Dec 16, 2009

The Garden of Eden | Characters

The central characters are the ill-fated newlyweds, Catherine and David Bourne. As with other star-crossed lovers in Hemingway's fiction, their love, which begins as a romantic idyll, is destroyed by the end of the book. It is very much to the point of character analysis, however, to see that this love relationship is shattered, not by war, biological fate, or any external agent (as is often the case in Hemingway's fiction) but by the very flaws in the characters themselves. Catherine, driven by a kind of rage for change, insists upon sexual role reversals and inversions. The question of...