Time Period in The Sun Also Rises

     Woah, it's the last post of the quarter. For this one I'm gonna tone down the seriousness and talk about time period. So, reading this book I've noticed a couple of weird details that have done an effective job at completely disorienting me. I know the book itself was made in 1926, but as for the setting of the story, I'm at a loss. I'll try my best to explain what I mean. So on the opening page, Jake introduces Cohn by letting us know that he was the middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. Now, this is totally baseless and I'm aware of that, but when I hear things like "middleweight boxing" and "Princeton" my brain automatically thinks of a relatively modern setting. I'm not very good with History (as you'll come to know better and better the more you read), but my weakest of weak points is reasoning when certain things were invented. To me, something like a middleweight category in boxing seems like something that wouldn't have been developed 100 years ago. If someone asked me to draw my mental image of boxing in the 1920s I'd probably draw a big, bald, muscular, comically mustached man wearing something like a speedo with suspenders. This monster of a man would probably be fighting an equally cartoonish muscleman or a really skinny guy with a spectacle. I can't imagine people paying enough attention to the well being of their fighters to create different sections to keep things safe/fair. 

    I don't know if that made sense at all, and I don't know if anyone's still reading this, but I'll get into my next example. So the club or bar that Jake and his companions go to. The first time we're at this bar, Brett comes in with a bunch of gay men, and this angers Jake. I understand this as Jake just being homophobic. Now, I don't know my time periods very well, but considering how 1: women only got the right to vote (in America) 6 years prior to this book's publication, and 2: the civil rights movement (in America) hasn't happened for another 30 years, I would assume that society as a whole would not be very accepting of this crowd of gay guys. Then again, maybe America just sucks that much more than other countries. If someone asked me what I thought would happen if 6 gay men tried to get into a bar in 1926, I'd describe something along the lines of acts of homophobic violence, them getting turned away, or people not realizing that they're gay at all. Thankfully none of this happens in the book, but it wasn't too expected considering that LGBTQ+ people still face a lot of discrimination 100 years later. Outside of that, later on in the book, Jake points out that there's a "n*****" drummer playing in the band. Once again I process this as Jake being a piece of shit. Although as I said, in 1926 the civil rights movement had not yet happened, so this kind of description is (unfortunately) not out of the ordinary. However, the fact that the black guy is 1: in a band of white people, 2: in a bar full of white people, and 3: friends with Brett does surprise me. She's an upper class white woman, and he's still being called the n-word casually. One might assume a racist asshole such as Jake would perhaps ostracize a woman who would engage in such a friendship. Then again, she's got him totally wrapped around her finger so I don't think he'll be looking to end things any time soon. Also, I wouldn't have guessed that drum sets were around in 1926.

    Other things that confuse me are the ways people still have the titles count and lady (which mean nothing to me), the fact that one guy had arrow wounds from war, and the cab guy in one of the more recent chapters cracking a whip. Do horse drawn carriages and cars exist side by side? Did Hemingway call cars "whips" like we do now? I couldn't tell you. Anyway, if you read this absolute mess of a post, I hope you enjoyed it at least a little bit (and maybe even had a laugh at my ignorance?). But yea thanks for reading, I'll see you next quarter.