Make-up Week Four

          The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway is a novel about the wild nightlife of Paris in the nineteen twenties.  The narrator of the novel, Jake Barnes is suffering from an unfulfilled love life with Lady Brett Ashley in the beginning of the novel which basically just follows them as they travel from club to club and cafe to cafe as they get drunk.  This novel heavily resembles The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 so the writers are writing in similar times and both are just following the first World War.  They are also both set in the 1920s and follow the crazy nightlife in the city that they are set in.  In New York Gatsby is throwing huge parties and in Paris Brett and Jake are visiting club after club with all of the other upper class members of society.          
          These to works are also similar in their character's inability to hold a stable love life.  Jake Barnes' equivalent in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway has a very shaky relationship with Jordan Baker.  Neither of them really knows whether or not they love each other and nothing really comes of the relationship throughput the book.  While Jake and Brett definitely love each other this love is not often acted upon nor is it understood and they both frequently have other relationships even while they are seeing each other.  They do not even bother to keep these relationships secret from one another leaving it open and talking about them freely.   
          The Narrators best Friends also both have ill fated or rocky relationships with women that they love, or think they love.  Gatsby and Daisy Buchannon both believe that they love each other and even go on to have an affair but in the end their relationship is not fulfilled and as soon as Daisy learns that he is a bootlegger she detests him.  At the end of the novel she doesn't attend his funeral and goes back to life with her husband as if nothing had happened leaving one to question the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby.  Robert Cohn, Jake's best Friend also has a very bad relationship in the beginning of the novel with the woman he thought he loved, Frances.  They are dependant on each other but they cant stand each other and they even go so far as to get into a fight in a cafe in the presence of Jake.
          These books have very similar qualities and not just because they are set in the same time period.  The plot is similar with all of the partying and many of the characters have similarly unsuccessful relationships.