Finally, Hemingway makes the nature of Jake’s problematic condition clear (or as clear as he will ever make it, in this extremely subtle story). Reading between the lines, and keeping in mind the hints dropped during the book’s prior chapters, one can deduce the following: While fighting on the Italian front during World War I, Jake was somehow castrated. (This is what the Italian liaison colonel means when he says to Jake, “You . . . have given more than your life.”) “Of all the ways to be wounded,” indeed!
Thus, Jake can never consummate his love for Brett. Valiantly, he tries to think of his disability as some sort of cosmic joke—and Brett sees it as punishment for being free with her sexuality. Their plight is genuinely tragic, however, because of the particular nature of the wound. Recall Jake’s lascivious description of Brett’s body in Chapter III (“She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey”), as well as the erotically-charged way he sees her in the cab at the start of this chapter. Jake’s castration has not eliminated his sexual desire, only his ability to fulfill that desire. (Erection and ejaculation are both physiologically impossible.) Therefore, even looking at Brett is agony for him, and for her as well, because she understands the pain he’s in. No wonder Jake feels rage toward Brett’s gay companions, men who presumably could make love to her but are uninterested in doing so. And yet Jake will spend much of the story watching Brett go off with other men (like the Count, in this chapter), even encouraging her to do so.
Chapter IV is crucial, because it is here, at last, that Hemingway clarifies the conflict of The Sun Also Rises. To reiterate: The protagonist, Jake Barnes, wants Brett Ashley, but he can’t “have” her, despite Brett’s reciprocal feelings. “Isn’t there something we can do about it?” Jake asks. The reader, who empathizes with Jake’s pathetic lot, wants to know this as well, and reads on. The fact that, as Jake says, “there’s not a damn thing we can do” is another aspect of The Sun Also Rises that marks the book as Modernist—as genuinely experimental, in fact. In the tradition of all the books that came before it, this novel has a powerful conflict at its center. And yet the conflict would seem to be insolvable. Hemingway’s experiment: Can he hold our attention anyway, much less leave us fulfilled in the end?
Note the phallic references that make brutal fun of Jake’s condition. At the start of the chapter, he and Brett travel “up . . . then levelled [sic] out” and finally “went smoothly down,” immediately after which Jake tries to kiss Brett and she recoils. A few pages later, they sit in the cab “like two strangers” while passing by a pool of live trout (a phallic fish), which is closed and dark. “I’ve never let you down, have I?” Brett inquires of Jake later. Even the novel’s title and the biblical passage to which it alludes participate in the book’s black humor: You may not “rise,” the title taunts Jake, but at least the sun does.
Be sure to observe the careful characterization of Brett up to this point, though much of it occurs between the lines. We know that she is attractive to men—not just Jake, but Cohn and the Count and even the homosexuals with whom she is first seen. This despite a distinctly androgynous quality to her appearance: Brett has cut her hair short, she wears a man’s hat, and she refers to everyone, including herself, as “chaps.” The writer subtly links her to prostitutes—first Brett is mistaken for Georgette and later she is offered money by the Count to accompany him on a trip. (More will be made of this later in the book.) Finally, Jake sums up what may be the most significant characteristic of Brett’s personality: “I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have,” he tells us bitterly.
It is Brett who introduces the theme of payment for bad behavior, as if life’s misfortunes are some sort of fine levied for sin. “When I think of the hell I’ve put chaps through,” she says to Jake. “I’m paying for it all now.” Brett seems to think that there is a logic to the universe—that life, though often painful, is at least fair. One of the bitter lessons of The Sun Also Rises is the wrongheadedness of that philosophy.
Stylistically, notice the emphasis here on the concrete and specific; this chapter is practically a catalogue of streets and parks, restaurants and bars in 1920s Paris. Do we really need to know exactly how much money is in Jake’s bank account, as well as the fact that he reads not one but two bullfighting papers? Clearly, Hemingway believes that it is exactly these banal details that bring a scene to life. Reading about Jake’s bank balance, it’s hard not to think that the events in this book of fiction really happened, though of course they did not.
Also, Hemingway introduces passages that combine Gertrude Stein’s penchant for repetition with the Irish novelist James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” technique; the latter attempts to reproduce on the page the illogical workings of the human mind. In this case the human is drunk:
I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.
