The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is, along with A Farewell to Arms, a key naturalist-modernist text by Hemingway. It certainly doesn't share with Arms a belief in the inevitability of the coming catastrophe. Arms ends up in a hyper-naturalist place; its protagonist ends up concluding that all existence is nothing but a steady march towards death.

But The Sun Also Rises does have a number of aspects which make it interesting for a consideration of naturalism. It's ultimately about impotence; Jake Barnes has come back from WWI with his balls blown off, which leaves an Italian military commander to tell him: "you...have given more than your life" (39). The out from the naturalist system that is denied in Farewell to Arms is denied here, and more thoroughly. Jake can never have offspring and perpetuate his genetics. The catastrophe has already come, once again delivered by WWI.

The novel is essentially the love story between Jake and Brett, the femme fatale who has dalliances and falling outs with her fiancee Mike, the Jewis novelist Cohn, and thtPerhaps is e ultra-masculine 19-year old bullfighter Romero. Each of them are a standin for the sexual relationship she cannot have with Jake, and she ends up with Jake in the end, having ruined all of her other relationships, but inevitably in a nonsexual way. Perhaps this is the most naturalist thing of all: neither jake nor Brett ever seriously consider being in love but not being able to have sex. It's just ont on the table.

Jake also advances a theory of morality which reminds me of Zola's belief that guilt is just a nervous reaction. Morality, or more accurately, immorality, is just "things that make you disgusted afterwards." This is a fully naturalistic system; only the gut can provide you with morality.