She cannot look away from the bullfight because she does not fear death - she may, in fact, be attracted to it. Jake compares Brett to a whore now and again, but Hemingway clearly understands that her behavior is not immoral it is amoral. Not only is Brett not a Catholic like Jake, or even a Christian she is a kind of pagan whose value system lies outside the church, literally - and the peasants recognize this. Note that Brett is barred from the church (ostensibly because she is bare-headed), and yet on the street and in the wine shop she herself is quite literally worshipped as a goddess. The writer's characterization of Brett continues in Chapter XV, where it is intertwined with the theme of inside/outside. And yet the effect is not dull, but rather hypnotic, as Hemingway's teacher Gertrude Stein understood. There are two instances of the words consequences, happened, and feeling, as well as the phrase for seven days. The word fiesta appears five times in this paragraph. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days." It was the same feeling about any action. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as thought nothing could have any consequences. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. But the expatriates of the 1920s were foreigners in their own homelands, as well.
As Bill says to Cohn, "We are the foreigners" - meaning that they are foreigners in Spain. The café on the morning of the fiesta is "like a battleship stripped for action." Rockets are fired to mark the start of the celebration, and a "ball of smoke hung in the sky like a shrapnel burst." The war and its futility explain the presence of Jake, Bill, Brett, and Mike on the European continent (where the fighting occurred) rather than their own countries, where they feel like strangers amongst those who did not fight.
Indeed, their status as veterans explains their aimlessness - not to mention their reliance on alcohol to get them through each day. We are reminded by the imagery in this chapter that, other than Cohn, all the novel's major characters participated in the Great War. As life goes on, however, one learns that the existence of such transactions is illusory. At first, equal exchanges are possible, he says - or at least they seem to be. Late in the fiesta it would not matter what they paid, nor what they bought." Hemingway is working metaphorically here, with the fiesta standing in for life itself. "They got their money's worth in the wine shops," Jake says of the peasants who come to Pamplona for the fiesta. (Brett, by contrast, did not flinch.) The next day, Romero performs admirably in the ring, and Brett cannot help talking about her attraction to him. Mike ribs Cohn for being upset by the goring of the horses. That afternoon, Jake meets the nineteen-year-old matador Pedro Romero, after which Jake, Bill, Cohn, Mike and Brett attend a bullfight. Locked out of his own room, Jake sleeps on one of the beds in Cohn's while the rest of the group stays out all night and then attends the running of the bulls from the corrals to the bullring, through the streets of Pamplona. Musicians and dancers fill the streets - and even some of the shops, like the wine store, where Brett is placed on a cask so the Basque peasants can dance around her as if she is an idol. The fiesta of San Fermin, which will last for seven days, begins at noon on a Sunday.
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