him. The fire escape, a visually prominent part of the set, is an important symbol for the imprisonment that Tom feels and the possibility of a way out. In his stage directions, Williams characteristically imbues the fire escape with symbolic weight, saying that the buildings are burning with the "implacable fires of human desperation." Tom addresses the audience from the fire escape, and his positioning there, standing alone between the outside world and the space of the apartment, points to the painful choice he makes later in the play. In order to escape, he must escape alone and leave his mother and sister behind.

Originally, the script called for the use of a projector, which, during each scene, showed images to emphasize certain motifs and symbols. This projector was not used in the original Broadway production, but some productions since have used the idea and the instructions for the device remain in the script. For example, while Amanda is speaking, the script says that a projected image of Amanda as a young girl appears. These photographic images and projected text emphasize the symbolic elements of the play as well as the theme of memory; in the case of Amanda's image, we are given memory within memory, a memory framed by the larger memory of the play itself. The audience is therefore twice removed from the world of the image, contributing to the dream-like and ghostly atmosphere of the play. While the projected image gives added force to Amanda's words, showing the audience a visual representation alongside the images created by Amanda's speech, these visual images become symbolic of memory's paradoxical nature. On one hand, the visual image is real, right before our eyes, and full of evocative power; on the other hand, it is only a photograph from a distant past and is therefore frozen and lifeless.

Amanda is always returning mentally to this past, which is immaterial and far-removed from her current reality. Her reaction to Laura shows that she is strangely in denial about the nature of her own daughter. Laura is crippled, able to walk only slowly and with great effort, and emotionally she is terribly fragile. The contrast between the vivacious and talkative Amanda and her timid, soft-spoken daughter could not be starker. Tom has a tender relationship with Laura; when Tom expresses frustration at the start of Amanda's story about her gentlemen callers, it is Laura who persuades Tom to humor their mother.

The relationship between Tom and Amanda is tense. In this scene, he seems to be struggling to tolerate her, and while Amanda is loving, she is also demanding beyond reason. Her insistence that Laura stay put while Amanda plays "the darky" reveals her extremely provincial Southern upbringing. In her youth she was wealthy enough to have servants, but now, with her husband gone, she is struggling to make ends meet. Indeed, she wants to relive her past through Laura, transplanting the quaint life she had in Blue Mountain to the urban setting of St. Louis. Clearly, Amanda seems oblivious to Tom's unhappiness and Laura's painful shyness.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 2 Summary:

Laura is polishing her collection of glass animals, and Amanda returns home visibly disturbed. She has made an unsettling discovery. On the way to her D.A.R. meeting (Daughters of the American Revolution), Amanda stopped at Rubicam's Business College, where Laura has supposedly been taking lessons, to tell the teachers that Laura has a cold and to ask about Laura's progress. Amanda discovered that Laura has not been going to class everyday, but instead dropped out of the school after only a few days of attendance. The teacher remembered Laura only as the shy girl who trembled so much that she couldn't hit the keys.

Amanda, bemoaning the waste of fifty dollars for the tuition, asks Laura where she has been everyday. Laura, clearly shaken and guilt-stricken, admits that she has spent all of these days walking in the park or going to museums, keeping up the deception because she could not bear Amanda's disappointment.

Amanda talks about her fears - economically, Laura has no way of supporting herself, and women without husbands and jobs end up dependent on resentful relatives. She asks if Laura has ever liked a boy, and Laura responds shyly that in high school she had a crush on a boy named Jim. He used to call her "Blue Roses," having misheard her when she told him that she had been ill with an attack of pleurosis. However, the yearbook says that Jim and his high school girlfriend were engaged, and so Laura assumes that the two of them must be married.

Amanda tells Laura that she must try to find a husband. Laura reacts doubtfully and with great sadness, responding that she is crippled and therefore cannot find a husband. Amanda reminds Laura that she has told her daughter never to use the word "cripple," and says that Laura should overcome her "little defect" by cultivating charm.

Analysis

This is the first scene where the audience sees Laura taking care of her glass menagerie. The glass menagerie is the most important symbol for Laura and her fragility. Her engagement with the tiny animals reveals how painfully afraid she is of interaction with other humans. The qualities of glass parallel Laura's characteristics: like the tiny glass animals, she is delicate, beautiful in her oddness and terribly fragile. The little collection, like Laura, is locked completely in the realm of the home. The animals must be kept on a little shelf and polished; there is only one place where they truly belong. In a similar way, Laura is kept and cared for, dependent on her mother and brother for financial support.

The Blue Roses are another important symbol of Laura. The image of blue roses is a beautiful one, and it is the image that is indicated as being on the screen at the start of Scene Two. But blue roses are also pure fantasy, non-existent in the real world. Laura, like a blue rose, is special, unique even, but she is also cut off from real life.

Laura's attempt to learn job skills at Rubicam's Business College was a terrible failure. Her true crippling ailment is not her leg but her shyness, and this anxiety becomes manifest as physical illness. Laura could not bear to continue going to class. Her subsequent deception and fear of her own mother's disappointment shows how oppressive Amanda can be; although Amanda is not intentionally cruel and means to be only loving, her investment in her children and her need to live through them is a terrible burden for both Tom and Laura.

Amanda's anxieties show the difficulty of their financial situation. She is sincerely fearful of what will become of Laura, now that Laura has given up any hope of a career. Amanda works, but the Wingfield family is dependent on Tom's wages. This dependency puts Tom in a difficult position, and we'll see more of that difficulty in Scene Three.

Throughout the play, Amanda vacillates between a realistic appraisal of her situation and a willful blindness towards the truth. Here, early in the play, we see Amanda in brutally honest form - she knows, deep down, that Laura is not going to be easy to marry off, and her attempts to make Laura support herself have failed. It is after this crushing disappointment that Amanda begins to retreat back into the illusion of a gentleman caller swooping in to save the day.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 3 Summary: Tom addresses the audience from the fire escape, telling us about Amanda's determined preparation for a gentleman caller. Mention of the gentleman caller pops into every conversation in the Wingfield apartment, and the stage is haunted by the gentleman caller's projected image. Because it will take money to make their home presentable, Amanda takes a job searching for subscribers to The Homemaker's Companion, a magazine for women. We see Amanda speaking on the telephone to a woman whose subscription is about to run out. Amanda tells the woman that she needs to renew her subscription, trying to convince her with the prospect of a new serial novel that has just begun. Amanda alludes to Gone With the Wind, comparing the new serial to the famous story of Scarlett O'Hara. Eventually, the potential subscriber hangs up on Amanda. We then cut to a very different scene, of Tom and Amanda locked in a vicious argument, which is already in progress. A horrified Laura watches as Tom and Amanda scream at each other. Tom expresses outrage that Amanda confiscated his books. Amanda is not cowed, saying that she will not allow any books by "Mr. Lawrence" in her home. Tom responds that he is the one who pays the rent, and that he is the one who has given up his dreams to support their family. Stage directions indicate that the upright typewriter is surrounded by manuscripts in a state of disarray, and that the battle between Tom and Amanda was probably instigated by Amanda's interruption of Tom's writing. Amanda is also outraged because she does not know where Tom goes at night. She does not believe his claim that he spends his nights out at the movies, and she is angered by the drunken state in which he often returns home. She fears that his nights out jeopardize his day job, and that if he loses his job their security will be threatened.

Tom fires back with anger and frustration that he goes to work every morning even though he hates it. And to Amanda's doubt about where he goes every night, Tom answers with a sarcastic speech that is one of the play's most famous and memorable moments. With bitter sarcasm, he warns her that by night he is a czar of the underworld (known and feared as "Killer Wingfield" and "El Diablo") and that his enemies plan to dynamite the Wingfield apartment. He calls his mother a witch. As he is trying to leave the apartment, he accidentally knocks over the glass menagerie. Amanda storms off, enraged, and Tom remorsefully helps Laura pick up pieces of her collection.

Analysis

The idea of a gentleman caller becomes Amanda's obsession and the great hope for the Wingfields to attain financial security. With a husband, Laura will be provided for and the two women will no longer be dependent on Tom. However, Amanda's ambition for Laura shows the level of her disconnection from real life and the fragility of her dreams. Even if Laura could find a husband, it is strange that Amanda should have so much faith that a husband for Laura would mean security for their family. After all, Amanda's own husband was faithless, and his decision to leave their family led to their current predicament.

The "Mr. Lawrence" Amanda refers to is D.H. Lawrence, one of the most important influences on Tennessee Williams. The allusion to D.H. Lawrence tells us about Tom's needs. Lawrence's work was daring and provocative, especially for its time. Novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover depicted sexuality as a powerful force, and Tom's interest in Lawrence's work suggests both Tom's literary ambitions and his frustration. Tom is trapped in the apartment, with no outlets at home for the ambitions or desires of a young man. One of the play's important themes is the conflict between the desire to live one's own life and the responsibility for one's family. Tom's wages pay the bills, but Amanda continues to treat him as a child. She confiscates his books, and during their argument she attempts to control their discussion as an adult controls an argument with a little boy.

Tom's nightly disappearance "to the movies" has been played in different ways, depending on the production. While his later discussion of his frustration with movies suggests that he goes to the movies at least part of the time, some critics have argued that Tom might be spending his nights exploring the city's hidden gay world. The text does not give enough evidence to make a definitive argument either way. In his monologues to the audience, Tom does not give firm indication of where he used to spend his nights. Nothing in the text rules out the possibility that Tom spends his nights seeking out men for sexual encounters. He never really directly denies that he is going somewhere other than the movies, and with the audience he never addresses the question of whether or not he really goes to the movies. He also arrives home at hours - five in the morning, in one scene - when it seems unlikely that a movie would just be ending.

His anger at being questioned does not help to shed light on the matter: he would be angry if he was telling the truth about going to the movies, and he would be angry if he had something to hide. Critics who favor the sexual interpretation of Tom's nightly disappearances often cite Tennessee Williams' youth and his grappling with his own sexuality. The play is in many other respects autobiographical, and Tom is Williams' surrogate - he even bears Tennessee Williams' real name. If Tom were gay, his frustration with home would be even greater. Tom would feel even more isolated and restless, unable to tell the truth to his mother and sister.

When Tom accidentally breaks some of the pieces in the glass menagerie, the incident foreshadows Laura's heartbreak later on. The event emphasizes the collection's fragility, and so metaphorically we are reminded of Laura's own fragility. Tom is the one responsible, and the pain of his position is made clear. As much as he would like to live his own life, his actions have a deleterious effect on the well-being and security of his mother and sister. By being reckless, he can destroy the pretend-world of his sister.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 4 Summary:

As the church bell strikes five am, a drunken Tom stumbles home. The script does not make clear exactly how much time has passed between Scene Four and the argument that ended Scene Three, but it has been no more than a few days. Laura, who sleeps on the couch, hears him and opens the door for him. Tom insists that he has been at the movies all night. When Laura expresses doubt that her brother could really have been at the movies all this time, Tom tells her about the length of the program and the magician that he went to see. He gives her a rainbow colored scarf as a souvenir from the magic show. The magician's most impressive trick was to escape from a coffin without removing a single nail. Tom is awestruck by the trick, and shares his wonder with Laura: "You know it don't take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?"

Cut to one hour later. After the church bell strikes six times, we hear Amanda calling out "Rise and Shine!" After just an hour of sleep, an exhausted Tom stumbles out of bed for another day of work at the warehouse. Laura, who has been sent to wake him, begs Tom to apologize to Amanda. Meanwhile, Amanda is calling out from the kitchenette for Laura to go get butter from the grocery store. Laura, exiting on the fire escape, slips and cries out. The noise gives Tom and Amanda a scare, but Laura seems to be fine.

Awkwardly, Tom tries to apologize to Amanda as he takes his morning coffee. Amanda feels that she suffers and struggles for the sake of her children, and that her efforts go unappreciated by Tom. Tom tries to tell her that he doesn't hate her and that he understands her feelings. Amanda also tells Tom he cannot fail; without him, she cannot keep the family together. She believes that if Tom applies himself he will succeed; the idea of her children's success is an exhilarating one for her, and she becomes breathless just speaking about it. Amanda also asks Tom to promise that he will never be a drunkard. She exhorts him to eat, but he refuses everything except for black coffee, implying that he is hungover.

Amanda is concerned. She tells Tom that Laura thinks he is unhappy. She asks why - and if - he goes to the movies every night. Tom responds that he likes lots of adventure, and that his job at the warehouse does not provide any. Amanda is worried that Tom will abandon them. Fearful for Laura's future, Amanda tells Tom that he can leave if he can find a replacement - a gentleman caller for Laura, who will eventually marry her and provide for her. Amanda exhorts Tom to overcome selfishness. An increasingly frustrated Tom tries to break off the conversation and go to work, but not before he begrudgingly agrees to look for a gentleman caller for his sister.

Analysis

Tom's fascination with the movies and the magician reveals his need for fantasy and escapism. Tom is always dreaming of fantastic places far from St. Louis, but for now he can only escape through the illusions offered by the movie house and the stage magician. He dreams of leaving home, but his responsibilities for his sister and his mother have so far kept him tied to the Wingfield apartment.

What Tom sees at the magic show is directly connected to the theme of conflict between Tom's responsibility for his family and his need to live his own life. The magician's most impressive trick becomes a symbol for what Tom wishes he could do - to make a clean, easy escape, without destroying the coffin or removing any nails. The use of the coffin as a symbol for Tom's predicament shows the depth of his unhappiness. He feels spiritually dead, despising his work and stifled by the atmosphere at home. In his talk with Amanda, he suggests that his work emasculates him, making it impossible for him to follow the instincts of a man. The magician is able to escape the coffin without the messiness of having to remove nails, which would damage the coffin. Tom can escape, but only at great cost - he would have to abandon his sister and mother and leave them to an uncertain fate. Tom is in awe of the magician because he does not have to choose; he can escape without causing any harm, a feat that might be impossible for Tom.

Laura's vulnerability is emphasized in that symbolic space most closely linked to Tom, the fire escape. Tom will later climb down the fire escape one final time, leaving the apartment forever. But in her one attempt to even step briefly on to the symbolic space of the fire escape, Laura stumbles. This fall symbolizes her inability to fend for herself in the outside world, and the ultimate hopelessness of her situation.

The scene balances Tom's frustration with his home situation against the tenderness the Wingfields feel for each other. Laura is able to exhort Tom to apologize, and at the start of his conversation with Amanda, Tom's affection for his mother is clear. As their conversation continues, however, the old rifts seem inescapable. There is a moment of dramatic irony when Amanda tries to get Tom to eat and to promise that he will not become a drunkard; the audience knows, although Amanda does not, that Tom is probably horribly hung over and that he came home drunk only a few hours ago. This moment shows the greatness of the divide between mother and son; she knows nothing of his state, and so her attempts to care for him are met with irritability. Tension escalates gradually but steadily, suggesting that no peace between Tom and Amanda can ever be easy or long-lasting.

