Hi miker,
You are more right than you know. _The Sun Also Rises_ is
also first person, and not third person non- omniscient.
Marlowe and Jake Barnes do in fact have a lot in common.
Barnes' physical war wound (which renders him impotent)
results in a psychic scarring with which he seems barely to
cope. Marlowe's 'wounding and scarring are more difficult to
pin down. No direct refence is made to the events which
soured Marlowe on society, but it seems almost as if he is
suffering from a case of burn-out after having operated in
law enforcement during the years before he went into business
for himself.
In many ways the results of their wounds/scars are vastly
similar: neither can ever really have a woman
(Barnes for reasons obvious and those less so, and Marlowe
because of his alienation complex); and they are both
deliberate outsiders in the guise of an insider;
semi-detatched observers along the lines of Fitzgerald's Nick
Carraway (Hemingway said once of _The Great Gatsby_ that he
thought it the finest novel written by an American in the
20th century, and he was probably right at the time. I know
that only a handful of books over the course of the century
rivaled it, including _The Old Man And The Sea_. But then I'm
biased, I vastly prefer Hemingway's short stories to all of
his novels save _The Old Man And The Sea_ and _For Whom The
Bell Tolls_, which is a largely sentimental choice).
There seems to be two real differences between Barnes and
Marlowe, though. Barnes in the end succumbs to the sort of
world-weary fatalism ("ennui" if you prefer) which afflicted
so many disillusioned by the horrors of the Great War.
Marlowe, for all of his posturing, has not entirely given up
the fight. Where Barnes gives up everything that matters to
him by the end of the book, and compromises himself even
further than his wound has compromised him, Marlowe seems
intent on winning the small, personal battles wherein he can
truly make some difference.
This initial distinction between these two characters leads
to the second one: Barnes just isn't sympathetic, when taken
all in all (a common complaint about the characters in
Hemingways' novels, especially the women who populate them),
and he isn't sympathetic because Americans have a problem
with admiring "quitters". It is cultural in many ways, but
there you have it. Such is hardly the case with Marlowe, the
tarnished knight, who is far more of an actor in the dramas
he records than Barnes is.
So there you have it, my 2 cents. Please, no rotten fruit,
just throw money!
Brian
> MrT said:
> i do recognize that _the big sleep_ is first person
and
> that hemingway's _sun also rises_ is what someone
called
> "objective" third person, meaning that the thoughts
of the
> characters is not in the narrative. but marlowe and
jake
> strike me as being very similar characters. they
both
> project a stoic front, while inwardly being
frustrated,
> with feelings of alienation from most of the world.
al-
> right, i'm going on about character similarities
when you
> were talking about style differences.
>
> i'm at a disadvantage because most of my books are
packed
> away right now while we are doing some remodelling,
so i
> can't drag out copies of both books and compare,
but i
> seem to remember thinking that even hemingway's and
chand-
> ler's styles were similar. clean, precise prose and
sharp,
> quick dialogue.
>
> to reiterate, i would appreciate hearing anything
you can
> tell me about the differences between the THH and
chandler
> style.
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