Because of his impotence, Jake’s sense of masculinity is unsurprisingly set in doubt, yet he also has other reasons to question his masculinity. The narrator of the story, Jake Barnes, is a war veteran rendered impotent from an unspecified war injury. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, the idea of what it means to be masculine and feminine, amidst the post World War I Roaring Twenties, is critically and dramatically called into question. Stereotypically, a man is, above all else, sexually driven always attempting to persuade a beautiful woman to accompany him behind closed doors. Even more importantly is a man’s sense of sexual mastery. Men are expected to delight in these things, idealizing manly events in order to increase their own sense of masculinity. Fishing, bullfighting, and war all emphasise masculine qualities. Understanding cliched ideas of masculinity is fairly simple, but the process of challenging these stereotypes by defining new ideas of what it means to be masculine is exceptionally difficult. Masculinity in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”
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