Let's talk about Jake Barnes.

Aakash Vasireddy | 20th Century Blog Post #4 | October 16th, 2020

Today's post: Jake Barnes: Our Narrator

Happy end of the 1st Quarter! To end off the first quarter, we got another blog post coming at you about our new book The Sun Also Rises by the classic 20th Century author and writer @TheRealErnestHemingway.

In today's post, I want to reflect on my interpretation of our narrator Jake Barnes, including my thoughts about his personality and his character through what we've seen so far in The Sun Also Rises. He is a very interesting character that has many layers of complexity that we've discussed in the last couple weeks. At the end, I will also give some of my general thoughts about what we've read so far from Hemingway.

I'll start by saying that our narrator Jake Barnes has been a very unique character thus far. I can't really decipher if I'm in a place in the novel to really say I can empathize with Jake and confidently say that I like him as a character. I don't love him, but I wouldn't say I hate him or despise him. It is clear to me that I will not ever be able to think of him on a level at least five steps below the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons of characters in literature that I've read that I've really enjoyed. Do I expect him to be at that level? No, I wouldn't say so. There are certain characters that instantly click with me and other readers but there's so much variation in the world of novels which appeal to different audiences, so no, I am not surprised nor disappointed he doesn't really click with me. However, Jake Barnes' narrative and the levels to his character that we can't really see on the surface has been pretty interesting to discuss about in class. Like Hemingway's Iceberg Principle, there is a lot underneath the surface with Jake that we have to read between the lines and flesh out as readers. Enough said. Let's head back to the novel.

From the very beginning of the story on page one, we can gather some thoughts about Jake as a character. It is interesting that Hemingway chooses to start his narration with talking about another character. In this case, Jake starts by giving the reader his thoughts about Mr. Robert Cohn, another interesting character that we've discussed heavily, only seconded to Brett Ashley and obviously our main character Jake Barnes himself. We are typically used to looking at the start of the story and getting our main character's background or a point of view focused on our main character established right away. For Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, this is not the case. I may say that this confused me at the start. I thought to myself, "Okay new story, main character is Robert Cohn, may be about the life of a retired boxer..." but then we get an "I" which threw me off. "Oh I guess it's a first person narrator... who the hell are you?!" 

I think this does play into Jake's character however. There seems to be some observer mentality or observer aspect of Jake's character. We kind of have to make our first impressions of Jake by the way he views others, and this may be the reason we can't really find out too much about Jake on the surface in these few first pages. Let's also consider: What basic details do we know about Jake? Came over and fought in the war (is a war veteran), but staying in Europe as the Paris correspondent of a newspaper. He does have this reporter narration style and way of looking at things that happen to him in life. We see this a lot when he tries to keep things off of his mind like we see when he tries not to think of Brett: just describing things around him and a play-by-play of what he does. This is an important part of Jake's character. 

We also know that through these chapters, we've come upon the fact that Jake is a very judgmental character as well. At the beginning of the novel, even though Hemingway may be showing Jake's reporter-narrative style (because I could definitely as a reader sense a journalistic style of writing in these paragraphs), there does seem to be a condescending, patronizing tone in the way Jake describes Cohn. This part that includes Jake describing Robert isn't just a few sentences either - it does stem forward into the following paragraphs until we finally arrive upon Jake and Cohn's conversation in the present when Cohn comes to Jake's office. Jake talks about Cohn's "fall" from his boxing career and criticizes Cohn on letting himself by controlled and led by the collar by the women in his life. We know from these chapters that Jake doesn't have the most loving perception of his so-called "bestfriend" Robert Cohn, especially after hearing about Cohn and Brett's little trip to San Sebastian and also since his critical opinions of Cohn are pretty explicit. However, Jake's judgmental mentality can be made out from these scenes as well. Another important aspect to Jake's narrative is that Jake likes to be critical of  Cohn because that makes him feel better about his own insecurities, especially in relation to Jake's masculinity/manhood that we know has taken quite the hit. As we have seen in these past ten chapters, there's a lot more to discuss about Jake that extends outside of this blog post, but that's just some of my general thoughts about our narrator Jake Barnes.  

Overall, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has given me an unique experience thus far. It is definitely a different style than Mrs. Dalloway and The Mezzanine in terms of narrational style. For example, during the reading for today, something I noticed and found kind of amusing was that the conversations in this novel take on a pretty shallow level of complexity. In comparison to the to the conversations in the other two novels, there isn't too much differentiation with the length of these conversations. They seem to be pretty minimal on the surface for all three novels. 

However, there isn't really any emotion expressed during these conversations which differs from Mrs. Dalloway nor is there any hard description or speculation about the conversation which differs from The Mezzanine. It's just person A says this, person B says this, move on. Look at page 59 for example with the interaction between Jake and Bill. Reminds me of like a text message conversation or how I used to write stories and dialogue when I was younger. 

I walked up to him. "Hi," I said. "Hey," he said. "You want to go play?" "Sure." We walked outside. "Your ball." "Cool." We played. Like you know what I mean? Generally though, this novel has been a great source of engaging conversation. That's all I got for today. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think. Peace. 

~Aakash V.