The Sun Also Rises

Based on Wikipedia: The Sun Also Rises

A War Wound That Cannot Be Named

Ernest Hemingway's first major novel opens with a secret that nobody in the book will say out loud. Jake Barnes, an American journalist living in Paris, suffered a wound during the First World War. The nature of that wound? Hemingway never specifies exactly, but the implication is unmistakable: Jake cannot have sex. He can feel desire. He can fall in love. But he cannot act on either.

This invisible injury becomes the engine of an entire novel about people who drink too much, love the wrong people, and wander through 1920s Europe looking for something they cannot name.

The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, made Hemingway famous. It remains in print nearly a century later. What looked like a simple story about expatriates drinking their way through Paris and Spain turned out to be something more: a portrait of an entire generation trying to figure out how to live after the catastrophe of modern warfare.

The Real People Behind the Fiction

Hemingway did not invent this story. He lived it first, then wrote it down.

The novel is what literary scholars call a roman à clef—French for "novel with a key." The characters are thinly disguised versions of real people from Hemingway's circle. The events actually happened. In the summer of 1925, Hemingway traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the Festival of San Fermín with a group of friends. They watched bullfights. They drank heavily. They fought over a woman named Lady Duff Twysden, who became the model for Brett Ashley.

Hemingway converted to Catholicism while writing the novel, and scholars have noted that Jake Barnes—who is Catholic in the story—seems to be a way for Hemingway to work through his own conversion on the page. Jake thinks about faith, struggles with it, and ultimately cannot find the comfort it might offer.

Two Epigraphs That Tell You Everything

The novel opens with two quotations that set up its central tension.

The first comes from Gertrude Stein, the American writer who presided over a famous salon in Paris: "You are all a lost generation." Stein had coined the phrase to describe young people who came of age during the war—a generation supposedly ruined by what they had witnessed, incapable of believing in the old values, adrift in a world that no longer made sense.

The second epigraph comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible:

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

This is where the novel's title originates. And Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that this second quotation was actually the point. The book was not about a generation being lost. It was about the earth abiding forever. The characters might be "battered," Hemingway said, but they were not destroyed.

This tension—between loss and endurance, between damage and survival—runs through every page.

Paris in the Roaring Twenties

To understand why so many Americans were living in Paris in the 1920s, you need to understand economics.

The exchange rate was extraordinarily favorable. An American with dollars could live like royalty in France. By some estimates, two hundred thousand English-speaking expatriates made Paris their home during this period. The city had developed an entire infrastructure to serve them: an American Hospital, an American Library, an American Chamber of Commerce.

But there was more than money drawing writers and artists across the Atlantic. America in the 1920s was not always hospitable to experimental art. Hemingway was living in Paris when Ulysses, the modernist masterpiece by his friend James Joyce, was banned and burned in New York. Europe offered freedoms that America did not.

The first section of The Sun Also Rises takes place in this Parisian milieu—the cafés, the nightclubs, the aimless social rounds of young Americans with too much time and not enough purpose. Jake plays tennis with his friend Robert Cohn. He picks up a prostitute named Georgette. He runs into Brett Ashley at a nightclub with a count who has an unpronounceable name.

Brett tells Jake she loves him. They both know it cannot work.

Brett Ashley: The New Woman

Lady Brett Ashley is one of the most discussed female characters in American literature. She was modeled on the real Lady Duff Twysden, but she became something larger: an emblem of the "New Woman" of the 1920s.

Brett has been divorced twice. She wears her hair bobbed short—a radical fashion statement at the time. She drinks with the men. She sleeps with whom she chooses. She is engaged to a Scottish man named Mike Campbell but does not let that stop her from having affairs.

Critics have argued about Brett for decades. Some see her as a villain, a destructive force who ruins men and friendships wherever she goes. The critic Leslie Fiedler called her one of Hemingway's "bitch women." Others see her as sympathetic, even tragic—a woman trying to navigate a world that offers her freedom without telling her what to do with it.

The literary scholar James Nagel argues that Hemingway created in Brett "one of the more fascinating women in twentieth-century American literature." She is complicated, elusive, impossible to pin down. Hemingway treats her, in one critic's phrase, with "a delicate balance of sympathy and antipathy."

What Brett wants is sex without love. What Jake can offer is love without sex. This mismatch is the tragedy at the heart of the novel.

Robert Cohn: The Outsider

If Brett is the woman everyone wants, Robert Cohn is the man everyone resents.