Amanda is still fixating on the idea of the gentleman caller. She proposes a swap; Tom's freedom in exchange for a husband for Laura. Amanda is still putting her security into the hands of men. Indeed, perhaps she sees no alternative. Although her old husband's irresponsibility and Tom's increasing restlessness would seem to argue against the reliability of male providers, Amanda is still hoping to find an ideal husband for her daughter. This hope will prove to be misplaced. Even the gentleman caller, when he finally comes, will be careless with Laura.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 5 Summary:

After dinner, Tom reads a paper (the headline reads, "Franco triumphs") as Amanda and Laura clear the table and do the dishes. Amanda nags her son to comb his hair. Tom heads out to the fire escape to smoke, and Amanda complains that he spends too much money on cigarettes; if he saved the money, he would be able to go to night school. Tom replies that he would rather smoke. Tom delivers a speech to the audience about Paradise Dance Hall, across the alley from the Wingfield apartment. Tom describes the music that emanates from the hall, and the rainbow colored lights that are visible from the fire escape. Tom speaks of the carefree world of the dancers, who drank and danced to swing music while the atrocity of Guernica unfolded in Europe. Those dancers, says Tom, could not have known that change would be coming for them, too.

Amanda joins Tom on the fire escape. Tom reveals to her that he has found a gentleman caller for Laura. Amanda is thrilled, but Tom also tells her that the gentleman caller is arriving tomorrow evening. Amanda is startled, afraid that she will not have enough time to make the home presentable. For Amanda, this is a major event: she'll send for a new floor lamp, polish her wedding silver, put chintz covers on, wear nice clothes, etc. She begins to grill Tom on the gentleman caller's character; she is particularly concerned that he might be a drunkard.

His name is Jim O'Connor. As far as Tom knows, he is not a heavy drinker. He works as a shipping clerk at the warehouse for eighty-five dollars a month (twenty dollars more than Tom's monthly salary). He is not too good-looking, nor is he ugly. He goes to night school, believes in self-improvement, and has great ambitions. Tom is anxious, however, because he has not mentioned Laura to Jim, and although Amanda has faith in Laura's ability to enchant Jim, Tom has his doubts. Tom asks Amanda not to expect too much of Laura, saying that Tom and Amanda see Laura's beauty because they know her and love her. He mentions that Laura is crippled, and Amanda insists that the word "crippled" is not allowed in the Wingfield home. Tom mentions Laura's peculiar habits - her care of the glass menagerie and her love of their old phonograph records. Tom then departs for the movies. Amanda seems somewhat shaken by Tom's misgivings, but she regains her optimism and calls Laura to come out to the fire escape. Amanda asks Laura to make a wish on the "little silver slipper of a moon," her eyes filling with tears as she tells her daughter to wish for happiness and good fortune.

Analysis

The first part of the scene uses the time setting to reinforce a sense of tension and expectation. The newspaper headline, "Franco Triumphs," gives the audience the first specific marker for the time of the play: 1937. In Tom's speech from the fire escape, the symbolic name of Paradise Dance Hall can be read in a number of ways. "Paradise" is an allusion to the lost Garden of Eden, and here the allusion paints the American thirties as a period of innocence before the turmoil of World War II. The dance hall, because it is being described as a memory, creates a sense of loss due to the passage of time. This loss of innocence occurs for the nation - Tom tells us that the dancers could not have known what was coming, and he makes yet another allusion to the carnage of Guernica, which by the time of writing had become a symbol for the violence in which their entire world would soon be enmeshed. On a personal level, Paradise Dance Hall might symbolize more specific loss that Tom has experienced. For the older Tom narrating the play, the fragile world of his family is lost forever.

But for the characters living through the action of the play, the Paradise Dance Hall symbolizes hope. This scene, with Amanda and Tom sitting on the fire escape, wishing on the moon and surrounded by the music and lights of the nearby dance hall, is lyrical and beautiful. The rainbow-colored lights and the lively music point to a world of leisure, ease, and good times. Paradise, from this perspective, is not a thing lost and receding into the past, but is rather a thing that might be gained in the future. Amanda's life story, as she tells it, includes both kinds of Paradise: she longs for the idyllic world of her youth and her seventeen gentleman callers, and she longs for a future fairy-tale ending for her daughter.

Through the conventions of the stage, however, the dance hall is always just out of reach. The audience can hear the music, possibly see the lights, and hear characters' descriptions of the place, but the Paradise Dance Hall can only be suggested indirectly, as out of reach for the audience as "Paradise" is for Tom, Amanda, and Laura. With the narrator's added perspective and his remarks about the trouble that will engulf the world, we are made to see the illusory nature of the kind of "Paradise" represented by the dance hall.

It is also worth noting that the Paradise Dance Hall is a sort of foreshadowing for Williams' next play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Paradise, dance halls, and colored lights are all prominent symbols in Streetcar, and in that instance operating independently of one another. Further support for the argument that Tom is gay can be found by retrofitting Williams' later associations with these symbols into the earlier play. In Streetcar, paradise (or Elysian Fields) is tied up with sexuality and death; a dance hall is a dreaded place, where Blanche discovered her husband's homosexuality; and colored lights are used as a metaphor for sexual pleasure. Working backwards, it is easy to associate Tom's wistfulness towards the colored lights of Paradise Dance Hall with his sublimated homosexuality. Despite the lessons from Amanda's own unhappy marriage, Amanda imagines that her daughter will be the princess of a Cinderella story. Jim O'Connor, named in Tom's first monologue as a symbol for that special something that we all wait and live for, is supposed to be the prince in Amanda's dreams who rescues Laura and provides her with a happy ending. Amanda is imagining a fairy tale life for her daughter, and when she asks Laura to wish on the "little silver slipper of a moon," her description of the moon is an allusion to Cinderella. Amanda is ignoring the lessons from her own marriage and the obstacle of Laura's awkwardness.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 6 Summary:

Tom addresses the audience and talks about Jim. The two men went to the same high school, where Jim was the class hero. In high school he was the basketball star, class president, and male lead in the annual light operas, and now, six years later, his job is not much better than Tom's. He and Tom are on friendly terms, partly because Tom remembers his former glory. Jim's affection for Tom has helped Tom along socially with the other workers, who initially disliked Tom because of his aloofness and oddness. Jim also knows that Tom steals away at work to write poetry, and so he has given Tom the nickname "Shakespeare."

Stage directions indicate that the Wingfield apartment looks beautiful. Amanda has worked hard to make the apartment ready for the gentleman caller. There is a brief comical interaction where Amanda encourages Laura to stuff her bra. Amanda dresses in a girlish outfit from her youth. It is the dress in which she led the cotillion, and she speaks feverishly of the days when she spent all her time going to parties and dancing. She also speaks of her youthful obsession with jonquil flowers. The story ends mournfully with Amanda meeting Tom's and Laura's father.

Laura, for the first time, hears the name of the gentleman caller, and she realizes that it might be the same Jim on whom she had a crush back in high school. She tells Amanda that if it is the same Jim, she will not come to the table. The idea of facing Jim horrifies her. When the doorbell rings, a terrified Laura argues with an increasingly irate Amanda about who will answer the door. Laura finally lets the two men in but flees after being introduced to Jim.

Jim is boisterous and constantly talks about the self-improvement courses in which he is involved. As they wait for the women, he tries to convince Tom to enroll in a public speaking course with him. Tom is uninterested. Jim warns Tom that the boss is not pleased with Tom and he may soon be out of a job. Tom responds that he is preparing for a change. He gives a speech about being tired of the movies: movies tranquilize people, making them content to watch other people's adventures without having any of their own. He tells Jim of his plans to join the Merchant Seamen. This month he has paid his dues to the Merchant Seamen instead of the light bill, and he plans to leave St. Louis. Amanda does not know of his plans, and Jim is incredulous, but before the two men can really talk about it, Amanda enters, dressed as if she were a young Southern belle, and immediately begins to talk Jim's ear off.

Tom goes to fetch Laura for supper, but Laura refuses to come to the table. Scene Six ends with Amanda, Jim, and Tom sitting down for dinner. The audience can see Laura in the living room, where she is stretched out on the sofa, trying not to cry.

Analysis

Amanda's expectations for this evening are very high. The apartment has been made over - with great expense - and she has worried Laura by making such a fuss over the evening. Amanda is vicariously reliving her youth, and her longing for that youth is made clear when she dresses in the old frock she wore as a young girl. The escapism of living in the past, however, can never last long for Amanda, since all stories of her glory days end with her married to the faithless Mr. Wingfield. Although Jim is charmed by Amanda, Tom is slightly embarrassed by her behavior. She is not acting her age.

Tom is also preparing for his own escape. He now rejects his previous escape of the cinema and its vicarious adventuring, in favor of a more literal escape to the Merchant Seamen. Tom finally sees a route away from Amanda and Laura, adrift at sea without any true destination or goal. (There is also clear gay subtext in the idea that Tom chooses to be aboard a boat of only men for a limitless amount of time.) Jim, meanwhile, disapproves of his plan – his life may not have gone where he wanted it to, but at least he is trying to redirect his path, rather than leave it altogether.

But Tom's intentions are a perverse alteration of the deal offered by Amanda. Amanda insisted that he wait until Laura could find a husband. But Tom has only provided a gentleman caller and is already planning to leave. Indeed, he has even stopped paying the bills. He does not have the patience to escape the coffin without busting the nails, and has decided to not even try.

We know from Tom's description of Jim that he enjoys praise. Jim was once the big man on campus, and life has yet to prove as rewarding as he'd once found it. He likes the company of people who admire him, and who moreover remember his glory days - much like Amanda, who likewise seeks appreciation for the promise she once showed. Laura, meanwhile, sees Jim as a warden of the past - who can't let her move forward with her hopes and dreams because he is such a potent reminder of her own disappointments. Jim's interaction with Laura in Scene Seven will show how this love of admiration compromises his consideration of others.

This scene also features Amanda's second famous speech, about the jonquils. Like her first story about the 17 gentlemen callers, this story also ends when Amanda meets her husband, making her marriage the symbolic end of her life. The imagery of the jonquils is beautiful but also telling – another name for the jonquil is the narcissus, derived from the Greek youth who fell in love with his own reflection (think narcissist). Ultimately, Amanda sinks under the weight of her own self-image.

The Glass Menagerie Summary and Analysis of Scene 7 Summary:

Half an hour later, as dinner is finishing up, the lights go out. Tom feigns ignorance of the cause. Amanda, unfazed, continues to be as charming as she can. She lights candles and asks Jim to check the fuse box. After Jim tells her that the fuse box looks fine, Amanda suggests that he go spend time with Laura in the living room.

As Amanda and Tom do dishes in the kitchen, Laura warms up to Jim, who is charming enough to put her ease. She reminds him that they knew each other in high school, and that he used to call her "Blue Roses." Jim feels ashamed that he did not recognize her at once. They reminisce about the class they had together, a singing class to which Laura, because of her leg, was always late. She always felt that the brace on her leg made a clumping sound "like thunder," but Jim insists that he never noticed it.

They have a friendly conversation by candlelight. Jim reveals that he was never engaged, and that his old girlfriend was the one who put the announcement in the yearbook. They no longer see each other. Laura speaks admirably of Jim's voice, and he autographs the program of the show he was in, The Pirates of Penzance. Indeed, she was too shy to bring the program to him back in high school, but she has kept it all these years. Jim tries to give Laura advice about raising her self-esteem, and talks about his plans to get involved with the nascent television industry. He speaks of the numerous courses he is taking, and his interest in programmatic methods for self-improvement. He calls money and power the cycle on which democracy is built.

Laura shows Jim her glass collection. They look closely at a little glass unicorn, remarking on how the unicorn must feel odd due to its uniqueness. They put the unicorn down on a different table, for "a change of scenery." Laura bashfully admires Jim, while Jim grows increasingly flirtatious. When he hears the music of the Paradise Dance Hall, he asks her to dance with him. He tries to help her shed her self-consciousness, and the two of them begin to grow close - but suddenly, they jostle the table and knock over the unicorn, breaking off its horn. Jim apologizes but Laura tells him not to worry. She can pretend the unicorn had an operation to make it feel less freakish.

Jim speaks admiringly of Laura's character, and then begins to praise her looks. He tells her that she is pretty, and Laura blushes with shy bliss over this unexpected praise. Then, suddenly, Jim kisses her. Immediately, he seems to regret the kiss. Awkwardly, he admits to Laura that he is engaged. Laura's face reveals terrible desolation. She gives him the broken unicorn as a souvenir. Then she goes to the Victrola and winds it up. Amanda rushes in, only to hear Jim's announcement that he has to leave. When Amanda tells Jim that he should come again, he tells her about his plans to marry his current girlfriend. He also mentions that no one at the warehouse knows about the engagement. He leaves.

Amanda, furious, calls in Tom. She accuses Tom of playing a practical joke on them, by intentionally bringing in another woman's fiancé to disgrace them. She is visibly shaken; the evening has been expensive for the Wingfields, and her dreams for her daughter have been shattered. Angered by her accusations and not willing to put up with her foolishness, Tom tells her that he is going to the movies. She accuses him of selfishness, and says that he never thinks of them, "a mother deserted, an unmarried sister who's crippled and has no job." Infuriated, Tom leaves.

Tom, as narrator, then addresses the audience from the fire escape, telling us that soon after that night he went down the fire escape one last time and left St. Louis forever. As he gives this final speech, Amanda and Laura are visible through a transparent fourth wall that drops down into place in front of them. This closing speech is one of the most famous moments in all of Williams' work, and indeed one of the most haunting and beautiful moments in all of American theatre. He talks about time being the "longest distance between two places," and his long search to find something that he himself seems unable to name. He tells the audience that for all of the years since he left, he has been pursued by the memory of Laura. Though he tried to leave his family behind, his memory of his mother and sister continues to haunt him. He finishes by imploring his memory of Laura to blow out her candles, "for nowadays the world is lit by lightning." He says goodbye, although in the script it is unclear whether he is bidding goodbye to the audience or to his sister. Behind him, visible through the transparent wall, Amanda comforts Laura silently throughout Tom's speech. When Tom has finished speaking, Laura blows the candles out, ending the play.

Analysis

Although a great deal depends on the actor's interpretation, Jim's enthusiasm is selfish and empty-headed. He shamelessly leads Laura on, not maliciously but also without any careful consideration. He enjoys her company because, like Tom, Laura remembers his glory days. His speeches praising self-improvement and night classes are symptomatic of the most unimaginative and vapid interpretation of the American dream - culminating in his appalling praise of the lust for money and power as the cycle on which democracy is built. As Tom said in the opening of the play, Jim is more a part of the real world than anyone in the Wingfield family. He is fully a creature of the world and worldly pursuits. He knows what no one else does - that he is engaged - and he still gives Laura the kiss that raises her hopes before he tells her the truth.

Their different memories of school reveal how fatally self-conscious Laura is. The sound of her brace mortified her back in high school, but Jim cannot remember it at all. Jim tries to convince Laura that she is worthwhile and unique. A more gracious interpretation of his character would argue that part of his motivation is a desire for Laura to see how beautiful she is.

