A Novel Without a Hero: Trailer

“Maybe a story is better without any hero,” scrawled Ernest Hemingway in an early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. He was well into a story in which his narrator, his omnipresent point of view, was a man who was made sexually dysfunctional from a war wound; at this point heroism, though it might have been difficult, still could have been reached by circumvention. But a line of thought had been running through Hemingway’s head and was already woven into the novel, and perhaps he already had in mind the epigraph to this thread: an opening passage from the book of Ecclesiastes... 

          "Listen, Jake. . . Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is

     going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve

     lived nearly half the time you have to live already?" 

          "Yes, every once in a while."
          "Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?"
          "What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell?”
          "I’m serious."
          ”It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.
          "You ought to."
          "I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or another. I’m through 

     worrying."

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