Before World War I, Europe and America enjoyed a century of peace. Despite some small civil wars, during this period, there had been no large-scale continental wars. The roaring twenties had been an era of technological advancement, industrial change and urbanization. Electric lights, telephones, subways, moving pictures, automobiles, radios, and airplanes were some of the technological innovations that would promote further peace by uniting humanity. It was thought that humanity had evolved past the need for war. Economic reforms, anti-trust laws and the Federal Reserve System emerged promising fair play and happiness to the nation's growing middle-class citizens.
While industrialization made life more comfortable by cutting down man-hours, it also produced more effective mass-produced weapons. During the First World War, which lasted from 1914-1918, the technological innovations that were intended to unite humanity reaped greater devastation than the world had previously witnessed. These new weapons included: machine guns, tanks, planes, poison gas, and artillery guns. War was no longer a matter of a man facing his enemy; but a chaotic and undisciplined atmosphere where one encountered the gravities of chance via massive war machines. There were 37,466,904 causalities in WWI, meaning that nearly a generation of men in Europe had been exterminated as a result of this devastating war. Frederick Henry, a soldier in A Farewell to Arms, comments on the randomness of these attacks, saying he was "blown up while... eating cheese."It is not surprising that soldiers of this timer period were demoralized as a result of their gruesome war experiences. Before the war, they shared a faith in peace, and went to war with patriotic ideals. Now they had to solve such question as how to assert their honor and courage in a world that they now viewed as lacking abstract truths. Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" describes the gravity and meaninglessness of this new system of warfare: "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/ Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--/ My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ ...That old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Para patria mori." This is the society of ex-patriots that Ernest Hemingway illustrates, and to which he belonged. Gertrude Stein sympathized with society's plight when mentioning a garage keeper’s comment, "You are a lost generation," a casual remark, yet one which became world famous after Hemingway used it as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises.
The term "lost generation" was instantly meaningful to Hemingway readers because it signified the diaspora felt by the post war generation, especially the ex-patriot intellectuals. Modernism is the term coined after the fact to encapsulate this literary and artistic movement. These texts, like this society, had lost faith in God and all other universals such as: peace, freedom, justice and love. Authors of this time period, Hemingway included, begged the question: What is one to do when previously trusted universals no longer bear any merit? The answer was to come to the harsh understanding that reality was truth. Life was futile, and often it was nothing, meaningless. The concept of life being a meaningless experience is represented in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." The older waiter in this short story expresses modernist thought when he says, "It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was all nada." This belief in nada transcends to a disenchanted questioning of Christian ideals when the waiter tries to pray and cannot do so: "Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name..."
To survive in this meaningless world, a character must learn to apply his own set of principles to life. This code is presented in various Hemingway texts, and has come to be known as "code heroism."
It must be emphasized, however, that the code hero would never speak of a code. He does not make broad generalizations. To formulate a set of rules of conduct to which the Hemingway character would adhere is, in some sense, a violation of the essential nature of the code hero. He does not talk about what he believes in. He is a man of action, rather than a man of theory. Therefore, the following concepts are those defined not by the hero himself, but by the critics and reader s who are familiar with Hemingway’s works and views. Philip Young, one of the first scholars to publish a book-length study on Hemingway’s fiction, established an important tradition in interpreting Hemingway’s work. Young developed the notion that the majority of Hemingway’s fiction featured what he called a “code hero” and a “Hemingway hero.” The Hemingway hero, (later termed the apprentice hero,) is often the story’s protagonist, and has much to learn about life as it really is. In contrast to the Hemingway hero, or apprentice hero, the code hero a subject of wisdom who is able to live properly in the world because of his adherence to an unspoken code of behavior.
In defining the Hemingway code, Young asserts it is a “’grace under pressure.’ It is made of the controls of honor and courage which in a life of tension and pain make a man a man and distinguish him from the people who follow random impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps cowardly, and without inviolable rules for how to live holding tight” (63). This code is of the utmost importance because it presents a solution to the problems of the Hemingway hero. Young goes on to claim that Hemingway found this code operating among various sporting figures, and that he wrote several stories intending to formulate the basic principles of the code by illustrating it in action. Lisa Tyler comments on the sexism involved in Young’s meager definition of code heroism, stating: “Unfortunately, the sexism inherent in his definition made it harder to see Hemingway’s women characters as exemplars of the code. Some of Hemingway’s protagonists—Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, for example—behave in ways that seem inconsistent with the code as Young defined it” (29).
Lisa Tyler is accurate in her conception that Young’s influence has “obscured other possible readings of Hemingway’s work” (29). As a result of these misreadings and misanalyses, Tyler concludes: “The concept of the ‘code hero,’ although historically important in Hemingway studies, is no longer as influential as it once was” (30). It is because of Young’s sparse definition of code heroism that this concept must be redefined, expanded and reevaluated. By doing so, the definitions of the Hemingway hero and the Code hero can be more readily understood, and more accurately applied to The Sun Also Rises, allowing for greater illumination of the text. The following chapter will examine Brett and Jake as Hemingway heroes. These apprentice heroes, although disillusioned, are still catering to archaic, romantic ideals which they learn to eradicate through their association with the code hero, Pedro Romero. Although Romero is the code hero of this text, he is romanticized as his life experience is limited to the romantic realm of the bullfighting arena, which separates him from the chaos and misgivings of the outside world. By the end of the novel, Jake and Brett surpass Romero’s code hero status, as their life experiences, coupled with their newly found declaration of principles allow them to ‘hold tight’ in a world devoid of concrete meaning.
