Grace Under Pressure: What Constitutes a Hero in The Sun Also Rises Destiny Salter 12th Grade

In the despairing modernist world in which Ernest Hemingway’s characters exist, Romantic conventions are incompatible with the demoralized state of the world. Therefore, traditional ideals such as the “true hero” must be radically redefined in order to apply to his characters. The criteria for a hero in a modernist society consists of particular characteristics, as explained by Harry E. Hand in his essay, Transducers and Hemingway’s Heroes: “The Hemingway code, lived and acted but never verbalized by the hero, suggests the following concepts: love for a woman, honor…determination …resignation but not personal defeat…individual freedom from the demands of society”. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a hero is one who is able to recognize and accept the cynical state of the world without letting that realization affect one’s dignity or strength of spirit. By these measures, it is worth contending that the matador Pedro Romero is the closest the novel comes to depicting a hero.

The concept of possessing “grace under pressure” truly defines the Hemingway hero (Hand 871). A person who can be considered heroic is one who does not fight against the hopelessness and mundanity of the world, but instead allows his circumstances to...