Gloria's Blog

In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Jake Barnes spends part of the book in France and part in Spain. The narration style in these sections is different, as well as Jake’s overall mood. In France, we see Jake have trouble falling asleep. He stays awake thinking about his war wound and the Catholic Church then he starts to think about Brett. He begins to cry and after that he stays awake even longer and just “listened to the heavy trams go by”. This sleeplessness is different in Spain where he falls asleep much easier. We get only two sentences of him falling asleep early in his visit, which contrasts with the page and a half of him trying to sleep in France. Earlier, he had cried himself to sleep but now that he was in Spain it “felt good to be warm and in bed.” We also get different levels of description of Jake’s surroundings in France and Spain. In France we don’t get much description, most of the details we get are Jake quickly describing his surroundings while going somew...

            So far in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the main character Jake Barnes has come across as being a horrible person. So far he’s showed that he’s anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, and racist. In the very first paragraph of the novel he talks about how Cohn is a Jew and makes fun of him, saying that he only boxed because he was scared and couldn’t emotionally handle anything. He talks about how Cohn’s nose was permanently flattened but that it “certainly improved his nose”.             Jake also makes fun of Cohn saying that he is controlled by the women in his life and they act stronger than him. He says that this behavior is a bad thing, implying that women shouldn’t be strong in a relationship or they should be more submissive to Cohn. Jake also literally objectifies women, he says that Brett is “built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht,” an...

            In Mrs. Dalloway there are some mixed signals on how Clarissa feels towards Peter Walsh. At times it seems as though she regrets not marrying him, or that she regrets marrying Richard. At other times it seems like she thinks Peter was obnoxious and not husband material. Clarissa’s memories of him could also be interpreted as reminiscing but not regretting the past. Especially when her memories of Peter aren’t positive memories and are more like remembering times he was annoying or hurt her feelings. For example, she remembers that Peter had said she would be the “perfect hostess” and Clarissa had “cried over it in her bedroom.”             She also compares Peter to Richard in a negative way saying that “with Peter everything had to be shared” but with Richard they gave each other space. We know that she appreciates this distance from Richard but that it might be ...