at he will donate $1,000 to any charity…for the pleasure of Mr. Eastman’s company in a locked room with all legal rights waved.
             Hemingway’s penchant for adventure, belief in honor, and outward male pride often manifested themselves in well-publicized scandals such as his 1937 rumble with Max Eastman. Some of his stories, like surviving on bananas and rum in the African jungle after suffering two plane crashes, have integrated themselves into American folklore. The author seemed to live the romantic, wild lifestyle his novels reported. And Hemingway did lead an exciting life—hunting in Africa, fishing off Cuba, battling in Spain, and drinking in France. However, Hemingway killed himself in July of 1961, so he obviously found shortcomings in the commingling of fiction and reality that he created.
             Consequently, a reading of The Sun Also Rises that examines the failures of its male characters as a study of qualities men ought to have inevitably proves anemic—all of them suffer from flaws the author purposely highlights. Hemingway cannot deny the importance and existence of heroic acts even within a novel containing no complete hero. Rather, the defects of the men with whom Lady Brett cultivates relationships throughout the book represent the obstacles that all men must overcome as the necessary action of heroism. His story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” follows the full cycle of this process, from the emasculation of its protagonist when his wife witnesses his flight from a lion on safari, to his murder as a result of conquering his fear. Noticeably, though, the heroic completion of Francis Macomber who grows, “‘awfully brave, awfully suddenly’” immediately precedes the death he suffers not in the fangs of his previous adversary but at the hands of his wife, society’s representative on that plot of savannah.
             Jake Barnes, the narrator in Th...