The glass unicorn, of course, is a clear symbol for Laura. She, like the unicorn, is odd and unique. Both Laura and the unicorn are fragile -and Jim "breaks" both of them. Laura's subsequent gift of the broken unicorn, however, suggests the extent of her affection for him. For Jim, the evening has been insignificant. But Laura has harbored a girlish crush on him for many years - she even saved the program of the play in which he starred - and the gift of the unicorn, an item that is a symbol of herself, shows how much she still likes him. It is the gift of an odd and painfully shy girl, for whom kissing Jim (probably her first kiss) was a climactic experience. For a brief moment, the Wingfield apartment was a place of dreams. Amanda experienced a return to her girlhood, Laura showed her long lost love her precious glass menagerie, and the place was full of the music from Paradise Dance Hall. But the unicorn breaks, the music of "Paradise" gives way to the sad sounds of the Victrola, and even Amanda is left without defenses against reality. For the first time, she refers to Laura as "crippled," breaking her own rule, and she seems to acknowledge that Tom will soon leave them. This scene has its share of rose imagery. The new floor lamp has a rose-colored shade; Laura herself is "Blue Roses." The rose-colored light makes Laura look beautiful; she is bathed in rose-colored light, she is "Blue Roses," and she is also, in many ways, the surrogate for Williams' sister - whose name was Rose. Williams uses the rose as a motif for Laura to emphasize her delicateness and her beauty, as well as her worth. The fantastic blue color of the flower shows, however, that Laura is not a being of this world. Laura's association with a candle in the final moment stands in sharp contrast to a world "lit by lightning." The image of lightning suggests a hostile and overpowering world, and in the last scene a storm is brewing outside. Especially as a lone figure juxtaposed to the turmoil of the forties and the war to come, Laura seems hopelessly frail and vulnerable.

Tom's closing speech, of course, is a peerless and infamous moment. The descending fourth wall puts a powerful but permeable barrier between Tom and his family. They are behind him, behind him in time and in the physical space of the stage. And yet, Tom cannot seem to shake the memory of them, and they are clearly visible to the audience. Although he has never explicitly spoken of one of the play's most important themes - the conflict between responsibility and the need to live his own life - it is clear that he has not been able to shake the guilt from the decision that he made. The cost of escape has been the burden of memory. For Tom and the audience, it is difficult to forget the final image of frail Laura, illuminated by candlelight on a darkened stage, while the world outside of the apartment faces the beginnings of a great storm.

The Glass Menagerie The Dead Gay Guy The Glass Menagerie is a remarkable play in its own right, full of poetic beauty and aching drama, but it is also remarkable in the context of Tennessee Williams' greater body of work. It was his first produced play, and it ricocheted the young writer into uneasy stardom. "I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence," Williams wrote in his essay "The Catastrophe of Success," and it unnerved and demoralized him. Fame discomforted Williams just as much later in his career. His second play, A Streetcar Named Desire, was revered and lauded even more than Menagerie, and together the two works are considered a pinnacle of American theater. Williams had a long and prolific career, stretching many decades past his early success, but he never escaped the shadow of his first two magnificent plays. "I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer," he wrote in the New York Times in 1977, bemoaning the neglect that his later work received in favor of his first triumphs. This is not the place to issue a defense of or tribute to the second act of Williams' career. Rather, it is worth observing The Glass Menagerie not only as an isolated play, but as an entry into a oeuvre with repeating symbols, motifs, and themes. Elements of Menagerie can be used to shed light on Williams' other prominent works. Likewise, the symbols of Streetcar and other plays can be traced backwards to a new understanding of Menagerie.

One of the most famous features of the Williams' oeuvre is the figure of the absent male character – the "dead gay guy" who haunts the proceedings of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and the one-act Suddenly Last Summer. Blanche's husband, Allen, shot himself after Blanche discovered his homosexuality; Skipper drank himself to death after realizing the nature of his love for Brick; and Sebastian was brutally killed while on a hedonistic vacation. Two were poets (Allen and Sebastian), two were suicides (Allen and Skipper), all three were gay, and all three were killed by a sort of societal punishment for their homosexuality. The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, has a different absentee male character. Mr. Wingfield is not implied to be gay, and he isn't dead – he is a telephone man who fell in love with long distances. His image hovers over the stage and shadows Amanda's life just like Williams' similar figures, but Mr. Wingfield is only the structural prototype for the dead gay guy. It is Tom who provides the character prototype. And yet, Tom is never overtly stated as being gay. It is not even hinted at in an avoid-the-censors sort of way. He is a poet, yes, and he spends the evenings away from the apartment, but his claim to attending the movies is supported by his speech about the false adventure of cinema.

And yet it is not unusual for Tom to be read or played as gay. This is in no small part drawn from the fact that Tom is a semi-autobiographical character. But aside from the obvious connection between Tom and Williams, a reader or viewer of Menagerie who is also fluent in Williams' other major plays can view the symbols of Menagerie with the lens of those symbols' appearance in Streetcar and other plays.

The obvious example is the emphasis on Tom as a poet. Yes, this is another autobiographical connection, but it also reflects Hayes-era coding of "poet" for "homosexual" (cf: the film of Streetcar, in which Blanche confronts Allan for being a poet). Other symbols from Streetcar can be read back into Menagerie as well. In Streetcar, the concept of paradise is closely tied up with destruction and sexuality; dance halls are a place of sexual degeneracy and doom; and colored lights are a continued symbol for sexual pleasure. And a prominent set piece of Menagerie has Tom standing on the fire escape, waxing poetic about the colored lights at the Paradise Dance Hall. It is not too much of a stretch to apply the Streetcar symbols to this particular image and find further connection between Tom Wingfield and Allan Grey. So what does that give us? Nothing concrete, except perhaps an interesting glimpse into the development of that most famous Williams prototype of the 'dead gay guy.' Tom is not only the prototype – he is the origin story. In the other three plays, the dead gay guy is already gone and dead, and we only see the effect of his haunting non-presence on the women he left behind. In Menagerie, however, we get to see the character before he leaves. The Glass Menagerie is the story of Tom, while A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer are the story of Amanda and Laura, the women he leaves behind.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature. Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had been a journalist. He based For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) on his experience there. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. He was present with the troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. Hemingway went on safari to Africa shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), where he was involved in two successive near-fatal plane crashes that left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho where he ended his own life in mid-1961.

The Sun Also Rises Study Guide The Sun Also Rises will maintain a place in history not only for its literary merit, but also for its documentation of what writer Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation." After WWI, many young Americans left their native country, bitter over the war and seeking adventure. A circle of artistic expatriates -- among them Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso -- formed in Paris under Stein's guidance and shared their revolutionary ideas on art. While they helped define Modernist techniques in literature and painting, the Americans, in particular, catalogued the social upheaval in their homeland. While reeling from a huge blow to their innocence, Americans (at least the white middle- and upper-class) drifted irresponsibly through the prosperous era now known as the Roaring 20s. Hemingway and Fitzgerald employed their keen social observation in writing The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, respectively, widely considered the two masterpieces of Lost Generation fiction. The novels are remarkably similar: a somewhat indistinct young man narrates a story of unrequited desire for an untouchable woman in a hedonistic social environment. The major difference is that in The Sun Also Rises, it is the narrator whose desire is unrequited, and because of a physical impairment, whereas in Fitzgerald's work, Gatsby (not the narrator) cannot have his love interest for other reasons. While Hemingway, like Fitzgerald, explores and critiques the superficiality of his characters' indulgent lifestyles, he touches upon a number of other themes, many of which have to do with new notions of masculinity arising after the war. Jake's purported impotence is a powerful symbol for the emasculated postwar male psyche, and bull- fighting describes sex as warfare on several metaphorical levels. These ideas are delivered in Hemingway's spare, unadorned, journalistic prose (another contrast to Fitzgerald, whose more ornate writing has had an arguably equal stylistic influence over modern writers).

Hemingway conceived of the idea for The Sun Also Rises while attending the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, with friends in July, 1925. Hemingway had set up the beautiful Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett, with Cayetano Ordonez, the model for Romero (who is most likely named for Francisco Romero, an 18th-century bull-fighter who invented the modern rules for the sport). He felt guilty over compromising Ordonez's "aficion" with a foreign woman, and possibly wrote the story -- with "Hem" as his stand-in matchmaker -- as a means to exculpate himself. The real-life conflict spun out to Harold Loeb (Cohn) and Pat Guthrie (Twysden's fianc? and the model for Mike). Ogden Stewart rounded out the group in the novel as Bill Gorton. Hemingway soon expanded the story into a novel originally entitled Fiesta: A Novel (it is still called this in British editions). He shifted the opening to Paris and heightened the relationship between Brett and the narrator -- now called Jake (Hemingway was wounded in WWI, though he was not rendered impotent). He ran through several more revisions, often with F. Scott Fitzgerald's help, and changed the novel to its current title just before printing in October 1926. The book was a success and established Hemingway as an internationally-known author.

The Sun Also Rises Summary The narrator, Jake Barnes, describes Robert Cohn, a rich Jew who graduated from Princeton with low self-esteem, had an unsuccessful marriage, lost most of his inheritance, and moved to Paris with an exploitative woman, Frances, to write a novel. Jake plays tennis with him. Cohn sold his novel in America and returned with arrogance and a craving for adventure. He frequently imposes on Jake. One night, Jake picks up a girl, Georgette, and turns down her sexual advances, explaining he is "sick." They end up at a dancing-club, where Jake sees the beautiful and independent Lady Ashley, known to him as Brett. He eventually leaves with her; they have had a romantic relationship in the past, and though they kiss, Brett does not want to go through "'that hell again.'" They briefly discuss Jake's physical condition, which appears to be impotence. They meet one of Brett's friends, Count Mippipopolous. Jake makes plans to see her tomorrow. In his bed, he cries when thinking about Brett, and is woken when Brett drunkenly comes up. She invites him to go out with her and the count for dinner tomorrow, kisses him, and leaves. The next day, Cohn asks Jake about Brett; he explains she's getting a divorce now and is going to marry Mike Campbell, who is currently in Scotland. Cohn admits he's falling in love with her. Jake says he met her while he was in a hospital during the war; she was a volunteer nurse and had married the man whose name she took, Ashley. Later, after Brett blows off a date with Jake, Frances humiliates Cohn in front of Jake. Jake leaves, unable to stand it. Brett shows up with the count. Brett joins Jake in his room, and Jake says he loves her. Brett sends the count out for champagne. Jake asks Brett if they could live together, but she says they couldn't, as she would "tromper" (be unfaithful to, or elude) him. She says she is going away from him tomorrow, to San Sebastian, until Mike comes back. The count returns and shows his scars on his stomach and back from arrow wounds in various wars. They go to a club. Brett tells Jake about Mike, then tells Jake she is "'so miserable.'" They take the count's car to her hotel, but Brett doesn't want Jake to come up with her. They kiss at her door, but Brett pushes him away before leaving.

Jake does not see Brett until she returns from San Sebastian, nor does he see Cohn, who takes a trip to the country. He works hard in preparation for his trip at the end of June to Spain with Bill Gorton. Bill arrives in Paris, and they run into Brett, just back from her trip. That night, they meet up with Brett and Mike. Brett introduces Mike as an "'undischarged bankrupt'"; he explains that his ex-partner "'did me in.'" Mike is very drunk and possessive of Brett. Jake receives a letter from the vacationing Cohn, who is eager to go on the fishing trip with Jake and Bill. Jake writes him and gives him instructions for where to meet them in Spain. Mike also asks if Jake would mind if they accompanied him to Spain, and Jake says it's fine. When Mike leaves, Brett tells Jake that it might be "'rough'" on Cohn to accompany them, as she went to San Sebastian with him. Bill and Jake take a train to Bayonne and meet Cohn that night.

Jake, Bill, and Cohn hire a car and drive to Pamplona. They discuss Brett and Mike; Cohn bets Bill that they won't arrive. At night, Jake and Cohn go to meet Brett and Mike's train; they are not on it. Cohn tells Bill not to worry about the bet. Jake receives a telegram from Brett and Mike; they've stopped over in San Sebastian. They make plans to leave tomorrow; if Brett and Mike get in later, they can follow them. The next day, Cohn says he won't be leaving with them. He explains that he is supposed to meet Brett and Mike in San Sebastian, as he had suggested it to Brett. Bill and Jake share information about Cohn and Brett, and decide they're better off without him and take a bus to Burguete for fishing.

Bill and Jake bond while fishing, and meet an Englishman named Harris at their inn. One day, Jake receives a letter from Mike; Brett passed out on the train, so they decided to recuperate in San Sebastian with old friends. He says they are going to Pamplona. Jake and Bill take a bus to Pamplona. They talk to the head of the hotel, Montoya, and learn about the bull-fights for the next couple of days. Montoya believes he and Jake are true, passionate "aficionados" of bull-fighting. The good bull-fighters stay at Montoya's hotel. Jake describes the "unloadings" of the bull-fights to Bill: they release the bulls from their corrals, and they chase and gore steers, young oxen castrated before sexual maturity. The purpose is to calm down the bulls and prevent them from fighting each other. Jake and Bill find Brett, Mike, and Cohn, and they watch the bulls unloaded. One steer is gored and excluded, while the other befriends the bulls. Brett is fascinated. Later, Mike says Cohn follows Brett around like a steer and that he is not wanted. Bill leads Cohn away. While Mike knows Brett has affairs -- she tells him -- he finds Cohn pathetic. Later, everyone has a pleasant dinner together, pretending nothing happened. Jake has a rough night, tormenting himself with thoughts of Brett. Pamplona gets ready the next two days for the fiesta. The fiesta explodes at noontime on Sunday. While some people are at mass, as San Fermin is also a religious festival, music, dancing, and drinking fill the streets.

Wearing wreaths of garlic, dancers chant around Brett in a circle. They do the same to Bill and Jake. Afterwards, they seat Brett on a cask from which they draw wine, and give her a wreath of garlic. Jake, Bill, and Mike share food and drink with the Spaniards. Jake wakes the next morning to the rocket announcing the release of the bulls. He watches from the balcony. Men run down the street to the bull-ring, chased by bulls.

Jake and his friends go to the bull-fight that afternoon. Jake gives some advice to Brett about watching the fight; she is nervous about what will happen when the bull attacks the horse. Jake returns to the hotel for his wine-skin, where Montoya briefly introduces him to Pedro Romero, an extremely good-looking young bull-fighter. Jack finds the fight good, as Romero is a "real" bull-fighter. Later, Mike points out and Brett admits that she could not stop staring at Romero. Romero dominates the second day of fighting. Jake explains to Brett why Romero is so skilled a matador. Mike jokes that Brett is falling in love with Romero. At dinner in the hotel, Romero invites Jake to his table. They discuss bull-fighting. Jake introduces him to his friends, and Brett flirts with Romero; Mike, drunk and disorderly, makes disparaging comments to Romero and, when he leaves, to Cohn. Later, Brett tells Cohn to leave her and Jake alone. She admits she has fallen in love with Romero and cannot help it. She feels she has to do something, as she has lost her self-respect with the way Mike and Cohn are around her. She asks Jake to help her through this, and they find Romero in the café with other bull-fighters. Romero joins them. Jake leaves with an excuse, but he makes it clear it is to leave Romero and Brett alone. When he returns later, they are gone. Jake reunites with Mike, Bill, and Cohn. Mike says that Brett has gone off with Romero. Cohn asks Jake if it's true, and when he receives no answer, calls Jake a "'pimp.'" They fight, and Cohn beats up Jake and Mike. Later, at the hotel, Bill tells Jake that Cohn wants to see him. Jake reluctantly goes to Cohn's room. Cohn is crying and begs Jake's forgiveness, and says he'll be leaving in the morning. He says he can't take the way Brett treats him like a stranger, after they had lived together in San Sebastian. Jake says goodbye to him.

Jakes wakes and goes to the bull-ring to watch the bulls run in. A bull gores one man in the back. Jake reads about the man in the paper the next day, and the town has a funeral for him the day after that. Jake describes how Romero killed the bull the afternoon of the funeral. Its ear was cut off and given to Romero, who gave it to Brett. She discarded the ear in her hotel room's drawer. Bill and Mike tell Jake that after Cohn beat up him and Mike, he found Brett in Romero's room and beat up Romero badly. When he tried to apologize to Romero, the bull-fighter hit Cohn in the face, and then threatened to kill him if he weren't out of town by the morning. Brett told Cohn off until he cried. Brett is now taking care of Romero. Mike also relates Brett's unhappy relationship with the Englishman Lord Ashley (from whom she received her title).

