Topics for Further Study
Last Updated August 24, 2024.
- After conducting research on bullfighting and the associated festival, discuss the novel in light of your findings. Evaluate whether the British title Fiesta is more or less fitting. Is bullfighting central to the novel? Support your argument by analyzing each character’s response to the event.
- Reflect on the role of the matador in the novel. What does it mean to be a hero in a world disillusioned by war? Would you agree with cultural anthropologist Joseph Campbell, who argues for the importance of rejuvenating masculine heroic rituals to reconnect people into a “coordinated soul”? He states in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.” Do you think Hemingway had this concept in mind when writing?
- Compare The Sun Also Rises with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. How does the representative of the “lost generation” compare with that of the “beat generation”?
- Considering the agrarian conditions in the Dust Bowl during the early 20th century, what arguments can be made for linking the “greats” of the “lost generation” to their birth regions? Except for Ezra Pound (Idaho), they all hail from the Midwest—F. Scott Fitzgerald (MN), Ernest Hemingway (IL), Sherwood Anderson (OH), Sinclair Lewis (MN), and T. S. Eliot (MO).
- Would Hemingway, or any character in his novel, support a female matador? Provide evidence from the novel or from other Hemingway works to back up your assertion.
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