RIP Livers.

In Ernest Hemingway's (I always use the author's entire name to reach the word count more quickly) novel The Sun Also Rises, Jake and his friends have a fun little habit of destroying their livers with as much alcohol as they can possibly afford. While I think this can be partly attributed to the fact that Hemingway seems to have written what he was familiar and concerned with - bullfighting, booze, babes - I think that in The Sun Also Rises the excessive drinking actually does serve a greater purpose.

Hemingway poppin' bottles.

Although the war is hardly ever brought up in conversations between characters or even in narrative exposition, Jake and his friends have very apparently been traumatized by the war. The premise of the novel, I think, is that they do not know how to, or are afraid to, express this trauma. The characters are shut off from self-expression, and, because of this, it is alcohol that drives the novel forward – drinking is the means by which the characters reveal everything that they have had to suppress. When the characters have had something to drink, they are more able to express how they truly feel about their situation and each other. True motives and opinions are revealed when the characters are able to drink themselves into a less inhibited state of mind, and this creates tensions and escalates conflicts throughout the novel.

Excessive drinking also plays into the theme of being lost. The characters' post-war lives are aimless –  they travel, they fish, they go to bullfights, but, even though they're doing things, they're not really doing anything. Their actions don't seem to have a greater purpose or meaning; they are wandering, miserable, damned souls. Drinking is a way for these characters to occupy their time, to put themselves into a fuzzy haze in which the acuteness of the painful boredom they are all secretly suffering may be temporarily numbed. Hemingway said in a letter to Fitzgerald, "We are all bitched from the start,"and I think the characters in The Sun Also Rises drink to try to forget how very bitched they are.