It’s a great recipe for disaster: A woman travels alone with four men, three of whom are in love with her. In the case of Lady Brett Ashley, the main female character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the disaster is made no smaller by her constantly finding even more men whose heads she can turn.
One of those men, the wealthy and decorated war veteran Count Mippipopolous, brings a rare breath of sanity into the delirious air among the group, but even he can’t help himself. In an attempt to get to the real Brett beneath her hardened but beautiful exterior, while once again fueling her alcoholism with more champagne, the count says: “I should like to hear you really talk, my dear. When you talk to me you never finish your sentences at all.”
All Brett’s got? More teflon for the count’s words—but not his champagne—to roll off of: “Leave ’em for you to finish. Let any one finish them as they like.” “It is a very interesting system,” the count admits. “Still I would like to hear you talk some time.” As if the count is little more than thin air, Brett asks into the room: “Isn’t he a fool?”
Having lost her original and true love in the war, Brett is now adrift at sea. She appears independent and strong, but actually, her armor only makes her weaker. She follows whichever man she finds attractive or will pay her bills. She lets his imagination paint a picture of her the real Brett could never sustain. And when the booze runs out, she simply moves on, in search of a new vessel to board on her metaphorical journey across the ocean with no port to ever arrive in.
It must have been a special kind of isolation they felt, the Lost Generation. But millennials, Gen Z, and later age groups, too, all eventually discover: Sooner or later, you’ll have to reveal yourself. It’s a risk, this vulnerability thing—but only in taking it can we avoid the much larger risk of not having lived at all.