The main character is Jake Barnes, whose balls were cut off. To cope with the loss, he moves off to Europe. France. (By the way, living in France is the only real symbolic connection to impotency)
Bonjour.
Prostituting himself to French society, Jake tries to "fill the void" with excessive drinking (Note picture above), aimless drifting, impotent sinfulness, hintfully homosexual admiration of other male characters, and profligate jollification with random girls - of course not that kind of jollification.
Today, Mr. Carman divided us into groups of 6. Wouldn't you know it. My group was assigned the "male imagery" category. Some kind of phallic spirit possessed Paul within minutes. He entered a nervous state of pointing randomly into the book and giggling incessantly. The mention of a couple hard-boiled eggs brought poor Paul half to tears.
You know what I don't understand? Authors and their obsession with penis. I mean can't you cocks find something a tad more appealing than penis? Aside from being the most valued possession in any straight man's life, there's nothing much more complicated and symbolic to a penis. It's a very simple object, really. Anyway, I took the liberty of looking through one of those analytical summaries online and it took a couple minutes to find a reference to phallic symbols in the book. This particular fragment is from Cliffnotes:
"Note the phallic references that make brutal fun of Jake's condition. At the start of the chapter, he and Brett travel "up . . . then levelled [sic] out" and finally "went smoothly down," immediately after which Jake tries to kiss Brett and she recoils. A few pages later, they sit in the cab "like two strangers" while passing by a pool of live trout (a phallic fish), which is closed and dark. "I've never let you down, have I?" Brett inquires of Jake later. Even the novel's title and the biblical passage to which it alludes participate in the book's black humor: You may not "rise," the title taunts Jake, but at least the sun does."
Regarding a trout as a phallic fish troubled me a bit. I looked up "trout" on google images to see if there were any "resemblances." Unable to find any immediately discernible connections, I looked up "trout penis". This horrifying image appeared on my screen:
resemblance: The ruffle of water at the base, the body, then the well-defined head. A very nice erect fish. Then I noticed the strange object portruding from the tip.
"What the hell is that?" I wondered. "A tongue?"
I realized that it was a hook. That actually disturbed me a bit. Now, I am troubled as to whether or not the artist of this image had these intentions. As you can see, I've diverged hopelessly from my initial objective of discussing the unwarrantedly excessive use of phallic symbols in literature, to suggestive depictions of trout. Well anyway the length of this post has also extended well beyond the "bored" line.
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