It is the last day of the fiesta. Brett tells Jake and Bill at the café that Romero is badly hurt and won't leave his room, though he is still going to fight. Mike angrily tips over the table. Brett leaves with Jake. She tells him she is happy, and asks him to go to the fight with her. After lunch, Jake, Bill, and Brett sit ring-side at the fight. Three matadors are there -- Romero, Marcial, and Belmonte. Belmonte, a legend who recently came out retirement, renowned for working close to the bull and gravely endangering himself, goes first and is very good, but not as good as he used to be, and the crowd turns against him. Romero is elegant in the "quite," in which the bull charges all three matadors. With his own bull, whose vision is impaired, Romero works to make the match exciting, but the crowd does not understand the situation, and believes he is afraid. He brilliantly handles the last bull, the one that gored the man the other day. His brother cuts the ear off the bull and hands it to Romero, who gives it to Brett. That night, Mike tells Jake that Brett left with Romero on the train. The fiesta is over the next morning. The men split up, and Jake ends up in San Sebastian. He spends several relaxing days there until he receives a telegram from Brett in Madrid, saying she is in trouble and asking him to come to her hotel. He arrives in Madrid on the overnight train. Brett is happy to see him and kisses him, and says she made Romero leave yesterday. He wanted to marry her so that she "'couldn't go away from him.'" Ultimately, she feels she could have lived with him had she not seen it would be bad for him. Brett cries, and Jake holds her. She says she is returning to Mike. They get train tickets for that night, and later go for a taxi ride through Madrid. Brett laments that she and Jake could have had "'such a damned good time together.'" Jake replies, "'YesŠ Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

The Sun Also Rises Character List Jake Barnes The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Jake is a young American expatriate working in a Paris newspaper office. He is a veteran of WWI and has an injury from it which, it appears, has left him impotent. He desires Brett, with whom he developed a relationship while in the war hospital, but cannot have her because of his physical condition. His submissive pursuit of her often undermines his values and sense of self-worth. His other passion besides Brett is bull-fighting; he is considered a true aficionado of the sport. He spends his days and nights living irresponsibly and drinking heavily with his friends, none of whom he seems to care about too deeply, such as Robert Cohn. Overall, Jake represents the worst of the Lost Generation -- irresponsible, aimless, and bitter, his life seems over before it has begun. Brett (Lady Ashley) Although the true antagonist in the novel is the lack of values and direction of the Lost Generation, Brett comes closest to personifying this malaise and provoking it in others as she consistently manipulates Jake and makes him undermine his sense of self. She met Jake as a volunteer nurse when he was in the hospital during the war, but she is now engaged to Mike Campbell. Brett is the strongest, most conventionally "masculine" character in the novel, dominating her lovers and manipulating them like a bull-fighter; she even has a short haircut and refers to herself as a "chap." However, in her carelessly dominating relationships with Jake, Mike, Cohn, and Romero, she appears to be dependent on them as well; she needs men to let her be dominant. Robert Cohn A Jewish novelist from Princeton, Cohn the only central male character not a war veteran, and perhaps because of this he is the only one whose values have not been fully compromised. He represents American pre-war romanticism and idealism, and it is often painful to watch him pitted against a world that has lost these beliefs. He is romantically involved with Frances at the start of the novel, dominated by her as he was by his former wife. Quiet and willing to take abuse, he is disliked by everyone in Jake's circle, especially Mike, who resents him for his fling with Brett and the way he follows her around pathetically. Jake, who shares certain feelings of inferiority with Cohn, sometimes sympathizes with his plight, but frequently Jake enjoys it and does not intervene when Cohn is humiliated. Cohn's one strength is that he is an excellent boxer, a skill developed to compensate for his inferiority complex. Pedro Romero Although Romero appears only briefly in the novel, his presence is crucial, as he is the only man who seems capable of manipulating Brett. His appeal to her, beyond his beautiful appearance, is clear through the parallels Hemingway draws between bull- fighting and sexuality. Like Brett with her submissive men, Romero is highly skilled at a somewhat "feminine" manipulation of the bulls; moreover, he penetrates them in a "masculine" way at the end of fights with his sword. These tactics carry through to his relationship with the audience, as well. Jake admires him because he is a great bull- fighter and because he fulfills the code of the hero, as Hemingway defined it: a man of action who exhibits "grace under pressure." While Jake fought in the war, he never controls his destiny in the face of death as Romero does, and with such command. Mike Campbell Brett's fiancé, Mike has gone bankrupt through business associations with "'false friends.'" He often gets drunk and grows possessive of Brett. Though he supposedly doesn't mind that she has affairs openly, he hates Cohn for his fling with her. He humiliates Cohn to his face and tosses off anti-Semitic comments at him behind his back. Bill Gorton Jake's writer-friend, Bill seems to waste his literary talent on witty, ironic quips and drunken socializing; he may represent Hemingway's fellow Lost Generation writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Hemingway's own worst tendencies. Still, he bonds with Jake while they go fishing, opening up to an intimacy unavailable in the city, and at times he seems like Jake's only real friend. Count Mippipopolous The count becomes friends with Brett in Paris. He is wildly rich and generously throws around money. He is proud of his war scars, arrow wounds through his stomach and back. Belmonte A legendary bull-fighter, Belmonte has come out of retirement but is not the fighter he used to be, and is overshadowed by Romero. A shell of his former self, he represents the decaying values of the Lost Generation. Montoya The head of the hotel in Pamplona that Jake and his friends stay at, Montoya is a friend of Jake's and a fellow aficionado of bull-fighting. He wants to protect Romero from foreigners, and seems upset when Jake introduces Romero to his friends. Georgette A slightly disreputable girl Jake picks up at the café, Jake is somewhat hurt when Georgette dances with the homosexual men in a club. Frances Clyne Cohn's girlfriend in Paris, Frances seems to be using him. She is upset when he wants to have different romantic adventures, and insults him in front of Jake. Harris An Englishman Jake and Bill befriend while fishing at Burguete, Harris is a veteran and enjoys buying them drinks and their camaraderie together. Edna Bill's friend, they meet Edna in Pamplona. Marcial Lalanda A bull-fighter, Marcial is a lesser talent than Romero and Belmonte. Braddocks Cohn's "literary" friend in Paris. Mrs. Braddocks The wife of Braddocks, she is Canadian and somewhat naïve. Robert Prentiss An up-and-coming and somewhat annoying American writer Jake meets in Paris. Harvey Stone Jake's friend in Paris, he asks to borrow money from Jake.

The Sun Also Rises Themes The Lost Generation The Sun Also Rises is an impressive document of the people who came to be known, in Gertrude Stein's words (which form half the novel's epigraph), as the "Lost Generation." The young generation she speaks of had their dreams and innocence smashed by World War I, emerged from the war bitter and aimless, and spent much of the prosperous 1920s drinking and partying away their frustrations. Jake epitomizes the Lost Generation; physically and emotionally wounded from the war, he is disillusioned, cares little about conventional sources of hope -- family, friends, religion, work -- and apathetically drinks his way through his expatriate life. Even travel, a rich source of potential experience, mostly becomes an excuse to drink in exotic locales. Irresponsibility also marks the Lost Generation; Jake rarely intervenes in other's affairs, even when he could help (as with Cohn), and Brett carelessly hurts men and considers herself powerless to stop doing so. While Hemingway critiques the superficial, empty attitudes of the Lost Generation, the other quote in the epigraph from Ecclesiastes expresses the hope that future generations may rediscover themselves. Emasculation and impotence One of the key changes Hemingway observes in the Lost Generation is that of the new male psyche, battered by the war and newly domesticated. Jake embodies this new emasculation; most likely physically impotent, he cannot have sex and, therefore, can never have the insatiable Brett. Instead, he is dominated by her (see "Sexuality and bull- fighting," below), as is Cohn, who is also abused by the other women in his life. Jake is even threatened by the homosexual men who dance with Brett in Paris; while not sexually interested in her, they have more "manhood" than Jake, physically speaking. Though a veteran, Jake now works in an office and fritters away his time with superficial socializing; he admires bull-fighters so much, and Romero in particular, because they are far more heroic than he is or ever was. Though Romero's appearance is more feminine than Jake's, he fulfills the code of the Hemingway hero, commandingly confronting death as a man of action with what Hemingway has called "grace under pressure." Jake, on the other hand, has returned from his confrontation with death feeling like less of a man, physically and emotionally. Sexuality and bull-fighting Hemingway draws numerous parallels between bull-fighting and Brett's sexuality. Early in the novel, Brett tells Jake she cannot commit to him, as she will "tromper" him; while this means "to be unfaithful to," it also means "to elude," and it makes sense why she is attracted to Romero: as a great bull-fighter, he is the consummate eluder, deceiving the bulls into thinking they are close to him, then pulling away, much as Brett does with men. Romero also penetrates with his phallic sword both the bull and, as Jake metaphorically describes it, the audience; he begins as the coy, elusive female, then metamorphoses into the violent, dominant male. In one episode, Jake and Cohn also resemble steers (Mike even calls Cohn a steer), young oxen castrated before sexual maturity. Jake resembles the steer that joins the herd of bulls (much as he, as a castrated male, manages to belong to his group of virile friends), while Cohn is like the steer excluded from the group, the pariah who follows around Brett. Nature and regeneration Hemingway depicts nature as a pastoral paradise uncorrupted by the city or women. Each time Jake ventures into nature, especially on his fishing trip, he is rejuvenated. While fishing with Bill, they bond and are unafraid to be intimate with each other; Jake does not mind that the fish he has caught are smaller than Bill's, in what sounds like an admission of lesser sexual virility, while Bill tells Jake he is fond of him and says that he would be called a "'faggot'" in the city for saying that. They also enjoy camaraderie with the Englishman Harris there, in a departure from the competitive relationships with women that develop when women -- especially Brett -- are present. In San Sebastian, Jake undergoes a symbolic baptism while diving in the water. Even the characters' excessive drinking is given greater significance during the fiesta; they return to a spiritual sense of ritual and generosity while partying, a distinct comparison to the spiritually bankrupt, competitive rituals of city life. Hemingway's journalistic style Hemingway's spare, laconic prose was influenced by his early work as a journalist, and he has probably had the greatest stylistic influence over 20th-century American writers of anyone. The key to Hemingway's style is omission; we usually learn less about Jake through his direct interior narration, but more through what he leaves out and how he reacts to others. For instance, we understand him much better through his thoughts on Cohn, who shares many of Jake's traits. As an example of how much Hemingway omits, Jake never even fully describes his war injury, leaving it somewhat open to interpretation. Hemingway provides a good outline of his own style when Jake describes Romero's bull- fighting style: "There were no tricks and no mystifications." Like Romero, Hemingway moves close to his subject, but eschews flashiness in favor of honest, authentic writing.

The Sun Also Rises Summary and Analysis of Epigraph and Chapters 1-4 The Epigraph:

Hemingway prefaces the novel with two quotes, one by Gertrude Stein, painter, poet, and social center of the American expatriates in 1920s Paris, and one by Ecclesiastes from the Bible. Stein's quote proclaims that Hemingway's is a "lost generation." Her title stuck and has since defined the moral, emotional, and physical emptiness of the young post-WWI generation, devastated by war and aimlessly seeking comfort in the superficial, hedonistic atmosphere of the 1920s. The quote from Ecclesiastes compares the permanence of the earth to the transience of men; Hemingway altered the words "'The sun also riseth'" for his novel's title. In one sense, the words of Ecclesiastes are an optimistic antidote to Stein's pessimism; though Hemingway's generation may be "lost," soon mankind will find himself again ("'One generation passeth away, and another generation commeth'"). On another level, the quote embraces the rejuvenation nature offers. This promise of natural rejuvenation will play an important role in the novel. Chapter I:

The narrator, Jake Barnes, describes Robert Cohn, who was the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Cohn took up boxing, though he disliked it, to compensate for the inferiority complex he developed as a Jew at Princeton. Cohn's nose was flattened while boxing, and Jake says no one he knows from Cohn's class remembers Cohn. From one of New York's richest, most prominent Jewish families, Cohn emerged from Princeton with low self-esteem, had an unsuccessful marriage, and lost most of his inheritance. Cohn moved to California and edited and backed an arts magazine until it folded. A woman, Frances, who had been using Cohn for his rising status, moved with him to Paris so he could write a novel. There, Cohn became friends with Braddocks, his "literary" friend, and Jake, his "tennis" friend. Frances, wanting to marry Cohn, kept him on a short leash. Analysis:

Cohn's time in Princeton is almost an allegory of a young soldier's going off to war: his early dreams of glory are quickly shattered, his body is physically changed (the flattened nose), and he leaves embittered. He is quickly exploited by two women, the first instance of the theme of manipulative sexuality that Hemingway will explore in greater depth.

We are also introduced into a social world of little responsibility -- Jake's crowd travels and drinks freely, Jake refers to himself as Cohn's "tennis" friend, and money is taken care of by rich relatives (Cohn is given an allowance by his mother).

Hemingway also deploys his influential style of spare, unadorned prose to good effect here; in giving a run-down of Cohn's character, Jake reveals himself as a quasi-reporter (indeed, he works for the newspaper, though not as a reporter, and Hemingway himself was a former journalist) who does not reveal much about himself. Jake doesn't even tell the reader his name -- we only find out when another character calls him by his first name -- or about his job, but lets you in on both his factual and emotional life through others.

For instance, Jake is somewhat sympathetic to the abuse and exploitation heaped on Cohn, and we intuit that Jake, too, must harbor similar feelings of inferiority. Though we know little about Jake's relationship with him so far, we will see that Jake is similar in some ways -- Cohn's flattened nose, for instance, foreshadows a less visible impairment Jake has (for Cohn, however, Jake maintains that the flattened nose has improved his appearance).

Chapter II:

Jake recounts how Cohn left for America, sold his book to a good publisher who praised his efforts, had several affairs, and returned to Paris arrogant and rude. He strove to emulate W.H. Hudson's book, "The Purple Land," in which an Englishman has numerous romantic adventures.

One day, Cohn interrupts Jake in his newspaper office and proposes that they travel to South America, at Cohn's expense. Jake doesn't want to, but Cohn feels his life is slipping by him. Jake invites him to have a drink, since he knows he will be able to get rid of Cohn after one drink. At a café, Cohn expresses anxiety that their lives are half-over; Jake says he doesn't worry about death. Jake says he has to work, and Cohn joins him and reads the papers. Jake and the editor and publisher work hard and send out news stories. After, Jake wakes Cohn from a nightmare, and the two go to a café and have a drink.

Analysis:

With the sense that life is passing him by, Cohn seeks solace in adventure and sex. But Jake mentions that only bull-fighters truly experience life. For a former soldier, this is an odd admission. Ostensibly, Jake admires the bull-fighter because they confront death in their jobs, coming within inches of being gored every time they wave their red cape. Jake, as a soldier, confronted death frequently, too, but he probably would not consider fighting in a war on the same level. What sets the bull-fighters apart, at least in Jake's mind, will develop into an important theme later on in the novel.

