Jake's Aimlessness and Lack of Character Development

    As we follow Jake Barnes through The Sun Also Rises, it becomes increasingly apparent that he never quite has his life on track. He constantly struggles with feelings of love, personal insecurity, and a general lack of tranquility. The reader can see this through specific scenes and general trends in the book. For example, Hemingway gives us a closer look at Jake's state of mind when he suddenly breaks down crying in his bedroom one night after putting off sitting alone with his thoughts. However, other factors, like the desultory manner in which he follows his peers through Spain, also contribute to the general aimlessness that attributes to his character. 

    

He is thirty-four during the book's main events, but it still seems like he is caught in a postwar period where he has no clear idea of what to do with his life and still has intense internal turmoils that he needs to address outright. His narration style clearly favors indirectness and subtlety over directness, which can be seen through his talks about his injury. Most of his pent-up emotion gets spent acting moody and lashing out at others around him (especially Robert Cohn). 

His injury can easily be blamed for the cause of a lot of his emotional problems. Moreso, the lack of confidence it causes for him. He cannot appease Lady Brett Ashley, who is stuck in a tragic relationship where both are lovers but cannot make love. He knows he can never have the woman he wants and feels helpless about it. Instead, he has to watch her wander around other men, falling in and out of love and making marriage plans. Brett has a spontaneous love life, while Jake is stuck trying to push his mind away from her. The halfhearted desire he maintains for her throughout the book also affects his sense of masculinity. Part of his violent relationship with Cohn stems from these feelings, as Cohn frequently shows interest in Brett. Though Cohn is an easy person for Jake to take his anger off all the men that spend time with Brett, he also symbolizes Jake's sense of stagnance. Jake and Cohn were good friends before the war, but during the actual book, Jake constantly acts annoyed while Cohn tries to maintain the friendship. The men have a broken friendship, but Jake never entirely drops it. This fact further symbolizes how Jake never moves on with his life, while Cohn still has goals, aspirations, and autonomy over his life. 

The book also makes a physical metaphor for Jake's aimlessness. When Brett tells him she is leaving for Spain, instead of rooting down in Paris to move on with life, he joins another veteran named Bill Gorton to travel to "go fishing" in Spain. He then meets Cohn there, and they together continue to travel. Jake eventually meets Brett as well and once again moves from one place to the other. 

One of Jake's outright stagnating characteristics that Hemingway tries to push on the reader is his alcoholism. He engages in a lifestyle that lacks fulfillment: much of his week consists of getting drunk in Paris, and many of his travels in Spain also involve getting drunk. His friendships with others center more around alcohol than an actual affinity toward one another. Alcohol, while temporarily distracting Jake from his problems, only plunges him deeper into the hole of his emotional deficiencies. We can see how alcohol only perpetuates problems when Mike Campbell, the person Brett plans to marry before getting for Romero, becomes violent and ends up in a physical altercation with Cohn towards the end of the book. 

Jake only hints at realizing he is trapped in a cycle at the end. Brett has broken up with Romero and now wants to return to Mike, and Jake accompanies her through Madrid. She tells Jake about all the missed opportunities they could have had together, and he simply responds with a dry, sarcastic line, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?"