nd persuades Jake to facilitate her affair with Pedro, provoking the jealousy of Mike and Cohn. Cohn nearly beats Pedro senseless when he discovers that Brett is having an affair with him. Brett eventually ends the affair because she fears that she will ruin Pedro and his career. In conclusion the characters in The Sun Also Rises are a careless, aimless, and pleasure-seeking crowd. They wander through an endless, drunken procession of parties, cafes, and sexual affairs in a desperate search for meaning in their lives. It is no coincidence that many of them are artists and writers. Through the work of artistic expression, they try to produce meaning in a world seemingly to be lost to amoral consumerism and loveless ness. They are always going somewhere, but never really arriving anywhere. This provides us with an incomplete portrait of the aimless expatriate crowd living in 1920's Europe. We must always search for what Hemingway does not say. Half of the story lies between the lines in the novel; perhaps this symbolizes the absence of meaning in the characters' lives. Although not a single shot is fired throughout the novel, The Sun Also Rises is about World War I. We know a few scarce specific details of the characters' war experience. However, the war relentlessly haunts the characters throughout the novel. The effects of the war are evident in their alcoholism and their casual cruelty to one another. It is evident in the way they skirt the edges of their war experiences in their conversation. It is the war and its effects they are fleeing when they descend into the forgetfulness of alcohol. They flee it continually by refusing to discuss its horrors directly. They flee it by running from one cafe, one country, and one party to the next. They are prisoners of their own attempts to escape the war that maimed them physically and psychologically. They are attempting to flee their shattered selves, but as Jake Barnes says, "You can't get a...
