Wednesday, September 19, 2007

SAR: a reversed journey

Expatriatism.

Do you share Bill’s take on the issue, or do you feel that Jake and the rest are on to something: going back to their ‘ancestral roots’ as the only viable thing to do when searching for meaning, lost values?

8 Comments:

Blogger evelyn, please said...

I agree with BG to a certain point...

In Chapter XII, BG and Jake talk, and BG tells Jake that the expatriates are nothing more but drunkards who only care about sex and never write anything worth publishing.

From a psychological point of view, this could be true.. as the whole change-of-environment process requires a lot of stoicism (self-control and detachment from distracting emotions, sometimes interpreted as an indifference to pleasure or pain).

In a time where all the traditional values get mixed up, the characters of SAR put stoicism as the building base for their new hedonism, which is not created to bring pleasure, but to fulfill their time.

What's specific about these characters is that they're constantly moving from one place to another, they all have the need to escape from themselves and change their lives, to get back to something that they know exists but they have lost.

They never actually feel like part of their new environment. They know that they're foreigners and, apparantly, they don't have the smallest desire to fit in with the locals. Occasionally, they make friends here and there, but always from a distance..

However, it's not definite that if they return to America everyhting will come to place.
At the end, it's not the place that matters, but it's the experience of war and suffering they've all been through. Time should be changed, not location.

11:47 AM  
Blogger belag said...

good...

a couple of thoughts, for further consideration -

is Jake like the rest of the ex-pats?

Thomas Wolfe believed that a person can never truly 'go home' (return, claim roots/heritage) -

how does that breed of ex-patriatism sound? is it a form of exile (the act of banishment, either voluntary or forceful)?

10:26 PM  
Blogger belag said...

valid point. and yet, the self, as you put it, is also located - it doesn't simply hide away. it is located, perhaps, even in more than one place, and one time.

4:36 PM  
Blogger SaV said...

I don't think that the "expatriates" are going back to their 'ancestral roots', but they are escaping from who they are espected to be if they go to their native country. Bill is unlike them, because he accepts who he is and he does not have a problem with it(but then, Bill is not carrying any visible sign of the war). Jake probably indentifies to a certain point with this company, and fears that he'll not be accepted by american standards.Jake even says: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”; but he fails to follow his own advice.

7:23 PM  
Blogger Emilio_AP said...

I agree with Bill that they are all a couple of incapable expatriates, who are unable to find any kind of meaning in their lives. Even when they try, e.g. Jake and Brett try to be together, a force seems to work against them. The expatriates can never achieve what they strive for because of the interruptions (war, wound, scar). Bill and the Count try to get them out of the never-ending cycle, but this does not seem to work. Even as the novel ends the characters go back to where they started, but nothing has changed, their attitudes remain the same. I see this as a break, distortion of the fifth step of a Hero's archetypal journey. "The hero uses his new wisdom to restore fertility and order to the land." It seems that Jake will never be able to do this.

5:54 PM  
Blogger \ said...

First of all, I would not say "Jake and the rest". I feel that Jake is not like the other expatriates (Brett, Cohn, Frances) because (1) he has a REAL wound (I will be asked to specify what I mean by real - tangible, existent, "so much there" kind of a wound) and because (2) he has made a home, a true home, outside of the US, namely in France.

Even if I make this distinction that I so much want to make, I agree with what Bill says. They are not seeking their roots or whatever. If they did, they would not be drinking so much wine and having millions of lunches in a week and attending a few parties per night and flirting with bull-fighters. If they did seek their roots, they would be somewhere, doing something. Jake would be probably in Ireland, exploring his Roman Catholic family background. Cohn would be either in Spain (doing research instead of kicking bullfighters) or in Germany. Brett would be somewhere, doing something which goes beyond domineering and flirting with people she MUST NOT be in a relationship with.

So, what are these expatriates doing is nothing even close to the whole "back to roots" thing. They are just using it to justify their senseless parties and lunches and love triangles and rectangles.

Exploring one's roots required strength, struggle, and sweat. Blood, sweat, and tears. But, what the expatriates are getting is mere satisfaction, nothing more, nothing less.

11:54 PM  
Blogger Kate5kova said...

To some extent, I share Bill's perspective on expatriatism. He sees Mike, Brett, Jake and everyone else as a group of drunkards, who have "lost touch with the soil" and "become obsessed with sex". With one word, he sees them as expatriates.
But I think that this is only the American view of Europe (life is easy, people don't work and they party the whole time). The expatriates are foreigners in the new country (that being France in the novel)and they have to learn the language. But this is not the case with the characters in "The Sun Also Rises", since they all communicate in English and Jake is the only one who knows Spanish. They travel throughout Europe, moving from one place to another and they don't really belong to that world. They are all hedonists, seeking only pleasure and trying to find the purpose of their life through it.

10:12 PM  
Blogger Jelena said...

The characters of the novel have lost their traditional values of love, faith and morality. They simply wander aimlessly in a world that appears meaningless. They don’t have a true goal that would guide them, they don’t have dream and ambition, but fill their time with inconsequential activities (drinking, partying). They travel around, but can’t find their true place, even at the end nothing really changes, but things remain the same, they split but still represent a group of lost expatriates that can never achieve their goals because of the many obstacles they are facing, but don’t know how to deal with them.

11:48 AM  

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