Cohn is Jewish, which the other characters never let him forget. He was a boxing champion at Princeton. He had a brief affair with Brett before the novel begins, and he cannot let it go. While the other men have learned to hide their feelings behind wit and alcohol, Cohn insists on sincerity. He writes romantic letters. He waits for Brett in Pamplona when she is late arriving. He believes that their affair meant something.

The other characters despise him for this. They taunt him with antisemitic remarks. They mock his earnestness. But Cohn is also the only character who refuses to play by the unspoken rules of the group—the rules that say you must never admit to feeling anything too strongly.

Eventually, Cohn snaps. He gets into fistfights with Jake and Mike. He beats up a young Spanish bullfighter named Romero. The violence does not redeem him; it only confirms his status as an outsider.

Pamplona: Where Things Fall Apart

The second section of the novel moves the action to Spain for the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona. If Paris represents sophistication and aimlessness, Spain represents something more vital. Hemingway loved Spain. He called it the only country in Europe that "hasn't been shot to pieces."

The festival features the famous running of the bulls—where bulls are released to run through the streets while young men race ahead of them—and daily bullfights. Hemingway was fascinated by bullfighting. He saw it not as mere brutality but as a kind of tragic art:

It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.

The Spanish word for this passion is afición. To be an aficionado—someone who truly understands and appreciates bullfighting—was rare for a non-Spaniard. In the novel, Jake has earned this status through years of dedication. It represents his connection to something authentic, something the other expatriates cannot touch.

The Matador as Hero

Into this charged atmosphere comes Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-old bullfighter of extraordinary skill. Hemingway named him after a historical figure: an eighteenth-century matador legendary for killing bulls in the most dangerous manner possible, standing perfectly still and letting the bull impale itself on his sword.

Romero is the only truly heroic figure in the novel. He faces death in the ring with grace and precision. He represents everything the expatriates are not: authentic, courageous, committed to his craft.

Naturally, Brett seduces him.

Jake facilitates the meeting, introducing Brett to Romero at the Hotel Montoya. This betrayal of his friendship with Montoya, the hotel keeper who had accepted Jake as a true aficionado, costs Jake his hard-won reputation among the Spanish. He has corrupted something pure by bringing his messy expatriate world into contact with it.

A Fishing Trip as Escape

Before the chaos of Pamplona, Hemingway gives his characters—and his readers—a respite. Jake and his friend Bill Gorton take a fishing trip to the Irati River in the Pyrenees mountains.

This interlude is one of the most peaceful passages Hemingway ever wrote. The men fish, drink wine, and talk about nothing important. The critic Harold Bloom calls it "an oasis that exists outside linear time."

The scene also connects to a deep tradition in American literature: the escape into wilderness. Think of Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi, or Thoreau retreating to Walden Pond. In American stories, nature is where men go to find themselves, away from the corruptions of civilization.

For Jake and Bill, the river offers temporary redemption. They do not need to discuss the war because, paradoxically, their shared war experience is always present between them. They can simply exist, for a few days, without the complications of Brett and Cohn and the social games of Paris.

Then they return to Pamplona, and everything falls apart.

The Iceberg Theory

How did Hemingway tell this story? His technique was revolutionary.

Hemingway developed what he called the "iceberg theory" of writing. The idea was that the dignity of movement of an iceberg comes from only one-eighth of it being above water. In fiction, this meant leaving out most of what you knew about your characters and situations. The reader would sense the depth beneath the surface without it being spelled out.

Jake's wound is never explicitly described. The characters' feelings are rarely stated directly. Instead, Hemingway shows us what people do, what they say, what they drink. The emotions must be inferred.

This spare style was a reaction against the ornate prose of the nineteenth century. Hemingway wanted to strip away everything unnecessary and leave only what was essential. The result could seem simple on first reading, even superficial. But the simplicity was deceptive. Beneath those short sentences and clipped dialogues lay a world of unspoken feeling.

What Does the Wound Mean?

Jake's injury is never precisely defined, but its symbolic meaning has been debated endlessly.

On one level, it represents the wounds of an entire generation. The men who survived the First World War came home damaged in ways that were not always visible. Shell shock—what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder—affected thousands. The old certainties about honor, duty, and meaning had been shattered along with the bodies.

