Sun Also Rises And Dog Sees God: A Literary Analysis

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The Sun Also Rises and Dog Sees God can both be looked at in a queer lens and a deconstructive lens. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake and his friends both try to embody ultimate masculinity and seem to judge other men who don’t. Yet, in the novel they contradict themselves multiple times. In Dog Sees God, there is an explicit queer relationship where both partners don’t know how to define themselves and the people around them judge them. Deconstructive and Queer criticism can be applied to The Sun Also Rises and Dog Sees God because masculinity and heterosexuality is fought to be realized and embodied by the men and women in both texts but in both situations characters contradict themselves with their actions and words. In The Sun Also Rises, the main focus is on the binary oppositions between heterosexuality/homosexuality and masculine/feminine. Tyson writes, “we tend to conceptualize our experience in polar opposites, called binary oppositions” (Tyson, 254) and this is how most of the …show more content…
Originally, CB was against homosexuality and would belittle Beethoven about it but eventually he went back on his words and kissed Beethoven. CB and Beethoven both don’t fit into the binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality because both of them refuse to put themselves in a category. They both realize that sexualiy is a lot more fluid than that and won’t put themselves into boxes. The other characters don’t seem to agree with that. Tyson writes, “heterosexists shouldn’t be allowed to define gay and lesbian experience” (Tyson, 334) and that is exactly what some of the characters do in this play. Multiple characters have pressured CB into admitting that he was gay and even CB himself thought Beethoven was gay until Beethoven told CB that he didn’t know. A lot of the characters feel like they have to force everyone into these binaries and CB and Beethoven know that is not how the world