The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and the novel immediately named something that Americans and Europeans were still trying to understand about themselves: the damage that World War I had done to a generation’s sense of purpose, pleasure, and identity. The title comes from Ecclesiastes – “The sun also rises, and the sun goes down” – and the biblical preacher’s lesson about vanity and futility runs through every chapter like a current beneath still water.

A Generation Adrift in Europe

Jake Barnes works as a journalist in Paris. He loves Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful, restless Englishwoman who moves through men the way water moves through sand – nothing holds, nothing stays. Jake cannot consummate their love because of a war wound, a fact Hemingway leaves deliberately vague but unmistakably central. Around them orbit Robert Cohn, a former Princeton boxer nursing romantic illusions; Bill Gorton, Jake’s sardonic friend; and Mike Campbell, Brett’s perpetually drunk fiance.

The novel’s first half takes place in Paris – cafes, bars, taxis, late nights, and money hemorrhaging away. The second half moves to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermin, where the running of the bulls and the bullfights provide the novel’s most vivid, purposeful action. Against the chaos of the fiesta, the characters’ aimlessness becomes more visible.

The Art of Omission

Hemingway described his method as the iceberg theory: the dignity of movement of an iceberg comes from what remains below the surface. The Sun Also Rises is his fullest execution of this principle. Characters drink rather than mourn. They make plans rather than confess. They argue about fishing trips and hotel rooms rather than admit what they want and cannot have.

The prose strips everything that looks like emotion from the surface and hides it in rhythm and repetition. When Jake lies awake in his Paris apartment unable to sleep, Hemingway gives you the physical details – the light in the square, the taxicabs, the thoughts cycling – and lets the devastation happen in what goes unsaid. This technique rewards rereading. The first time through, you follow the story. The second time, you feel the weight underneath.

Brett Ashley and the Novel’s Women

Brett Ashley is one of Hemingway’s most contested characters. She drinks heavily, moves between men without apology, and refuses to be possessed by anyone, including Jake. Some readers dismiss her as a flat object of male desire. A more careful reading reveals a woman who has also survived trauma – a husband who threatened her life, a fiance dissolving in alcohol, a war that killed the man she loved before Jake. Brett is not liberated; she is damaged and honest about it.

Her decision near the novel’s end – to send away the young bullfighter Romero rather than ruin him – shows a self-awareness that cuts against the nihilism her behavior sometimes suggests. “It’s sort of what we have instead of God,” she tells Jake. The exchange is brief and devastating, as everything between them is.

Bullfighting as Moral Theater

The bullfights in Pamplona are not decoration. Hemingway spent years studying the corrida and believed it had a moral seriousness absent from modern spectacle. Pedro Romero, the young matador, represents something the other characters cannot access: grace under genuine pressure, mastery of a craft, presence in the moment without irony or self-pity.

Jake watches Romero the way a man watches something he cannot be. Romero acts where Jake cannot. He faces danger directly where the expatriates circle it with alcohol and banter. The bullfighting chapters are among the finest Hemingway wrote, specific and exact, requiring the reader to accept on its own terms a form of violence that is also, in Hemingway’s reading, a form of art.

What “Lost” Actually Means

Gertrude Stein’s remark to Hemingway – “You are all a lost generation” – became the novel’s first epigraph, and it has shadowed readings of the book ever since. But Hemingway’s own view was more complicated. The second epigraph, from Ecclesiastes, suggests that no generation is particularly lost – the sun rises, the rivers run to the sea, one generation passes and another comes. The “loss” may be less a historical condition than a chronic human one, newly visible after the war stripped away the illusions that had concealed it.

The novel does not offer redemption. Jake tells Brett, near the end, “Isn’t it pretty to think so” – meaning: yes, they could have had a wonderful life together, and no, they cannot. It is not the most hopeful ending in literature. It is among the most honest.

A Century Later

The Sun Also Rises remains essential because its problems remain essential. The search for meaning in pleasure, the difficulty of honest communication, the gap between what people feel and what they can say – none of these have been resolved in the century since Hemingway wrote them down. The novel is short and reads fast, but it is not a quick read. The weight accumulates slowly, and it stays.

Is The Sun Also Rises autobiographical?

Heavily so. Hemingway drew on his own 1925 trip to Pamplona with friends including Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, and Pat Guthrie. Jake Barnes resembles Hemingway himself; Brett Ashley is largely based on Twysden. Several people in his circle were hurt by the portraits, particularly Loeb, who recognized himself in the unflattering Robert Cohn. Hemingway later expressed some regret about the accuracy of his caricatures.

What is Jake’s injury, exactly?

Hemingway never specifies. Jake was wounded in the war and cannot have sexual intercourse with Brett, whom he loves. The nature of the wound – whether he lost his genitals entirely or suffered a different kind of damage – is deliberately left ambiguous. The ambiguity is part of the point: Jake functions socially, professionally, even emotionally, while carrying an invisible wound that makes desire permanent and consummation impossible.

Why does Robert Cohn receive such harsh treatment?

Cohn is the novel’s outsider – the one character who still believes in romantic idealism and expects love to conform to storybook patterns. His attachment to Brett is possessive in a way the other characters find embarrassing. Hemingway’s portrait is harsh, and critics have noted an antisemitic dimension to it. Cohn’s Jewishness is mentioned repeatedly and linked to his outsider status in ways that reflect Hemingway’s own period prejudices, a real flaw in the novel’s social texture.

What is the significance of fishing in the novel?

The fishing trip to Burguete that Jake and Bill take before the fiesta is the novel’s emotional center, often overlooked. Away from Paris and Brett and the social machinery of the expatriate world, Jake is at peace for the only sustained period in the book. He catches trout, drinks cold wine, talks honestly with Bill, and sleeps well. Hemingway uses the fishing chapters to show what Jake is capable of when the circumstances allow – a happiness that is quiet, physical, and real.

How does Hemingway portray alcohol in the novel?

Alcohol is everywhere in the novel and functions in multiple ways. It lubricates sociability between people who would otherwise struggle to speak to each other. It provides the feeling of occasion and ceremony. It also, for several characters – particularly Mike Campbell – substitutes for competence, identity, and direction. Hemingway neither romanticizes nor condemns the drinking; he observes it the way he observes everything, precisely and without editorializing, and lets the reader calculate the costs.

What does the ending mean?

Jake and Brett reunite in Madrid after the fiesta collapses into disaster. Brett has sent away Romero – she says she will not be “one of those bitches who ruins children.” She tells Jake they could have had such a good time together. Jake replies: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” The line closes the novel. It is not quite despair and not quite acceptance – it is a man who loves someone he cannot have, who has learned to carry that fact without flinching. The ending is quietly devastating.

Is the novel anti-Semitic?

The treatment of Robert Cohn includes repeated references to his Jewishness that function as explanation for his social failures and romantic delusions in ways that reflect period prejudice. Scholars disagree about how intentional or self-aware this was on Hemingway’s part. What is clear is that Cohn’s Jewishness operates differently from his other characteristics – it is used as shorthand in ways that are uncomfortable by any modern standard. Readers should engage with this dimension of the text rather than look past it.

How does The Sun Also Rises compare to Hemingway’s other work?

It is generally considered his best novel alongside A Farewell to Arms, though the two books are very different in emotional register. The Sun Also Rises is cooler, more ironic, more socially observed; A Farewell to Arms is warmer and more openly romantic before turning brutal. For Whom the Bell Tolls is more politically engaged and more openly heroic. The Sun Also Rises is probably the purest expression of Hemingway’s early style – stripped down, controlled, and alive with suppressed feeling.