Fighting the bull

Emotions are often avoided in The Sun Also Rises. In this book, emotions are commonly related to alcohol, and there aren’t a lot of things that can emotionally shake Jake up. One more thing that has the same effect on Jake is bull-fighting. It says on page 168: “We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight”.

The reason why Jake feels so moved is that he believes that no one ever lives their life to the fullest like the bull-fighters. Bull-fighters impress him and he’s the most amazed by them. I think that that might have something to do with the fact that when he went to war, he was always fighting and risking his life, and he sees a part of that in the bull-fighters. They risk everything for the rush of the moment and the amusement of the audience. The bull-fighters have the ability to engage the audience like no theatrical performance can. The aficionados in the arena live each move the bull-fighter makes, with him, and that’s how they evaluate whether or not a bull-fighter is a real star or not. Jake is proud to be seen as an aficionados, and the fact that his friends were far from being as passionate as him about bull-fighting makes him superior to them in one area.

Jake is jealous of Cohn because he can get closer to Brett physically. Cohn has money, and he’s a fairly successful writer. He’s a boxer, which makes him more masculine than Jake by far. Jake needs this superiority of knowing so much about bull-fighting, to make him feel special.  He needs to be part of the audience to feel the passion and the rush of risking your life for something bigger than you.

Bull-fights, like fishing, are a form of escape for him. It seems as though when he focuses on what’s going on in the arena, he can forget about his inability to have sex, he forgets that he’s lost, and he might for a second even forget about Brett.

If bull-fights are the only thing that mixes someone’s feelings up like this, it proves that they are seriously having problems finding their place in the world. Jake is seen as being part of this ‘lost generation’, and as the story progresses, it is clear that Jake finds some ways of escaping from his ‘not belonging’, which involves things like bull-fighting, fishing, reading, nature and drinking.