The Hemingway Hero Prevalent among many of Ernest Hemingway's novels is the concept popularly known as the "Hemingway hero", an ideal character readily accepted by American readers as a "man's man". In The Sun Also Rises, four different men are compared and contrasted as they engage in some form of relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, a near-nymphomaniac Englishwoman who indulges in her passion for sex and control. Brett plans to marry her fiancee for superficial …showed first 75 words of 2543 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2543 total…impotence, Jake's true weakness is the impotence of his will and the supposed hero of the novel is flawed due to his failure to adhere to what he believes is right and wrong. Hemingway thus refrains from presenting a true hero in his novel. With the absence of a leading male ideal, Hemingway betrays the larger socio-cultural assumptions about men and masculinity and questions the conventional means in which they are defined in his society.