Hemingway further details the shallow friendships and lack of responsibility in the expatriate circle. Jake gets rid of Cohn after a drink, and in much the same way Cohn wants to leave Paris, believing a new place will cure his boredom. This is the essence of the Lost Generation's aimlessness; disillusioned and unsure of their values, they are in a constant state of retreat rather than pursuit. The conventional offerings of life do not satisfy them; work is shown as unimportant -- newspaper people "should never seem to be working" -- and no one seems to care much about family life. All anyone does is drink, an ongoing effort to blind them to reality.

We get a sense of where Jake's narrative style comes from -- newspapers. He is trained in the hard, economical language of journalism, and he has a good eye for detail, real or fictional -- he says he has a "rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends."

Chapter III:

Jake stays at the café after Cohn leaves. He watches a girl named Georgette walk past, then eventually catches her eye. They drink pernod together (an imitation of absinthe, which is a highly intoxicating, possibly hallucinogenic liquor) and take a horse-cab through town. When Jake rebuffs Georgette's seduction, she asks if he's "'sick,'" and he says he is. She says she's sick, too, and that he shouldn't drink pernod if he's sick -- however, it doesn't affect her as a woman. They eat dinner at a restaurant, and Jake explains he's sick because he "got hurt in the war." Before they can discuss war, Braddocks calls over to Jake from another table with his wife, Cohn, Frances, and several others. Braddocks invites Jake and Georgette to a dance. Jake accepts. After he and Georgette finish their meal, they join the others for coffee. Mrs. Braddocks and Frances talk to Georgette. The party arrives early at the empty dancing-club. They dance and work up a sweat in the hot room. Jake drinks in the doorway to cool off, and watches a crowd of young men with "white hands, wavy hair, white faces" enter. The policeman at the door gives Jake a knowing nod. With the young men is Lady Ashley, known to Jake as Brett. The men's flamboyant behavior annoys Jake to the point that he wants to punch them, though he knows he should be "tolerant." He leaves and has a beer at a bar down the street, then a cognac -- both drinks taste bad. When he returns, Jake finds Georgette dancing with the men in turn. Jake sits down with his party and is introduced to Robert Prentiss, a new American novelist. Slightly drunk, Jake gets irritated by Robert's persistent questions about Paris. At the bar with Cohn, Brett talks to Jake. Jake finds her very good-looking, as does Cohn. Jake and Brett trade insults about her friends and his date. Cohn asks her to dance, but she says she has promised her last dance of the evening to Jake. Jake feels happy dancing with her. They decide to leave. Jake puts money in an envelope and gives it to the patronne (head of the club); he says to give it to Georgette if she leaves alone, but to save it for Jake if she leaves with one of the men. Cohn follows Jake and Brett outside, but they say good night to him. There are no taxis, so Jake and Brett silently wait inside a bar as a waiter hails them one. Finally, they get in one, and Brett confesses that she's been "'so miserable.'" Analysis:

Jake's "sick"ness that prevents him from accepting Georgette's sexual offerings, and her statement that "'It doesn't make any difference with a woman,'" strongly suggests that Jake is impotent in some form. He never fully reveals his disability -- it is only strongly hinted at several times throughout the novel -- but it forms the basis of his pain, and its origin is the war. His impotence stands for the war's symbolic castration of the Lost Generation, especially the men. They felt as if they had lost their manhood in their return to the peacetime world.

Jake and Cohn best represent this loss of manhood, but it is applicable not only to the aimlessness of the Lost Generation. Rather, Hemingway explores in greater depth the new sexual relations that sprang up after World War I battered the male psyche. He is interested in the new power women wielded over their emasculated men. Cohn and Jake have little power in their dealings with women; Cohn (until his book's success, at least) is whipped and exploited by women, while Jake is literally impotent, "without power," and cannot fulfill the typical sexual expectations of a male.

The homosexual men who enter the club with Brett threaten Jake, and not only because they are with Brett. Even with their feminine appearance and behavior, their genitalia still functions -- they still have their "manhood," so to speak. To compensate for his feelings of inadequacy, Jake ups the ante on his drinking, imbibing another beer and then a harder cognac. But both taste bad, and Jake can't "take the taste out of my mouth"; there is no running away from his impotence.

Far more threatening to Jake than the homosexual men, and overall the most powerful, independent character in the novel, is Brett. Her traditionally male name is no mistake; she calls herself a "chap," has hair "brushed back like a boy's," and even her womanly curves are given a somewhat masculine connotation: "builtŠ like the hull of a racing yacht" (though boats are typically gendered as women, the fact that is a racing, and not luxury, yacht implies Brett's power and independence). She also has the capacity to wound Jake; though we know little about their relationship, she excites a response in him greater than any we have seen so far. We see more evidence of the irresponsible behavior of the Lost Generation. Jake is happy to be drunk since it allows him to be "careless" and be angry at Robert Prentiss's persistent questions, but he is careless while sober, too. He lies and says Georgette is his fiancée and gives her the same name as a popular singer, all in an effort to poke fun both at her and at the naïveté of Mrs. Braddocks, who believes him. Though Jake is a sensitive observer of others and of himself (note the money he leaves for Georgette -- provided she does not go off with one of the men in the club), he often treats people as objects.

Chapter IV:

Jake and Brett ride in the taxi through Paris. They kiss, but she pulls away and tells him not to touch her, as she "'can't stand it'"; she tells him she "'turn[s] to jelly'" when he touches her. She says she doesn't want to go through "that hell again," but when Jake says they'll have to stay away from each other, she says she needs to see him. Referring to sex, she says that "'It isn't all that you know,'" but Jake says "'it always gets to be.'" Brett blames herself for causing men pain, and believes she is paying for it now; Jake says his condition is supposed to be funny, and that he never thinks about it. She relates how her brother's friend returned from war with the same condition.

Jake says it's a fun, "'enjoyable'" feeling to be in love, though Brett disagrees. They direct the taxi driver to a café. Brett finds her friends from the club. One introduces her to Count Mippipopolous (hereafter referred to as "the count"). Braddocks tells Jake that Georgette got in a fight with the patronne's daughter, and eventually someone took her home. Jake says he has to leave, and makes plans with Brett to see her tomorrow evening. She also tells him she received a letter from Mike today (we do not yet know who this is). Jake walks home, passing a statue of Marshal Ney holding a sword. He gets his mail from the concierge in his flat and goes upstairs. He reflects on how so many people -- the Count and Lady Ashley, for instance -- have titles. He curses Brett, thinks about his condition, reads the newspaper, and tries to go to sleep. Instead, he thinks more about his condition, obtained on the Italian front. He thinks about how he wouldn't have had any trouble had he not met Brett when he was shipped to England; he believes she only wanted him because she couldn't have him. He thinks more about Brett and starts crying, then falls asleep.

He is woken by voices from outside, and the concierge tells him a woman has come to see him. Brett, drunk, comes upstairs. She says she just came from talking to the count, whom she finds interesting and says is "'one of us.'" The count offered her money to go with him to a number of exotic locales, but she kept saying she knew too many people there, so finally he took her to Jake's after she said she was in love with Jake. She says he wants to take them out to dinner tomorrow, and Jake accepts. She invites him to leave with her, as the count is waiting outside in a car, but he declines. They kiss and she leaves. He watches through the window as she gets in a limousine. Jake gets into bed and thinks about Brett some more and feels "'like hell again.'"

Analysis: Brett doesn't want to go through with foreplay if it means they will ultimately be sexually stymied by Jake's impotence. She says she "turn[s] to jelly" when he touches her, but her phrase is indicative of the real problem -- that Jake is the one who, sexually speaking, is always held at the rigidity of jelly. (Another possible pun comes up when Brett, expressing skepticism about Jake's claim that he doesn't think about his impotence, says "'I'll lay you don't.'")

The statue Jake sees is a phallic symbol, with its sword (the penis) coming out of the "horse-chestnut leaves" (possibly representing testicles and pubic hair), and must mock Jake's impotence every time he passes it. He says that he and the others in the Italian hospital who were rendered impotent were going to form a "society." In a sense, the society has already been formed by men everywhere who have been devastated by the war.

The other society is the one Brett refers to when she says the Count is "'one of us.'" She includes Jake in this group when describing the count's cosmopolitan, elite demeanor, but Jake is not truly included in her "us." Not only does he not have a title or excessive amounts of money as they do (he needs to get up to work in the morning while they can frolic all night), he ultimately feels locked out of the sexual games they can play, even though Brett prefers his company to the count's and claims she loves him.

The other way Jake is separate from them is in the intensity of his pain. He cries in this scene and feels miserable each time he thinks about Brett, whereas we have witnessed Brett only talking about how "miserable" she feels and the "hell" she has gone through. Jake's revelation at the end, that he can be "hard-boiled" in the day but has a harder time at night, is one of the more intimate comments we will get from him. His adjective of choice even alludes to the new school of "hard-boiled" detective fiction that emerged after WWI. Laconic, wounded men, much like Jake, sprang up in American literature as a reaction to postwar emasculation. Jake admits, however, that he cannot maintain their level of stoicism, at least not while alone at night.

The Sun Also Rises Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-9 Chapter V:

In the morning, Jake goes out for breakfast, observes Paris in the morning, and goes to work. He goes to an insignificant press conference and shares a taxi back with two colleagues. When he returns to work, Cohn is waiting for him. They lunch together. Cohn is having writer's block, but he can't go to South America because Frances won't let him. Cohn asks him about Brett. Jake says she's getting a divorce now and is going to marry Mike Campbell, who is currently in Scotland. Cohn admits he is feeling in love with her. Jake says he met her while he was in a hospital during the war; she was a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment; essentially, she was a volunteer nurse) and had married the man whose name she took, Ashley, after her "own true love" died of dysentery. Jake says she has twice married without love. Cohn feels Jake is insulting her, and they get in a small fight, which is quickly smoothed over. They leave and go back to Jake's office. Analysis:

This chapter provides exposition for Brett's character. We learn her age -- 34 -- and her romantic history, as well as the circumstances around her meeting Jake. As in his celebrated novel about WWI, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway has chosen to have his couple meet while the man convalesces in a military hospital under the care of a nurse. This nurse-patient romantic relationship takes on a special irony in The Sun Also Rises. Aside from the fact that Brett seems an unlikely caregiver (she seems better off fighting on the front lines), the one thing Brett-as-nurse could not cure, even with her romantic interest in Jake, was his impotence. Typically in novelistic treatments of the romantic nurse-patient relationship, the rest of the man's body is wounded while his sexual organs remain intact, thus preserving his manhood. As Jake has previously observed, perhaps she only wanted him because she couldn't fully have him. Hemingway also develops further conflicts. Cohn is falling in love with Brett; this was clear enough from the dancing-club episode, and it makes sense that Cohn, lacking any kind of will, would fall for the dominant Brett. Moreover, it is revealed that Brett will marry Mike Campbell (whom they referred to in the dancing-club episode). While Jake maintains she loves Mike, she has also said she loves Jake. It is unclear if she truly does love Jake or simply enjoys toying with him.

Chapter VI:

Jake waits in a hotel for Brett and writes some letters. After a while she still has not shown, so he has a drink in the hotel bar, then taxis over to a café. There, he finds a friend, Harvey Stone, who asks to borrow money. Cohn joins them, and Harvey mocks him before leaving. Jake describes Cohn in more detail, feeling he has not explained him enough. Frances joins them and asks Jake if she'll come with her to another café to talk to her. Cohn stays put. They leave and Frances confides in Jake that Cohn wants to leave her. Now she feels she is not a desirable bride for anyone else. They resolve there is nothing to be done about it, and return to Cohn. Frances reveals she is going to England to visit friends, and that Cohn is going to give her 200 hundred pounds -- although he originally was only going to give her 100 pounds. Jake marvels at the abuse Cohn takes. Frances cheerfully reveals more hurtful information with Jake as the audience, such as Cohn's mistreatment of a secretary on his magazine, or of his sexual plans once he leaves her. Jake makes an excuse to leave, unable to take her bullying of Cohn any longer, and watches them through the window from the street. He hails a taxi to go home.

Analysis: Here we see another way sex can be used as a weapon. Frances uses her knowledge of Cohn's sexual motives and history -- of his desire for sordid affairs and of his callous treatment of the secretary -- to humiliate him in front of Jake. Though Jake is fully aware of the pain Cohn suffers, both as an observer and as someone who has had his fair share of romantic pain with Brett, he does not try to intervene: "I did not even feel an impulse to try and stop it." Jake is irresponsible, unwilling to fix problems when he sees them, unwilling to shoulder someone else's pain because he feels he is too burdened by his own.

But his irresponsibility is matched by Frances's. She worries about Cohn's not wanting to marry her only because she feels she is no longer marriageable. And, though she does not like children, she says she always thought she would have kids first, and then start to like them. As in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 Lost Generation masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald uses the metaphor of careless drivers to suggest the irresponsibility of the times, Hemingway subtly indicts Jake for his unrealized sympathy. It is almost worse that Jake can understand, even feel, the pain of others but, as he says to Frances, believes he is powerless: "'And of course there isn't anything I can do.'" Chapter VII:

As Jake heads to his flat, his concierge tells him Brett stopped by with a very large man, and that they will be back in an hour. Jake reads a telegram from Bill Gorton, informing him he will soon be arriving in France. After Jake showers, Brett shows up with the count. Jake reminds her she didn't show up for their date; the count explains that she was very drunk. She also explains she got in the concierge's good graces by giving her 200 francs from the count. Jake goes into his room to get dressed. Brett comes in, and Jake says he loves her. Brett says she will get rid of the count, though Jake tells her not to. She leaves and returns, saying she sent the count out for champagne. Jake asks Brett if they could live together, but she says they couldn't, as she would "tromper" (be unfaithful to, or elude) him. She says she is going away from him tomorrow, to San Sebastian, until Mike comes back. The count returns with the champagne. They discuss titles, and the count says Brett wouldn't need one, as "'You got the most class of anybody I ever seen.'" They make more small talk and have the champagne. The count reveals he has been in seven wars, and shows his scars on his stomach and back from arrow wounds. Brett is impressed. The count says that because he has lived very much, he can now enjoy himself so well.

They eat dinner in a restaurant, then go to a crowded club. Brett tells Jake he is a bad dancer, and that Mike is the best dancer she knows. Though she says she likes Mike, she never writes him, whereas he writes her frequently. She does not know when they will get married, as it depends on when her divorce goes through. They talk with the count, then dance again. Brett tells Jake she is "'so miserable.'" Jake feels he is about to repeat something nightmarishly. They say goodbye to the count and leave. They take the count's car to her hotel, but Brett doesn't want Jake to come up with her. They kiss at her door, but Brett pushes him away twice before leaving. Jake takes the car home. Analysis:

Though the count is rich, popular, and well-traveled, his ungrammatical speech belies some lack of education: "'You got the most class of anybody I ever seen.'" No matter what one's financial state, everyone in the novel wants that particular distinction of classiness, that nobility that is somewhat separate from pure money. Even the concierge (after getting money from Brett, of course) finds Brett very prestigious, and is generally concerned with people's families.

The count also has the adventurous experience that Cohn craves. This is not merely sexual experience, but confrontations with death. However, his experiences have not destroyed him, as Jake's have. The count's wounds are merely scars, honorable war wounds he is proud to show off, while Jake's are hidden from sight, unmentionable, and considered at best "funny," at worst, shameful. Ironically, though the count was pierced with arrows, a highly phallic image of penetration, Jake is the one who has been rendered impotent.

