Bulls aren't the only ones who fight

Aficionado: Hemingway with the bulls

As anti-bullfighting as I am, I found Hemingway’s fascination with the sport entirely intriguing. Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure details the influence bullfighting had during Hemingway’s lifetime. In 1923 Hemingway went to Pamplona to witness his first bullfight, and continually returned to compete in amateur bullfighting competitions and conduct research for his manifesto on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. No one can say exactly why Hemingway was so attracted to the sport, but bullfighting became a instrument he incorporated in his novel to express different occurrences of verbal violence between characters in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway parallels bullfighting events with demoralizing episodes between Jake and his friends. At the beginning of the fiesta, the first bullfighting scene in which the bull kills the steer prefigures Mike’s attack on Cohn and Brett's devaluation of Cohn and his values. The violent passion of the bullfight expresses the underlying forceful anger of Mike and Brett’s verbal outburst toward Cohn. The destructivity of the grotesque sport Hemingway writes about emphasis the level of abuse Cohn endures.

Bullfighting evolves to not only symbolism petty quarrels, but also to argue the destructivity of sexual conquest. Hemingway’s description of Bullfighting incorporates first, a kind of flirtation, next a passionate, intimate intermingling: “Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape . . . were all one sharply etched mass. It was all so slow and so controlled. It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep.” If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was talking about a sexual act. Jake and Cohn are two examples where Hemingway characterizes the men as steers and the other central characters in the novel, mainly Brett, resemble bulls. Brett embodies the certain bull who killed a man when she devastates the unfortunate Cohn by rejecting him completely. Incorporating a personal passion for bullfighting into his novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway emphasizes the depth of passion in the relationships between men and woman in his novel.