This is my first time reading The Sun Also Rises and is one of only a few pieces I have read by Ernest Hemingway. I am a fan of Hemingway’s writing style, but I am sure I missed a lot of details reading through this book for the first time. As for how the war affected the characters in this book, I very quickly found several repeating ideas, such as: the need for escape, the need for love, and even the complete desertion of the idea of love. Most of the characters in The Sun Also Rises show at least one of these “symptoms” of war while some show even more. The main characters who seem to show great damage from the war are Jake and Brett who, in many ways, seem to have opposing damage from the war.

While some of the damage in the characters is physical, such as Jake’s wound, most is mental, which causes many to hide it. Jake, while trying to shrug off his wound, still faces the mortality it forces him to realize. Jake faces his mortality with a need to live his life to the fullest in his own eyes by traveling and seeing the world with a companion.

Brett, on the other hand, faces the horrors of the past war in a different way. She tries to merely escape the past by surrounding herself with companions. She also copes with a device used very commonly even today, alcohol, which she uses to escape from the demons of war. Both try to use love or companionship to shelter themselves from their demons, and both discover this to be difficult because love, as it was known before the war, seems to be dead.