Why I Don't Like The Sun Also Rises

Now as you might have guessed from the title I am not a big fan of The Sun Also Rises, it is kind of boring and is the first book this year to have actually made me fall asleep while reading it. I think the main reason I don't like it is that nothing important is happening. In Mrs. Dalloway we were building up to something, and in the Mezzanine we got to see how the main character sees the world. In The Sun Also Rises we are just following Jake as  he goes about his day drinking and talking with his friends, people who usually only get a couple of sentences of introduction. The only people we really get to know are Jake, Brett, and Cohn and most of the time we are only watching Jake and his other friends, who we barely know. Then there is the fact that pretty much the entire book so far (Chapter 10) is just short back and forth dialogue. And the dialogue all consists of pretty meaningless things, sometimes its a joke and they say something contradictory immediately after but it is extremely difficult to notice when this is happening, as they don't mention how something is said. It just isn't interesting to read, the most interesting part of this book is when Jake describes the other characters, but most of the time when it isn't dialogue all we get is where people are going and what the area around them is like which can be important but really it isn't as important as the characters in a book like this. I significantly preferred the Mezzanine because while it was boring we got a really interesting view of the world of the character's POV, which we don't get in The Sun Also Rises.

The Changed Ending of Mrs. Dalloway

 Now as we all should know at this point Virginia Wolfe changed the ending of Mrs. Dalloway from Dalloway herself committing suicide to the entire Septimus storyline and the party going on relatively well. Although I believe that the story would've been better if it ended with Mrs. Dalloway committing suicide compared to Septimus. To begin with Septimus doesn't really affect the story of Mrs. Dalloway, his suicide slightly ruins her party but not really, and he barely interacts with any of the characters that the story focuses on, at the most existing close to them. His story is interesting, don't get me wrong, but it feels slightly out of place because it doesn't give us any perspective on Mrs. Dalloway, unlike basically everything else in the story. I think it would have been better if she had removed the Septimus storyline and instead added another character that interacted with Mrs. Dalloway, or maybe a character who is about to meet Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, all of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, at least the ones the narrator focuses on, have known Mrs. Dalloway for a long time, usually since their childhoods, and it would be extremely interesting to see what she is like to someone who has never met her before. Or even see what they think she is like compared to any preconceived notions of her they might have gotten from people who did know her. It would definitely be more interesting then Septimus who doesn't give us any info on Mrs. Dalloway, even though that's the entire reason the book exists. I also think it would've been a very interesting scene seeing how everyone reacts to Mrs. Dalloway committing suicide, Peter Walsh, Robert Dalloway, and Sally Seton would have very extreme reactions most likely and I would've loved to see how that would play out. Ending with the party Mrs. Dalloway throws, while being the natural end, is not very interesting and it would've been great for something more stunning to happen. Something to make the characters react in new and different ways, and I think Mrs. Dalloway committing suicide would definitely do that.