This chapter comprises a sort of mid-book idyll. The author offers it to us by way of contrast to the Paris scenes that went before. In this novel, Pamplona will serve as a kind of anti-Paris, semi-rural and organic where the City of Light is urban and decadent. The woods outside Burguete where Jake and Bill fish for trout are even more different from Paris, and the sense of tranquility that the fishing trip creates in them and us could not be more different from the freneticism of the novel’s opening chapters.
Hemingway makes explicit here the themes of irony and pity: the irony of Jake’s situation (he is a kind of superman who nevertheless can’t perform the most basic of manly activities) as well as the pity we feel for him. The writer does so in an extended section, rich with dialogue, that is meant to be funny but has not dated well. The joking between Jake and Bill, over breakfast and later at lunch, is certainly believable as such, but it’s difficult for a contemporary audience to follow, because the references to Frankie Fritsch and so forth have grown obscure with the passage of time. (The reference to Bryan’s death tells us exactly when these scenes are occurring: 1925.) Do note, however, that Jake’s physical condition is alluded to—and quickly backed away from. (“I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it” could be the motto of Hemingway’s stoic take on the world, and Jake’s, too.) The writer has established, however, that Jake’s condition is not simple impotence and that it was caused by an accident.
Another theme of Jake and Bill’s banter concerns the latter’s status as an expatriate. He has fled America, with its prudish Anti-Saloon League and bourgeois President Coolidge (who famously said “The business of America is business”). Finally, note the gruff tenderness shared by Jake and Bill in these scenes. One of Hemingway’s pleasures in life as in art was what we now call “male bonding,” and in this case the bonding is poignant, as in some ways it replaces the love that Jake cannot fully express with female companions.
More black humor: “Get up,” Jake tells Bill, who replies “What? I never get up.” Of course, it is Jake, not Bill, who never gets up. Later, trout (again, a phallic fish) try in vain to swim against the current of a waterfall, and—not so humorously—Jake reads a book about a man frozen inside a glacier whose wife awaits the reappearance of his body for twenty-four years. Jake is “frozen,” too, only no one awaits his unthawing.
