Upon finishing Mrs. Dalloway and The Sun Also Rises, I felt like both of them were really anti-climactic. Both books ended in an extremely familiar place. While I like that sort of ending, I feel like the point is to show how the characters are in an almost identical place as they were when the story started, and be such different people. The goal is to show just how much has actually changed, usual internally, and make that change stark against a familiar backdrop.
Mrs. Dalloway ended with all of the Bourton characters back together for Clarissa's party. We finally got to meet all of these extremely influential people and see how they compare to Clarissa's view of them in the past and how they affected her when she was younger. Clarissa is standing in this party with all of her old friends beside her, contemplating suicide, and then she doesn't. She goes back to society and is almost completely unchanged from where she started that morning.
The Sun Also Rises ends in exactly the same place it started. Jake and Brett are in a cab driving who knows where and talking about the hopelessness of their situation. Neither of them have any new opinions about it and appear to be unwilling to change anything about their situation for the better. They also don't appear to be any more resigned to the facts than they were before. The dialogue exchanged is even the same as before.
With both of these books, the end didn't feel like any sort of resolution for me. The characters end the story with exactly the same problems as they started and the entire book seems to serve the sole purpose of explaining what the problem is and offering no solution to it. I think this is really representative of the feelings of hopelessness associated with the post-war world, but it isn't typically what I enjoy about a story. I always want there to be something satisfying about the end, where something has significantly changed in the situation. For Mrs. Dalloway, it seems like the whole point is that nothing exactly changed for Clarissa. The same thing really goes for Jake as well. He and Brett are still far from resolving their relationship issues at the end of the book, but we went on this great journey through Europe with them.
I think this in general is a theme with 20th century novels. The point is not to have a conflict and a resolution, but to show nothing but conflict, really. There was so much conflict that these novels aren't about happy endings, but realistic ones. Fiction helps us understand things that are going on in the world that are hard to deal with in our own lives. Some character can screw it up for us and we suffer no consequences while still watching how everything plays out. Since we know Virginia Woolf committed suicide, I have to wonder just what Hemmingway's problem was.
Interesting fact: Hemingway committed suicide, too, but not untiil 35 years after writing The Sun Also Rises.
ReplyDeleteI would disagree with you that Brett and Jake didn't change by the end of the book. This mostly hinges on how you interpret their dialogue in the last few pages: how ironic are they being? I see Brett's "deciding not to be a bitch" as a sincere realization that her heartbreaker lifestyle is hard on others and Jake's "Isn't it pretty to think so?" as finally admitting that he and Brett are incompatible in the long run, no matter how much they like to be together (a stark change from early on in the book when Jake was still clinging to hopes of getting back with her).
It's interesting that The Sun Also Rises has such a "realistic" ending (not obviously happy or sad) considering how may of Hemingway's other works end on (SPOILERS!) somewhat depressing notes. Aside from The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises is possibly the happiest Hemingway novel in existence.
Really? See I didn't think Brett was really deciding to change. I read that as just another complaint about her life that she feels open enough to talk to Jake about. I can tell that she feels bad about it, but she is in a self-destructive mode here. That decision could or could not lead to real change, but I didn't feel like there was any difference in their situation, really.
ReplyDeleteI think the ending of The Sun Also Rises really displayed how much Brett has changed. Brett's initial appearance seemed to be that she only cared about herself and she didn't really seem to have a sense of morals. If that was true, then at the end, she would have stayed with Romero because they both loved and satisfied each other. Instead, Brett chose to leave Romero because she thought it was morally wrong. We come to a conclusion that Brett isn't without save and can change.
ReplyDeleteIn neither Woolf nor Hemingway do we get anything like a traditional "happy ending" (as in Jane Austen, with three perfect marriages diffusing all conflict), but this may have more to do with their aesthetics than a particularly dark view of life. In Woolf's essays, we can surmise that her suspicion of plot as artificial must extend to the convention of the happy ending, which would impose an unrealistic sense of closure onto a picture of life being lived. But both endings can be read as a complex mixture of happy and sad, optimistic and bleak. Clarissa has just been deeply pondering death and the meaning of life, but she chooses to live, and to rejoin the party--not that her life is perfect, but it is what it is and it is to be lived. With Jake, too, you get a kind of stoical acceptance that Brett is who she is, and that his life is going to be difficult, and their relationship causes them both a lot of pain and angst, but there is a potential for change and redemption, and he looks to the future with the hard-edged stoicism that rejects fairytale endings ("We could have had such a damn good time together!").
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