English 015 - Americans Abroad
Repetition
Repetition
Category: 2E: Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald | Matt Nickel
Repetition leads to stability and instability among Americans abroad. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises the constant drinking, the frequent trips and false friendship all promote instability among the characters. However, in Fitzgerald’s short story, “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie’s one drink a day, repeated attempts at ignoring past friendships, and his goal of gaining back his daughter lead to a new and stable lifestyle, opposite of the one he lived three years before. Charlie has the strength to renounce alcohol and his past ways in order to stabilize his life while Jake and his friends are caught in a cycle of repetition. In Hemingway’s novel repetition leads to instability among the characters but in Fitzgerald’s story, there is healthy repetition and this allows Charlie to create a stable lifestyle for himself.
In The Sun Also Rises, the main character Jake Barnes and his close friends Robert Cohn, Bill Gorton, and Lady Brett Ashley drink excessively. A majority of Hemingway’s novel is filled with nights where these characters visit clubs and get drunk. In Spain, the characters travel to Pamplona to witness the week long fiesta, “We stood at the counter. They (the Spaniards Jake and Brett had met in a bar) had Brett seated on a wine-cask. I put down money for the wine…” (page 159). By frequenting nightclubs and by repeatedly being drunk, they create instability in their lives. This instability is caused by the constant repetition as they are caught in a cycle of drunkenness in their search for excitement from bar to bar. They believe they can find this excitement by partying and yet never seem to find any new thrills. Once they have visited the popular nightclubs in Paris, they grow bored of the Parisian night life and travel to other cities in search of excitement and pleasure only furthering the instability in their lives.
Traveling around Europe only promotes instability in their lives. All of the characters except Bill Gorton are disenchanted with America and have moved to Europe. Jake mentions casually that he had, “…heard Frances had left for England and (he) had a note from Cohn saying he was going out in the country for a couple of weeks…” (page 75). This constant cycle of traveling in an effort to find excitement becomes unstable for the characters. Roaming around Europe becomes repetitive to them and their constant wandering negatively affects their friendships.
Jake and his friends are constantly masking their true feelings from each other and creating false friendships with those that they meet. Jake and the other characters start out as friends with Robert Cohn but by the end of the novel, they are enemies. Mike, Brett’s fiancé asks Cohn:
“Tell me, Robert. Why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody
steer? Don’t you know you’re not wanted? I know when I’m not wanted.
Why don’t you know when you’re not wanted? You came down to San
Sebastian where you weren’t wanted, and followed Brett around like a
bloody steer” (page 146).
Everyone had talked among themselves about their dislike for Cohn but none of his friends were willing to tell him he was not wanted. Jake never shows any deep regard for his friends or others he meets. In Spain he meets an Englishman named Harris only to never see him again (pages 134-135). These friends conceal their true feelings from each other and are rarely honest or straightforward as Mike. Jake is stuck in this repetitive cycle of false friendships as he hides his true feelings from his closest friends. Jake is unable and unwilling to express his feelings to anybody and this is the reason why his friendships fall apart.
The negative repetition in The Sun Also Rises promotes insecurity in the lives of all the characters with drinking, frequent trips and fake friendships but Charlie in “Babylon Revisited,” uses repetition to his advantage to create a life without alcohol. This positive repetition gives him the stability in his life that he needs to raise Honoria, his daughter.
Helpful repetition plays a key role in creating a stable life for Charlie. He yearns for a stable and calm life so he can bring his daughter back into his life. Charlie believes that by having only one drink a day he will be reminded of his alcoholic past and it will stop him from further abusing alcohol. “As I told you, I haven’t had more than a drink a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination” (page 393). This daily ritual allows Charlie to sober up and realize that Honoria is all that he has left and that she is the most important thing in his life.
Charlie also makes repeated attempts at ignoring his past friendships. He does not want to fall back upon his past bad habits of being a free spender, frequenting night clubs, and drinking excessively. Charlie used to attend plenty of “…champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight” (p.389). He realizes that his past friends were a negative influence on him and were one of several reasons why he drank excessively. He wants to move on and disregard his past. He makes repeated attempts at trying to ignore his Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrels, two ghosts from three years before. When these three characters meet by chance at a restaurant one night, Duncan asks, “What’s your address? / He (Charlie) hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel. “I’m not settled yet. I’d better call you. We’re going to see the vaudeville at the Empire” (page 391). Charlie is reluctant to rekindle past friendships and jeopardize raising his daughter.
Charlie’s repetition is to aim for one major goal: to prove that he is capable of raising Honoria in a stable environment. He makes several repeated attempts at trying to regain the respect of Honoria’s foster parents, Marion and Lincoln. Charlie tells them:
“I’m awfully anxious to have a home, and I’m awfully anxious to have
Honoria in it. I appreciate your taking Honoria in for her mother’s sake,
but things have changed now-changed radically with me and I want to
ask you to reconsider the matter” (page 393).
Charlie continually shows up and does his best to convince his sister-in-law and her husband that he is suited to care for Honoria. These regular visits demonstrate how much Charlie cares about his daughter and how much it means to him to lead a stable life in order to gain Honoria back.
In each novel, repetition plays a different key role. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both incorporated repetition into their stories but it is amazing how they use them in different contexts. Americans abroad generally seemed to drink excessively, travel, and have friendships fall apart but only in Fitzgerald’s story do we see Charlie trying to correct and make up for his past mistakes. Charlie has an inner strength and a will that allow him to realize his errors and set about correcting them. The reader may wonder why Jake and his friends have not realized that their repetitive nature only leads to more alcohol and instability. The reader realizes that depending on the situation, repetition can help a person realize what is important in life or harmful repetition can trap someone in a cycle of instability.
Posted by on October 30, 2003 at 01:50 PM