We see greater evidence of irresponsibility. Brett did not show up for her date with Jake, as the count has to explain, because she was drunk. She also buys approval from the concierge with the count's money. Furthermore, she does not write Mike, though he writes her, and she says only that she is "'damned fond of him,'" not that she is in love with him, as she has previously maintained. Her emotional state also vacillates quickly, or at least what she claims her emotional state is, and she toys with Jake. He feels he is doomed to repeat the nightmare of falling for her, then being scorned. Her word for what she would do to him, "tromper," has several meanings, the most likely of which is "to be unfaithful to." It also means "to elude," and this may foreshadow the novel's later shift into the arena of bull-fighting, as matadors elude the charging bulls.

Chapter VIII:

Jake does not see Brett until she returns from San Sebastian, nor does he see Cohn, who takes a trip to the country. He works extra hard in preparation for his trip at the end of June to Spain with Bill Gorton, his writer-friend. Bill visits, travels around Europe, then returns and describes his trip, which he cannot remember very well, as he was drunk for most of it. He recounts in detail an adventure with a friendly black boxer to whom he lent money. They walk out for dinner, passing a statue, as Bill flippantly jokes about taxidermy with Jake, who is more grounded.

They run into Brett on the street, in a cab just back from her trip. Jake introduces her to Bill. She tells him that Mike is coming back tonight. They get in the cab and go off for a drink. They discuss Bill's and Brett's respective trips. Before she leaves, she tells them to meet her and Mike tonight. They eat dinner at a restaurant packed with Americans. After, they roam the streets for a while until meeting Brett and Mike. Brett introduces Mike as an "'undischarged bankrupt'"; he explains that his ex-partner "'did me in.'" Mike keeps referring to Brett as a "'lovely piece.'" Jake and Bill soon leave to watch a boxing match.

Analysis:

The experience of travel is largely wasted on Bill because he was drunk for most of it and cannot remember it; despite the grandiose adventures the Lost Generation accumulates, much of them are drowned in a haze of alcohol. Bill is a literary party boy who exhibits the worst tendencies of Hemingway's fellow Lost Generation writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald (and perhaps of Hemingway himself), wasting his literary talent on trenchant quips and raucous partying (he was directly inspired by another friend of Hemingway's, though).

While the modern reader may see Hemingway as a clear-cut racist for his repeated use of the word "nigger," it is the slur his upper-class white characters would use (nor would they consider it a slur as we do now). If anything, his characters have a confused sense of race. They like to think of themselves as exotic and sophisticated for their association with blacks (remember Brett's waving hello to the black drummer in the dancing-club), but they never want to relinquish their status of superiority -- Bill can still feel he is on top, for instance, by loaning the black boxer money.

Yet another statue pops up in this chapter. While a statue is, as a sculpture, art, it is foremost a commemoration of greatness, what the Lost Generation strives for, but without diligence. The statues are constant signposts of their mediocrity, landmark directions for the Lost Generation.

Bill's joking about taxidermy bears some significance. Instead of hunting and living in nature, the urban characters are surrounded by dead, stuffed animals. They live in a capitalist environment that undercuts man's primal urge to kill; as Bill says, "'Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.'" While he refers to the financial transaction as the "'simple exchange of values,'" he may as well be talking about the natural values the men have traded away in exchange for the new, emasculated urban ones.

Lastly, only in the taxi with Bill does Jake comment on Mike's constant referral to Brett as a "'lovely piece.'" Perhaps it is because to do so in the narrative -- to himself -- would be too painful; in conversation, he can merely pass it off that "'Mike was pretty excited about his girl friend,'" as if Brett is merely Mike's "'girl friend'" in Jake's eyes. Not only is she more than that, it seems an odd label for Brett; as we have seen, she is frequently less a girl than a man. Among the company in this scene, it becomes even clearer. The men all have relatively bland, four-letter, monosyllabic nicknames (Jake, Bill, Mike), while Brett's name, still monosyllabic, has five letters and is more distinctive. Jake and Mike, especially, have similar names, different only by the first two letters, but an entire world of emotional pain separates them.

Chapter IX:

The morning after the boxing match, Jake receives a letter from the vacationing Cohn, who is eager to go on the fishing trip with Jake and Bill. Jake writes him and gives him instructions for where to meet them in Spain. That night, Jake finds Brett and Mike in a bar. Mike asks if Jake would mind if they accompanied him to Spain, and Jake says it's fine. Mike leaves to get a haircut, and Brett asks Jake if Cohn is going on the trip. When Jake tells her yes, she informs him that it might be "'rough'" on Cohn, as she went to San Sebastian with him. Bill and Jake take a morning train to Bayonne. They have difficulty reserving a place for lunch and get in an argument with the dining-car conductor. They strike up a conversation with an older American couple and discuss the Americans from Ohio on the train making a "pilgrimage" to various Catholic centers of Europe. Jake and Mike drink, talk some more with the couple, and finally have lunch. At night, they arrive, say goodbye to the couple, and meet Cohn. Cohn is happy to meet Bill, whose books he has read. They go to their pleasant hotel.

Analysis:

This chapter is most notable for the slight regression Jake and Bill undergo on their train trip. Many of the amenities they are accustomed to are taken away from them. They no longer are served food whenever they want it, and religion suddenly overtakes money in terms of importance (the Catholics monopolize the lunch service, while Jake and Bill cannot buy their way into the dining-car). These changes herald the men's return to nature, back to the primal hunt (or fishing) where one is never served food, back to a spiritual, almost religious relationship with nature.

The other intriguing development is the revelation that Brett has added Cohn to her list of conquests. Perhaps this is why Jake regards Cohn somewhat differently when he meets him in Bayonne; though Cohn seems to surprise Jake frequently (and the reader), revealing depth of character not formerly recognized, Jake now may have a newfound respect for Cohn, feeling that Cohn is in the same boat -- desiring a woman neither one can have.

The Sun Also Rises Summary and Analysis of Chapters 10-14 Chapter X:

Jake, Bill, and Cohn explore Bayonne in the morning. Since the bus to Pamplona is not yet in service, they hire a motor-car. They drink until it arrives with a driver. They drive into the country, taking in the scenery. They cross the Spanish frontier, and while their chauffeur deals with the paperwork, they chat with the locals and a guard. They drive deeper into Spain, heading into a heavily forested landscape, and finally arrive at Pamplona. They pass by the bull-ring and reach their hotel near the big square. They set themselves up and have lunch with the driver before he leaves. They discuss Brett and Mike; Cohn bets Bill that they won't arrive.

Jake later explores the town on his own, making sure the man who gets him his bull-fight tickets has done so. He enters a cathedral and prays for himself, for all his friends, for the bull-fighters and the bull-fights, for good fishing, and for making money. He starts thinking about the count, then feels ashamed for being a "rotten Catholic," but decides there is nothing he can do about it.

At night, Jake and Cohn go to meet Brett and Mike's train. Cohn, freshly shaven and with a haircut, is extremely nervous, and Jake enjoys witnessing his anxiety, though he feels bad for doing so. Brett and Mike are not on the train. They relay the news to Bill; Cohn tells him not to worry about the bet. Jake receives a telegram from Brett and Mike; they've stopped over in San Sebastian. He lies and tells Cohn that they send their regards to him, and admits to himself that he did it because he is jealous of Cohn. They make plans to leave tomorrow; if Brett and Mike get in later, they can follow them.

The next day, Jake buys bus tickets for them, but Cohn says he won't be leaving with them. He explains that he is supposed to meet Brett and Mike in San Sebastian, as he had suggested it to Brett. Jake is annoyed, and sees that Cohn is enjoying it. Jake finds Bill shaving in his room, and Bill says Cohn confided in him last night about his date with Brett. Jake grows more upset, though he admits Cohn can be nice. Jake tells him about Cohn's relationship with Brett; Bill wishes she had gone to San Sebastian with Jake or him instead of Cohn. They decide they're better off fishing without Cohn, and go off for a drink.

Analysis:

Jake's jealousy reaches a boiling point as he discovers there is even more to Cohn and Brett's relationship than he believed. He finally admits to his jealousy, as well, and even Bill, who hardly knows Brett, is insecure (witness his low appraisal of his face in the mirror). Worse yet, Cohn is still a fairly pathetic figure, almost unworthy of their jealousy; even the fact that he cancelled his bet, won with insider knowledge, makes him too "nice" a figure to deserve their enmity. In a way, this is Brett's ultimate way of toying with the emasculated Jake -- bedding down with as emasculated a man as possible.

In the prior chapter, we learned in passing that Jake is Catholic. Here we see the absence of religion in his life as he prays at first for people, then for selfish, non-spiritual values (money, especially). His false prayers are not as bad as is his irresponsible attitude toward his salvation: "IŠ realized there was nothing I could do about it." This echoes what he told Frances about Cohn, and functions as the Lost Generation's motto of irresponsibility; the world is imperfect, but there is nothing they can do about it.

The pastoral drive to Pamplona is the first step in the 18th-century tradition of Wordsworth and other Romantic writers of regeneration through a return to nature. The winding scenery described much as the winding streets of Paris were depicted, but this landscape feels more soothing. Though the men quickly resume their habits of indulgent drinking and eating while in town, one feels Jake and Bill are ready to reclaim some lost part of their identities while fishing.

Chapter XI:

Jake and Bill bid adieu to Robert and take a bus crowded with peasants to Burguete so they can go fishing. They drink wine with the Basques from their wine-skins, and discuss America with an old Basque man. They reach Burguete, a small town, and find their inn, where it is very cold. The price is higher than Jake expected, but wine is included. They drink a lot to warm up with their dinner. They retire to bed. Analysis:

Jake and Bill continue their retreat into nature. As Hemingway increases his description of the landscape, the men befriend the Basques and learn how to drink from their wine- skins. They return to an older, ritualized way of life; even though they drink just as rabidly at the inn as they always do, they seem to appreciated the simple comforts there: "It felt good to be warm and in bed."

The other important part in this chapter is their brief discussion of America with the old Basque man. He is proud to have lived in America, just as Jake and Bill and the other expatriates are proud to have lived outside of America. For all of them, living in a foreign land has proven their experience and sophistication. However, the Basque is proud because he has lived in the land where the streets are supposedly paved with gold; the Americans are proud to have "slummed," to have lived and traveled in places without all the comforts of America (though they still usually insist on first-class treatment).

Chapter XII:

Jake wakes up early and walks outside. He digs for some worms and puts them in tobacco-tins. He returns and urges Bill to get up; Bill jokingly tells him to dig up more worms for them, and tells him to show him "'irony and pity.'" They have breakfast, and Bill discusses the need for irony and pity. He also speaks of the failings of the expatriates -- they become corrupted by European values, drink excessively and obsess over sex, cast off work. When he suggests Jake is impotent, Jake says he "'just had an accident.'" Bill changes the subject and tells Jake how fond he is of him, and that he could not tell him that in New York for fear of being called a "'faggot.'"

They hike through the beautiful countryside with their fishing gear and stop at a dam across a river. They put two bottles of wine in a spring to keep them cold. They fish, and Jake catches several trout and prepares them to take home. Jake takes a break and reads. He and Bill compare their catches -- Bill's are bigger. They drink their wine and have lunch. They discuss various men with whom they went to school. Jake admits he is in love with Brett, and that he is "'Technically'" a Catholic. They nap. When they wake up, they pack their belongings and walk home. They stay at Burguete for five similar days, playing cards at night and fishing with an Englishman named Harris. They do not hear from Cohn or Brett and Mike. Analysis:

Although it is unclear whether Jake is truly impotent or "'just had an accident,'" he still is uneasy discussing it, even when he doesn't believe he is: "I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about impotent." Even if Jake is not hurt by the joke, he is insecure that Bill may merely think Jake is hurt by it -- which, in the end, is almost worse: Jake cares more about how others perceive his feelings than about his actual feelings. This chapter is the prime example of Hemingway's idealized paradise of men without women. Away from all the evils Bill describes -- namely, obsession over sex -- the men can confide in each other more intimately. Bill says he would be called a "'faggot'" in New York for admitting his fondness for Jake, and Jake is not even afraid to admit that his trout are smaller than Bill's, in dialogue that recalls a comparison of penis size. Even their dialogue before and after they nap seems like pillow talk between lovers.

The men are also defined more in this chapter by their actions, rather than by their speech. For Hemingway, actions are where a man's true character lies, a topic that will be explored more in the arena of bull-fighting. Hemingway's writing is sparer in this chapter, too, as it has become since the men left Paris. Just as the men become more defined by action, so does his prose.

Bill mockingly refers to their lunch in the terms of a religious ritual, but in a sense it is. Away from the "'irony and pity'" of civilization that he previously referred to, they live a simpler life in deeper touch with the spirituality of the earth, fishing for their own food and drinking wine cooled by a natural spring. Even Jake's digging for worms is a return to the clean, fertile soil of the earth, and away from the grime and dirt of the city. These rituals, and the notion of fertility, will soon play a greater role.

Chapter XIII:

At breakfast, Harris hands Jake a letter that he accidentally received. Mike writes that Brett passed out on the train, so they decided to recuperate in San Sebastian with old friends. He says they are going to Pamplona on Tuesday, and wants to know where to rejoin them on Wednesday. Harris informs Jake that it is Wednesday, and Jake tells him he and Bill will leave for Pamplona in the afternoon. After breakfast, Jake receives a telegram while he sits outside with Bill. Cohn writes, in Spanish, that he is coming Thursday. They write a telegram back and tell him they are arriving tonight.

With Harris, they walk to a monastery, then drink in a pub. They say goodbye to him and board their bus to Pamplona. They talk to the head of the hotel, Montoya, find out their friends have been there since yesterday, and learn about the bull-fights for the next couple of days. Montoya believes he and Jake are real "aficionados" of bull-fighting -- they are passionate about bull-fighting. Jake reveals that the good bull-fighters stay at Montoya's hotel, where photographs hang of those with "aficion," or passion. He and Jake often talk about bull-fighting. Montoya has introduced Jake to the other aficionados of bull-fighting at his hotel in the past; it usually takes Jake a little while to convince them that though he is an American, he is a true aficionado. Montoya, Jake relates, forgives any faults of an aficionado -- for instance, he forgives Jake his friends. In their room, Jake describes the "unloadings" of the bull-fights: the bulls are released from their corrals to chase and gore steers, young oxen castrated before sexual maturity. The purpose is to calm down the bulls and prevent them from fighting each other. Jake and Bill find Brett, Mike, and Cohn at a café. They discuss the fishing, and Brett tries to get Mike to tell a war story. Instead, he tells about the time he got some medals from his tailor to wear at a dinner, but ended up giving them out to girls at a nightclub. He also says his "'False friends'" made him go bankrupt.

They leave to watch the bulls unloaded. They find a place in the crowd and watch as two steers are let into the corral. A bull is unleashed and charges first at the steers, then at a man in the crowd who distracts him. Another bull is unleashed but does not get distracted by two men who run out; instead, it gores a steer. Brett is fascinated. The other steer befriends the other two bulls, then the last three bulls that are unloaded, and they form a herd. The gored steer is not part of their herd.

