Just Finished Reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of those authors against whom I used to feel an unreasonable kind of bias, almost exclusively as a negative reaction to the kind of "instruction" I received throughout my high school English class years.  I do remember reading The Old Man and the Sea in 1971 as a reading assignment in the ninth grade and thought then that it was okay, but didn't get around to reading any of his other more famous works until recent years, when I went through For Whom the Bell Tolls (my favorite Hemingway novel) and A Farewell to Arms.  Well, I finally got around to reading one of his earlier books, The Sun Also Rises from 1926.  As for my following reaction, English teachers are welcome to read it but so are truck drivers, construction workers, policemen, and anyone else: their opinions are equally valid and authoritiative, as far as I'm concerned...

During the 1920s there was a very large American and British expatriate community residing in Paris, France, partially due to the more liberal social environment there, partially due to many having fallen in love with the place from their World War I experiences, and partially due to the fact that, while in the States Prohibition was a Constitutionally-mandated law at the time, overseas the American ex-pats could openly drink to their hearts' content.   Ernest Hemingway was one of these folks and decided to write a story that reflected the expatriate lifestyle, in the process reportedly drawing upon his own experiences and those of friends and acquaintances.  The result, The Sun Also Rises, is something that, were it to appear in some form of media today, would probably most closely resemble a TV reality show like Jersey Shore, The Shahs of Sunset, or the numerous Housewives series.  I say that because Hemingway's characters are continually going around from café to restaurant to hotel while getting themselves "tight", i.e. drunk.  Their lives seem to be in a state of stagnation, just drifting from one thing to the next.  At the same time these people (first person narrator/protagonist Jake Barnes, his "love" Brett Ashley, Mike Campbell, Bill Gorton, and Robert Cohn as the main characters) practice a kind of social insulation separating themselves from the people they encounter. I'll have to admit that some of these characters remind me in various ways of people I've personally known over the years, especially that tendency to insulate themselves as a "group apart"...or as Hemingway referred to it, the "gang".  They hobnob around in Paris, go fishing in French Basque country, and end up watching the bullfights in Pamplona, Spain. If you're looking for anything substantial happening in this story, forget it: more than anything this is a character study as well as a detailed description of 20s' Paris and the sport/tradition of bullfighting.  Hemingway's writing style was stark and plain, using short sentences and making dialogue the preeminent feature.  I can't say that I disliked The Sun Also Rises once I felt that I understood where the author was going with it...I'm just not sure that he would have appreciated the generally unfavorable reactions that I felt about his characters and their lifestyles, which I suspect he might have been promoting and defending...