Jake's wound makes him impotent and powerless—an "American hero" who cannot act on his desires. He becomes, in the critic Michael Reynolds's phrase, the "everyman" of his generation: damaged, struggling to maintain honor and faith and hope in a world that seems to offer none of these things.

And yet Jake is also the moral center of the novel. He works for a living as a journalist, which sets him apart from the idle rich who populate his social circle. Hemingway admired work. He portrayed matadors and even prostitutes sympathetically because they earned their way. Brett, who lives on inherited money while "prostituting herself" emotionally, represents the decadence that Jake quietly judges.

Alcohol and Oblivion

The characters in The Sun Also Rises drink constantly. They drink wine with every meal. They drink whiskey at night. They drink to celebrate, to forget, to fill the empty hours. The critic Matts Djos has argued that the main characters exhibit classic signs of alcoholism: depression, anxiety, self-pity, out-of-control behavior.

Jake, in particular, seems to use alcohol to avoid his feelings for Brett. In the final scenes, set in Madrid after the festival has ended, he has three martinis before lunch and three bottles of wine with lunch. The drinking is not celebratory. It is medicinal.

Hemingway himself would struggle with alcohol throughout his life. Whether he recognized what he was depicting in his characters—or whether the drinking simply reflected the social norms of his circle—remains an open question.

The Ending That Explains Nothing

After the fiesta ends in disaster, the characters scatter. Bill goes back to Paris. Mike stays in Bayonne. Jake retreats to San Sebastián on the Spanish coast, trying to recover some peace.

Then a telegram arrives from Brett. She has gone to Madrid with Romero, but something has gone wrong. She needs help.

Jake goes to her. He finds her in a cheap hotel, without money, without Romero. The young matador has left—or she has sent him away. She announces that she is going back to Mike, her fiancé.

The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi. Brett says that she and Jake could have had a wonderful time together. Jake replies with one of the most famous closing lines in American literature:

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

The line can be read as bitter, as wistful, as resigned. It refuses to provide closure. Whatever Jake and Brett might have been to each other, whatever happiness might have been possible, remains in the realm of speculation. The taxi drives on. The sun rises, and the sun sets, and the earth abides.

Why It Still Matters

When The Sun Also Rises was first published, reviews were mixed. Some critics found it nihilistic, a portrait of dissolute people doing dissolute things. Others recognized something new in Hemingway's spare prose and understated emotion.

Time has been kind to the novel. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers calls it "Hemingway's greatest work." Scholar Linda Wagner-Martin considers it his most important novel. It has never gone out of print.

What makes it endure? Perhaps it is the honesty about damage—the acknowledgment that some wounds do not heal, that some generations are shaped by catastrophes beyond their control, that love is not always enough. Perhaps it is the style, those clean sentences that seem to say so little while implying so much.

Or perhaps it is the tension in those two epigraphs: the lost generation and the abiding earth. We are damaged, the novel seems to say. But we go on. The sun rises. We order another drink. We take a taxi across a city we may never understand. We think about what might have been, knowing it is pretty to think so, knowing it changes nothing.

Hemingway's Conversion and the Question of Faith

One detail often overlooked: Hemingway was converting to Catholicism as he wrote this novel. Jake Barnes is Catholic—he visits churches, he thinks about prayer, he struggles with what faith means when the world seems meaningless.

Scholar Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera has suggested that Jake was "a vehicle for Hemingway to rehearse his own conversion, testing the emotions that would accompany one of the most important acts of his life." The novel becomes, in this reading, not just a portrait of lost faith but a search for new faith—or at least a questioning of what faith might look like after everything has been destroyed.

Jake does not find easy answers. Neither did Hemingway. But the questioning itself, the refusal to accept either cynicism or false comfort, gives the novel its moral seriousness. These are not merely bored expatriates getting drunk in Europe. They are human beings trying to figure out how to live.

The Earth Abides

Nearly a hundred years after its publication, The Sun Also Rises continues to find readers. The specifics have changed—we no longer worry about shell shock from the trenches of the Western Front, and Pamplona's running of the bulls is now a tourist attraction rather than an authentic local tradition. But the questions remain.

How do we live after catastrophe? What do we owe each other? What does it mean to be authentic in a world full of poses and pretensions? How do we love when love seems impossible?

Hemingway did not answer these questions. He was too honest for that. But he asked them in prose so clear and spare that readers are still grappling with them today.

The sun also rises. The sun also sets. And somewhere, in a taxi crossing a foreign city, two people who cannot be together wonder what might have been.