Jake's party leaves to go to a café. Jake explains that the bulls are dangerous only when alone or in small groups, not in large groups. Cohn says "'It's no life being a steer,'" and Mike humiliates him, saying Cohn follows Brett around like a steer and that he is not wanted. Bill leads Cohn away, and Brett is angry at Mike. Mike is somewhat subdued, but he discusses Cohn's behavior in San Sebastian. While he knows Brett has affairs -- she tells him -- he finds Cohn overly pathetic. Mike says that Cohn calls Brett "Circe" (after the beautiful character in Homer's The Odyssey who turns men into swine). Jake suggests they go and eat, and when Mike meets Cohn again, to pretend nothing had happened and to blame it on drunkenness. Jake finds Bill upstairs and they discuss the fragile state of Cohn, who is in his room, as well as the plan for the next couple of days -- more bull-fighting and the start of the siesta. Everyone has a pleasant dinner together, pretending nothing happened. Cohn stares at Brett throughout the meal. Drunk, Jake feels happy and that everyone is nice.

Analysis:

Hemingway draws numerous parallels between bull-fighting and sexuality. The greatest is one that Mike points out; Cohn is similar to the steer, a castrated, weak animal ruled by the powerful, violent bulls. Just the like the steer who is kept from joining the herd in the unloading, Cohn is the constant outsider, the Jew in a crowd of Protestants and Catholics, the emasculated follower of the masculine Brett.

But there is another personified steer who escapes inquiry here: Jake. Jake resembles the other steer who manages to join the inner circle of the bulls, then turns on the other steer with them. He does not defend Cohn when Mike humiliates him, for to do so would be to admit that he, too, is a fellow steer who follows Brett.

A last note about the bull-fighting is that Jake is a confirmed aficionado. It is the only activity for which he has unreserved passion -- he admits that even drinking and Brett have many downfalls -- and which seems to make him happy. But he is only an observer, albeit an informed, devoted one, and not a participant. Brett, on the other hand, is more closely aligned to the bulls, identifying with their power. We will later see, however, that she is associated less with the bulls than with the matador; she is a true participant, not merely an aficionado. We also understand more deeply Brett and Mike's relationship. Mike takes her for granted -- while Brett previously told Jake she does not write letters to Mike, here she reveals that he simply does not read them -- and he seems to be aroused by the attention she receives from other men. Brett is allowed to have affairs, after all, but he seems to care about them only when the men are less manly than he is, as he finds Cohn.

Indeed, this episode is notable for the way men turn against each other when women are in the picture. The camaraderie Jake and Bill have with the Englishman Harris is the last of the back-to-nature male bonding; once Brett is present, Mike viciously humiliates Cohn to preserve his own sense of masculinity.

Mike is especially aware of the fragility of his friendships; he even mentions his "'False friends'" who led him into bankruptcy. This is one of the novel's most explicit critiques of the shallow relationships prevalent in the lives of the Lost Generation. They base their friendships around money, and only rarely is it in good faith, as when Harris insists on buying Jake and Bill drinks because it gives him pleasure. His gesture is similar to the count's habit of picking up the tab, but the count does so more to impress Brett and because it gives him a sense of power, not because he enjoys the camaraderie. Jake makes the ultimate indictment of these false friendships, and of his passive attitude toward them: "Under the wineŠ It seemed they were all such nice people." Jake is as much a target of Mike's vitriol as is Cohn, but so long as alcohol is present, everything is smoothed over; Jake even suggests Mike blame his actions on alcohol.

A corollary to these false friendships is the brief discussion of the illusion of valor in the war. As Mike's story about the medals demonstrates, he didn't have to win them for honor in combat; he could simply pick them up from a tailor and hand them out to impress girls. Nevertheless, having been in the war gives the men some kind of valorous pass; Cohn was not a soldier, and as such is deemed lesser. But knowing that what they took part in was not truly valorous, the men, especially Jake, seek a greater sense of valor, a place of honest heroism: they will find it in bull-fighting.

Chapter XIV:

Jake does not remember the later events of the night very clearly. He recounts them: he remembers reading in bed until he heard Brett and Cohn say good night outside his door. They went to their separate rooms, and Jake tried to go to sleep, though he found he could not face the dark while thinking about Brett. He cursed her, then thought about how one must be in love with a woman to be friends with her. He thought more about how one must always pay for something good, though he recognized that soon this philosophy would seem silly to him. Still, he just wanted to know "how to live in it." Though he wished Mike were not so cruel to Cohn while drunk, he admitted to enjoying it. But he still wished Mike would stop, as it makes Jake feel bad about himself for enjoying it. He read again and fell asleep near daylight.

Pamplona gets ready the next two days for the fiesta. The bull-ring is prepared, as well. Peasants arrive for the festivities. Jake and his friends live with more restraint. One day, he goes to church with Brett. The morning before the fiesta, Jake and his friends enjoy the fresh, cool air and the view of the mountains. Jake feels one cannot be upset on a day like that.

Analysis:

We get some of the deepest insights into Jake's thoughts in the first part of the chapter. Hemingway's writing here comes as close as it ever does to the new technique of stream- of-consciousness, developed in the Modernist novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. While Hemingway's writing is in no way close to the frequently run-on prose of the other authors, he departs from his bare description of action in favor of interior description.

What is revealed are Jake's conflicted attitudes towards women, experience, and himself. He holds the cynical belief that everything in life comes at a steep price; whatever he has gained, he has somehow bought. Love, especially, operates under these economic conditions -- what Jake calls an "exchange of values," echoing Bill's philosophy in Chapter VIII. In the same way, Jake alternates between pleasure and self-loathing in the humiliation of Cohn. We can find the root of this disillusioned mindset in Jake's war experience. In exchange for the "worldly" experience of war, Jake gave up his masculinity. Not only that, but his war experience does not seem to have had any positive effects on him. No wonder Jake simply wants to know "how to live in it," how merely to survive in a cold world that pulls him in different directions.

Jake's description of the pleasant days before the fiesta, and especially of the last morning and his bare statement "That was the last day before the fiesta," foreshadows conflict arising in the fiesta. The ideal, pacifist atmosphere cannot survive long once the bulls, and their associations with violence, are reintroduced.

The Sun Also Rises Summary and Analysis of Chapters 15-19 Chapter XV:

The fiesta explodes at noontime on Sunday, July 6. The peasants drink wine from wine- shops, as they cannot yet afford café prices. Some people are at mass, as San Fermin is also a religious festival. Jake meets Cohn and Bill at the café. Rockets shoot up to announce the fiesta. Pipers and drummers play music as men and boys dance behind them. A man playing a reed-pipe leads children down the street. Dancing men bear a banner that reads "'Hurray for Wine! Hurray for the Foreigners!'"

Cohn leaves to bring back Brett and Mike. Jake relates that the fiesta went on for seven days and nights in a surreal atmosphere of no consequences. They watch the religious procession. Jake and his friends try to follow the crowd into church, but are denied entrance because Brett is not wearing a hat. In the street, dancers in wreaths of garlic dance and chant in a circle around Brett. They do the same to Bill and Jake. They do not let her dance, as they want her to be an "image to dance around." After, they pull them into a wine-shop and seat Brett on a cask from which they draw wine. Jake tries to buy wine, but is denied. Meanwhile, Brett has been given a wreath of garlic and is learning to drink from wine-skins.

Jake leaves to buy two leather wine-skins. He returns to the wine-shop and fills the wine- skins; a man offers to pay for Jake, and when Jake does not allow him to, instead buys him a drink. He asks for a squeeze from Jake's wine-skin in return. Jake finds Brett and Bill in the back room, surrounded by dancers. Mike is eating with some men and invites Jake over; Jake eats with them and passes around his wine-skin. Jake finds Cohn passed out in a back room, but leaves him alone. Cohn returns two hours later, hungry for dinner. They decide to leave.

They eat a big dinner and go out again. Jake wants to stay up all night to watch the bulls run through the streets in the early morning, but he is too sleepy. Unable to find his key, he sleeps in Cohn's room. He wakes to the rocket announcing the release of the bulls. Jake watches from the balcony. Men run down the street to the bull-ring, chased by bulls. They disappear from sight, and a rocket soon announces they have entered the bull-ring. Cohn, who watched the activities in the ring with the others, wakes Jake later; Jake learns one of the bulls hurt several people in the ring.

Jake and his friends go to the bull-fight that afternoon. Jake has six tickets -- three in the front row, three in the middle. He and Bill sit in the front; they give the extra ticket to a waiter to sell. Jake gives some advice to Brett about watching the fight; she is nervous about what will happen when the bull attacks the horse. Jake and Bill go to the hotel to get their wine-skin, and Montoya introduces them to Pedro Romero, an extremely good- looking young bull-fighter. They exchange a few words and leave. Jack finds the fight good, mostly because Romero is a "real" bull-fighter. His other friends seem to enjoy the fight, as well. After, they make their way through the packed crowd and to the café. They discuss the fight; as Mike points out and Brett admits, she could not stop staring at Romero. Cohn, however, almost became sick from watching the first horse. Brett says she wants to sit in the first row next time.

The second day of fights is better than the first. Romero dominates the show. Jake sits with Brett and explains the action, and why Romero is so skilled, elegant, and authentic a matador. Mike jokes that Brett is falling in love with Romero. The next day Romero does not fight, and the day after no fights are scheduled, though the fiesta continues.

Analysis:

The chapter's two sections, concentrating on the fiesta and the bull-fighting, are ripe with contrasts and parallels to Jake's society. While the fiesta is not so much wilder than the parties Jake and the expatriates are used to, it is different in one overwhelming way: it is a longstanding tradition with ritualistic ties to nature, rather than a shallow exercise in hedonism. It has religious undertones, as Jake notes, and it is no wonder he and his sacrilegious friends are barred entrance from the church (technically because Brett does not have a hat, but perhaps Hemingway is pointing out that they do not belong there in more spiritual ways).

Despite its showy rockets, the fiesta is less a spectacle, as the expatriates are accustomed to witnessing, and more a series of expressive rituals, Bacchanalian though they may be. The dancing, for instance, contrasts with the dancing in Paris. There, the wild dancing was either an excuse for cheap sexuality or competitiveness, as when the homosexual men dancing with Georgette threatened Jake; here, the men's dance is a dignified ceremony of unity. When Bill and Jake see the pied-piper figure leading the dancing children around, for instance, Bill cannot comprehend the mythological significance, calling him the "'village idiot.'" The fiesta is hedonistic, but its sense of ritual maintains some order. While Jake says there are no consequences in the fiesta, just as Jake and his friends feel there are none in their regular lives, it is understood that the fiesta, as a weeklong ceremony, will soon end and consequences will return. The expatriates, on the other hand, want to believe their party will never end. Even Brett's otherwise destructive sexuality is given a ritualistic bent. She is revered as a fertility goddess, given an honorary wreath of garlic (Cohn's wreath may be an ironic decoration, or perhaps it signifies that even Cohn, a virtual castrated "steer," is more fertile than the truly infertile Jake); seated on the wine-cask, it is as if she is the Dionysian bearer of wine, a literally fruitful goddess.

The atmosphere in the fiesta is one of generosity; drinks and food are shared freely, but it has none of the competitiveness that has come when the count, or even Harris (the Englishman), bought drinks. Still, there is some financial corruption in the air; the fiesta doubles the prices of the meal at the hotel, and the man in the wine-shop is suspicious that Jake will sell the wine-skins in Bayonne. Hemingway parallels Romero's bull-fighting techniques with Brett's sexual tactics. Both characters are physically beautiful, and both are masters at their respective games. Jake provides an explicit description of Brett's sexuality in his description of Romero's bull- fighting: "[H]e dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing." Previously, Brett had said she would "tromper" Jake like all the other men if they got together; while the word's best meaning is "to be unfaithful to," it also means "to elude." Like the bull-fighter, she teases men, tricking them into thinking they can have her, then eludes them at the last moment. It is clear why Romero fascinates her; aside from his physical appeal, he appears to be the one male who could make her pursue him. She is sexually engaged in the bull-fight, and describes herself after the fight in post-coital terms: "'These bull-fights are hell on oneŠ I'm limp as a rag.'"

Romero also fits the definition of what has become known in literary criticism as a "Hemingway hero." Hemingway defined a code of ethics for heroism, the most important tenet being that a brave hero exhibits "grace under pressure." What this means is that in difficult situations -- especially mortal ones -- the hero handles himself assuredly and confronts the danger head-on. The bull-fighter, of course, literally faces death, and Jake admires Romero because he is authentic in his confrontation with death; he allows the bull to come as close to his body as possible, unlike the other fighters, but always remains in control. Another quality of the Hemingway hero is that he is foremost a man of action, not of intellectualization. Hemingway's descriptions in this chapter, especially of the bull- fight, hone in on the action. This is not to suggest that there is a lack of analytic material here -- rather, this is one of the more profound sections of the novel -- but that the significance can be located directly in the action. When Jake says that there is an "Absolute purity of line in [Romero's] movements," he may as well be talking about Hemingway's prose, refined to its essence of action.

Chapter XVI:

It rains heavily during the fiesta, though the festivities and dancing continue. While Jake shaves in his room, Montoya tells him people at the Grand Hotel want Romero and Marcial Lalanda to come over for after-dinner coffee. Jake suggests he not pass the invitation on to Romero, and Montoya is pleased, as he feels foreigners could corrupt the young matador. At dinner in the hotel, Romero invites Jake to his table. They discuss the vocabulary of bull-fighting in English and Spanish. Romero, who speaks some English, tells Jake he has been fighting for three years. He is very modest when discussing his work, and promises that tomorrow he will put on a good show. Brett wants to be introduced, and they all move to a bigger table. Brett flirts with Romero; Mike, drunk and disorderly, makes disparaging comments about bull-fighting and about Brett's interest in Romero. Montoya comes into the room, but leaves when he sees Romero at Jake's table. Mike makes a toast to Romero, and Romero leaves. Mike tells Cohn his presence is not desired. Cohn is insulted, but seems to enjoy it, as well.

Before Mike can fight Cohn, Jake intervenes and pulls them both outside, where it has stopped raining. Brett and Bill soon join them to watch fireworks. They finally make it to a bar with a friend of Bill's from Biarritz. Mike compliments her on her appearance, and he goes outside with her and Bill. Brett tells Cohn to leave her and Jake alone, and he departs. She tells Jake she is sick of him. They go for a walk and see Cohn outside, though they evade him and walk in the quiet parts of town. Brett admits she has fallen in love with Romero. Jake urges her not to let it happen, but she says she cannot help it. She feels she has to do something, as she has lost her self-respect with the way Mike and Cohn are around her. She asks Jake to help her through this, and she suggests they go find Romero.

They locate him in the café, smoking cigars with other bull-fighters. Jake and Brett take a table, and Romero joins them. Brett reads Romero's fortune from his hand and says he will live a long time. He admits that he does not let others know he speaks English, as they would not approve. Jake leaves under the guise to find their friends, but he makes it clear it is to leave Romero and Brett alone. When he returns later on his own, they are gone.

Analysis: Jake says of Cohn "'I'm not sorry for him. I hate him, myself.'" The sentence is interesting. Though he means, of course, that he himself hates Cohn, the construction also implies Jake's self-loathing -- he hates both "him" and "myself." Both objects of hatred are logical and have been detailed throughout the book; Cohn's suffering reminds him of his own pain, and Jake has numerous reasons to hate himself (his impotence, his irresponsibility, his shallow relationships, and his dependence on Brett).

Brett, on the other hand, says she hates Cohn's "'damned suffering.'" She wants to hurt men only if their suffering does not cause her any suffering in turn; Jake is a perfect target, as he bottles up most of his pain and rarely exposes her to it. Cohn, on the other hand, is a whimpering puppy whose pathetic dependence on Brett is evident to all. While her evasive sexual tactics draw parallels to bull-fighters, she is less honest than they are; the bull-fighter knows that he will cause pain for the bull (if he is successful, of course), and accepts it, as Romero does. Romero calls the bulls his friends, but admits he must kill them before they kill him.

