Paris to Spain: Cloudy to Clear-minded
An interesting feature of The Sun Also Rises is the way Hemingway handles the setting shift from Paris to Spain and coinciding shift in writing style. Paris is painted as a chaotic, overstimulating place through Jake’s narrative. This description is apparent the first time he describes a scene in the city: “It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go-traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clip-ety clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal,” (Hemingway, 19). The writing style of this sentence shows Jake’s mind as scattered, with Jake flitting back and forth from one object to another without any rhyme or reason. From this sentence alone, he seems overstimulated and unfocused, as if living within a...