Hemingway marks the complex and intense bullfights as in the novel Romero “became one with the bull” and “each pass as it reached the summit gave you a sudden ache inside” (Hemingway 220). The intensity of the bullfights represented in the novel both contrast to and enhance to “pointless romances” of the characters (Bouchard 60). Despite the temporary aspects of the corrida, it allows Hemingway a source to intensify relationships and signify the intricacy.
The character of Pedro Romero is a prime example of the idealized figure; Hemingway creates the role of a torero to be “the moral or spiritual axis of the novel” (Josephs 97). Romero is “patterned after the contemporary Nino de Palma and named for a great eighteenth-century matador” (Wagner-Martin 128). The Romero family was an eighteenth-century dynasty of…show more content… Furthermore, Goya painted a portrait of Romero, and depicted him with “assured grace, the understated elegance, the paradoxical delicacy of the prominently displayed right hand that dispatched 5,600 bulls in his long and unmarred career” (Josephs 96). Hemingway’s basis for the character and the character’s admirable qualities create the image of the torero as a hero. In the novel, Jake expresses to Robert Cohn the greatness of toreros with the following: “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters” (Hemingway 10). As stated before, Hemingway viewed toreros as artists, he and his characters viewed them as heroes, and he respected their art in the face of “the ultimate reality – death” (Wagner-Martin 129). As for the character of Pedro Romero, he is truly a man of high moral standing who often saves others from ruin. An example of Romero’s place above others is present when he and Robert Cohn get into a brawl over Brett. Despite Cohn’s physical victory, Romero morally comes out on top. Likewise, the first fight