Brett's unwillingness to admit to this defensive impulse exposes her irresponsibility. She says she's "'never been able to help anything.'" While she refers specifically to the act of falling in love, she implies that none of her emotional manipulations is under her control. Just as Jake shucks off responsibility for helping others (though he does finally intervene before Mike and Cohn spar in this chapter), she casts off responsibility for hurting others.

Romero is somewhat feminine in his appearance -- "His hand was very fine and the wrist was small" -- but it makes him more beautiful and even more masculine, in a way. Jake, on the other hand, may appear more masculine, but he feels far more emasculated, not only for his impotence, but also for his lack of grace under pressure, his inability to follow the code of the hero. Instead of being a hero, Jake remains at the level of an aficionado. His virtual pimping off Brett to Romero underlines his status as an observer, not as a participant. He submits to Brett's desires so much that he is willing to efface his own and live vicariously through Romero.

Chapter XVII:

Jake finds Mike, Bill, and Bill's friend, Edna, outside a bar. They have been thrown out for trying to fight the Englishmen inside. Without Bill, they make it over to the café, where Cohn joins them and asks where Brett is. He doesn't believe that Jake doesn't know. Mike eventually says that Brett has gone off with Romero. Cohn asks Jake if it's true, and when he doesn't answer, calls Jake a "'pimp.'" They fight, and Cohn pummels Jake to the ground. He wakes up from being unconscious and learns that Cohn knocked Mike down, too. They discuss the fight and Mike's bankruptcy. Jake leaves them. Jake walks to his hotel, feeling as if everything is new to him. At the hotel, Bill tells him Cohn wants to see him. Jake reluctantly goes to Cohn's room, where he sees Cohn is crying. Cohn begs Jake's forgiveness, and says he'll be leaving in the morning. He says he can't take the way Brett treats him like a stranger, after they had lived together in San Sebastian. Jake says goodbye to him and goes to bed. Jakes wakes with a headache, and remembers he is supposed to show Edna the running of the bulls. At the café, he is reassured to learn that Bill, Mike, and Edna have just left -- Jake had promised to take her for fear the others would pass out. He enters the crowded bull-ring and sees the bulls run in. A bull gores one man in the back. When a rocket announces the bulls have been corralled, Jake leaves.

He goes to the café and tells a waiter about the man who was gored. The waiter finds it stupid that the man was gored "'Just for fun.'" The waiter then learns the man has died. Jake reads about him in the paper the next day, and the town has a funeral for him the day after that. Jake describes how Romero killed the bull the afternoon of the funeral. Its ear was cut off and given to Romero, who gave it to Brett. She wrapped the ear up in one of Jake's handkerchiefs and left it deep in her hotel room's drawer.

Jake lies down on his sunlit bed. His jaw is sore from Cohn's punches. Bill and Mike come into his room. They tell him the bulls trampled the crowd in that morning's show. They say Edna was impressed and wanted them to go into the ring. A chambermaid brings them beer. Jake learns that after Cohn beat up him and Mike, he found Brett in Romero's room and beat up Romero badly. After Cohn had knocked Romero down many times, he said he wouldn't hit him anymore. Romero hit Cohn in the face, then fell down on the floor and threatened to kill him if he weren't out of town by the morning. Brett told Cohn off until he cried and wanted to shake hands with her and Romero. When he leaned down to shake Romero's hand, Romero punched him again. Brett is now taking care of Romero. Mike tells him about Brett's unhappy relationship with Ashley (from whom she received her title), then leaves with Bill and tells the chambermaid to bring him more alcohol.

Analysis:

Jake quickly takes Cohn's apology, several times saying "'so long'" to him and nearly forgetting that he will be leaving in the morning. But it is not only because he cares so little for Cohn that he does nothing to console him. Perhaps Jake recognizes that Cohn is right about him -- that he is, indeed, a pimp -- and that he is deserving of the physical punishment (and if not for how he acts with Brett, then at least for Jake's passivity in helping Cohn when Mike humiliates him).

There is a parallel between the man who was gored and Jake, with his own war wound; both wounds are rendered by brutish violence and seem absurd, or "'Just for fun,'" as the waiter says. The count, too, was wounded in the back, in the same place as the gored man, but he has managed to turn it into a scar of pride. Even the dead man is given a stately funeral; Jake must live quietly with his shameful wound.

However, the greater parallel with the gored man is Cohn's final defeat. Like the gored man, whom no one helps, no one steps in to save Cohn from being trampled by Brett. And, again, while the gored man is given a good funeral by the town, Jake's friends hardly seem to care ("'Was there?'" Bill responds when hearing there was a death), much like they are apathetic to Cohn's departure. Ironically, only now is Cohn somewhat disillusioned; Mike believes he has been "'ruined'" by Romero's slap in his face. Cohn represents the vestiges of pre-war idealism, chivalrously defending his true love against a fellow suitor, then wanting to shake hands honorably with his competitor. But when his chivalry is rejected by both his love and by the suitor, he understands his place in the world is over, that his romantic notions are no longer applicable.

The severing of the ear somewhat resembles a castration, as well. It makes sense that Brett ends up the owner of it, as she has emasculated all the other men in her life. By discarding it, not only does she prove she is not a true aficionado of bull-fighting, but she demonstrates how little she cares about the other virtual castrations she has carried out. As with the ear, she shoves all the devastation she has created deep into a drawer. In other words, she refuses to take responsibility and witness the gruesome effects of her manipulations. She works out her guilt by tending to the sick, as Mike says and Jake knows (remember, he met her while in the hospital).

Chapter XVIII:

It is the last day of the fiesta and the town is packed. Brett joins Jake and company at the café. They tell her Cohn has left, and she says Romero is badly hurt and won't leave his room, though he is still going to fight. Mike asks Brett how her "'boy friend'" is, and tips over the table. Brett leaves with Jake. She tells him she is happy, and asks him to go to the fight with her. They go into church, as she wants to pray for Romero, but she makes them leave quickly, as she feels nervous.

They return to the hotel, and Brett goes to Romero's room. Jake goes into Mike's room, and finds him looking like a "death mask" on the bed in the midst of empty bottles and strewn clothing. He is drunk and speaks awkwardly, then falls asleep. Jake finds Bill in his room and they eat lunch across the street, as Bill wants to slight the snotty German headwaiter.

After lunch, they go to the bull-ring with Brett and sit ring-side. They watch as everything is prepared for the fight. Jake watches the three matadors -- Romero, Marcial, and Belmonte -- through the binoculars. The President arrives to start the festivities. Romero, his face swollen, hands his sword-handler his cape; it is in turn handed to Brett. Belmonte, a recently unretired legend, renowned for working close to the bull and gravely endangering himself, goes first and is very good. However, he is not as good as he used to be, nor does he place himself in as great danger, and disappoints the crowd until they turn against him. Jake relates that Belmonte came out of retirement to compete against lesser talents like Marcial, but that Romero has overshadowed him. Romero, Jake believes, has the "greatness," and he works in front of Brett that afternoon as much as he can, though he never looks up at her.

Jake describes the first "quite," in which the bull makes a charge for a picador, then at each of the three matadors in turn. Romero is last, and he evades the bull as the picador stabs the bull's shoulder. Then Romero pulls the bull out and beautifully evades him several times. With his own bull, whose vision is impaired, Romero works to make the match exciting. The crowd does not understand his technique, however, and believes he is afraid. Romero stabs the bull with his sword, then talks to it before it dies. He brilliantly handles the last bull, the one that gored the man the other day, building up to a suspenseful climax in which he kills the bull on his own terms. His brother cuts the ear off the bull and hands it to Romero, who shows it to the President, then gives it to Brett. He says a few things to Brett, then returns to the adoring crowd.

Jake, Brett, and Bill return to the hotel; Brett goes upstairs, and the men drink in the dining-room. Belmonte enters with his manager and two other men and eats at the next table before they all take a train to Barcelona. Belmonte is silent and does not eat much. Jake and Bill go to the café for some absinthe. While Jake gets very drunk, they discuss Cohn, the end of the fiesta, and Bill's depression. Jake leaves for Brett's room, where he finds Mike, who tells him Brett left with Romero on the train. Jake goes into his room and lies on his bed. He pretends to be asleep when Bill and Mike come in. He comes down later and eats with them, though it seems "as though about six people were missing."

Analysis:

Hemingway draws his final and most detailed parallels between bull-fighting and sexuality in this chapter. Jake resembles the bull with impaired vision; while he still goes for Brett, he is not at full capacity and can never "gore" her, in the sense that the piercing of a bull or of a matador with a sword or horns symbolizes sexual penetration.

Not only can Romero penetrate Brett and bulls alike, he is also a master of foreplay; the crowd begs for him to continue fighting rather than consummate the fight with the climactic penetration: "Š each pass as it reached the summit gave you a sudden ache inside." Whereas before the matador seemed like the elusive female, here Jake's description casts the spectators as the symbolically receptive female and the matador as the dominant, penetrative male.

Romero is even more of a Hemingway hero for working while injured, for his "grace under pressure." Moreover, he makes the match with the vision-impaired bull more exciting, although the ignorant audience does not appreciate it. Jake, while not a hero but a mere aficionado, at least can appreciate Romero's work; he may be an observer (his use of the binoculars makes this very clear), but at least he is astute.

Belmonte's decline mirrors the Lost Generation's disillusionment; though they are the young generation, their values have similarly decayed since the war, and they must feel aged beyond their years. The chapter maintains this sensation of decline; the fiesta ends, Mike's relationship with Brett appears to be over, and Jake recognizes that their group feels diminished.

Additionally, Hemingway seems to provide a synopsis of his own prose style when Jake describes Romero's technique: "There were no tricks and no mystifications." Like Romero, Hemingway moves close to his subject, but eschews flashiness in favor of honest, authentic writing.

Chapter XIX:

The fiesta is over the next morning. Jake walks through the empty streets to the café. Bill joins him. The three men want to go in different directions; Jake's is San Sebastian. He and Bill plan to get a car and they will all drive together to Bayonne. They drive out to Bayonne, where Bill buys a train ticket for that night to Paris. They drive to Biarritz and have several drinks. They roll dice to see who pays, and Mike keeps losing until he gives Bill his last twenty francs. Bill offers to cash him a check, but since Mike cannot write checks, he turns it down; he says he has some money coming to him and can survive. He tells Bill that Brett has very little money, if any.

They drive around, almost back to the mountains to Pamplona, then to the hotel Mike is staying at in Saint Jean. They say goodbye to him, then drive Bill to catch his train. Jake asks the driver to drive him to a hotel, and he takes the same room he had when he was in Bayonne with Bill and Cohn. He regrets not having gone to Paris with Bill, though he is looking forward to the quiet relaxation of San Sebastian. He has a good dinner in the hotel, and tips the waiter well; Jake appreciates being back in a country where money helps smooth over conflicts.

Jake leaves on the morning train for San Sebastian and takes a hotel room. He resets his watch, as he has regained an hour by returning to Spain. He wires his office and tells them to forward wires to him. He swims in the afternoon at the beach, diving several times. He has a drink outside on the street, then returns to the hotel for dinner, where bicyclists stopping over from a race crowd the dining room. Jake talks with one of the team managers after dinner and discusses bicycling. The man invites him to see them off early tomorrow morning, and Jake says he will try to make it.

Jake oversleeps and misses the bicyclists. He swims again in the morning and suns on a raft. Back at the hotel, he receives a telegram forwarded from Paris from Brett in Madrid, saying she is in trouble and asking him to come to her hotel. He receives another telegram with the same message, forwarded from Pamplona. He tells the concierge to get him a ticket to Madrid that night. He sends a telegram to her, announcing his arrival.

Jake arrives in Madrid on the overnight train. He reaches her hotel and asks for Brett. After some delays, he finds her room. She is happy to see him and kisses him, though he feels she is thinking of something else. She says she made Romero leave yesterday. She says he was ashamed of her, and that he wanted her to grow her hair long. He tried to give her money, she says, but she couldn't. He also wanted to marry her so that she "'couldn't go away from him.'" Ultimately, she feels she could have lived with him had she not seen it would be bad for him.

Brett cries, and Jake holds her. She says she is returning to Mike, and claims she will not become "'one of those bitches.'" They leave the hotel and find the bill has already been paid. They get train tickets for that night and have a drink at a hotel bar. Brett discusses Romero some more. They have lunch and drink a great deal, though Brett cautions Jake against getting drunk. They decide to go for a taxi ride through Madrid. Jake holds her in the taxi. Brett laments that she and Jake could have had "'such a damned good time together.'" The car slows and approaches a policeman directing traffic, and Jake replies, "'YesŠ Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

Analysis:

The end of fiesta heralds the end of the equally hedonistic period now known as Roaring Twenties; though Hemingway in 1926 obviously could not have predicted the stock market's crash in 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, he does seem to warn America that their party will soon end.

We have hope that with the end of the fiesta, Jake may finally be returning to his pre-war values, and may be casting off his hedonistic lifestyle. He regains an hour when going to San Sebastian, and symbolically goes back in time, as well; his repeated dives in the water represent a symbolic baptism of sorts. Again, nature helps regenerate him.

However, Jake has not come so far; he irresponsibly oversleeps to see the bicyclists off, and when he receives the pleading telegram from Brett, he quickly returns to his submissive behavior that overthrows whatever values and self-esteem he holds. In ways, Jake is more pathetic than Cohn; at least Cohn followed Brett around of his own volition, while Jake seems more independent but is truly at Brett's beck and call. Her behavior should be infuriating to him -- she pulls him over to Madrid only so they can leave again together, she keeps saying she does not want to speak about Romero anymore, then talks more about him (even though it probably causes Jake more pain than herself), and she tells Jake she is returning to Mike. But Jake accepts it so long as he still has a chance with her, or even so long as he can stay in her presence.

Oddly, Brett also proves herself to be a pathetic figure here. While she dominates the men in her life, she is also dependent on them -- dependent on them for their submission to her. Moreover, though she gets rid of Romero because he was trying to make her into a more subservient, feminine figure, she also expresses worries about becoming "'one of those bitches that ruins children.'"

The great irony of the novel is that Brett is perhaps most dependent on Jake. She needs him because he gives her constant worship without risk of his ever dominating her, as they cannot have a functional sexual relationship. He is the bull she continually eludes and wounds, but who keeps coming back for more punishment. Their cab ride is similar to the one they took in Paris in Chapter IV, in which she toyed with Jake, alternating between intimacy and distance. We can imagine that soon after her final line to Jake about the relationship that might have been, she will resume talking about Romero, or Mike, or even Cohn. Jake's final line is rich with irony. As the taxi slows at the policeman's raised baton -- possibly a symbol of Jake's struggle with impotence and how it bars him from advancing with Brett -- he seems to recognize that while it would, indeed, be nice to be with her, the somewhat caustic tone of the word "'pretty'" suggests he finally understands that Brett has no idea how much pain he has been through, both from her and his impotence; "'pretty'" is such an insubstantial word. While Jake ends the novel on a highly disillusioned note, breaking from all his friends rather unceremoniously and recognizing he has misplaced his love in Brett, perhaps this is what he needs to regain his lost self, and perhaps this utter disillusionment is what must impel the Lost Generation -- or a future generation -- to rise again.