The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway was twenty-six when he wrote The Sun Also Rises and twenty-seven when it was published in 1926. He had been working as a journalist in Paris, had attended the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, had been observing — with the trained attention of a reporter and the emotional investment of a participant — a particular group of Americans and English expatriates trying to live in the aftermath of the First World War. He took those observations and produced a novel that defined a generation's self-image and established a prose style that is still being imitated a century later.

The iceberg theory — Hemingway formulated it explicitly in Death in the Afternoon (1932) — holds that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer, knowing the full emotional content, can leave the other seven-eighths below the surface; the reader will feel it there. The Sun Also Rises is the first full-scale application of this principle: a novel in which almost nothing important is stated directly, where everything significant happens in the gaps between dialogue lines and the specific choices made about what to describe and what to omit.

Jake Barnes is a World War I veteran whose wound — almost certainly genital, never stated explicitly — has made a conventional romantic life impossible. He loves Brett Ashley; she loves him in whatever way she is capable of loving anyone; the relationship cannot be completed. Around them, the other expatriates — Robert Cohn, Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell — drink, argue, travel, and watch bullfights. The Festival of San Fermín is the novel's center of gravity: an ancient ritual of life and death and grace under pressure that serves as the measuring rod for everyone who witnesses it.

Jake Barnes — the narrator and moral center, a man who has been damaged by the war in the most intimate possible way and who carries that damage without complaint or explanation. His narration is the iceberg: flat, observational, careful. What Jake feels is audible in what he chooses to describe and how he describes it. His wound is never stated; the reader feels it in every sentence.

Brett Ashley — the novel's most debated character: a woman of genuine charisma and deep damage who drinks hard, loves several men imperfectly, and cannot be contained by any of the available categories for women in 1926 (wife, mistress, romantic ideal). She is not a villain; she is someone who has also survived the war and found no stable ground afterward. Her relationship with the matador Romero is the novel's most complex transaction.

Robert Cohn — the outsider who makes the insiders visible by his exclusion. He is the only major character who didn't fight in the war; he is also the only one who still believes in romantic love as the Victorian novel describes it. The contempt the others show him is partly snobbery and partly the contempt of the damaged for the undamaged. Mann takes his side more often than the novel explicitly acknowledges.

Pedro Romero — the young bullfighter, twenty years old, who performs with absolute grace and without performing. He is everything the expatriates aren't: young, certain of his vocation, living entirely in the present. His scenes in the ring are the novel's clearest expressions of what Hemingway means by grace under pressure.

No. 1 · The fishing trip. Jake and Bill Gorton leave Paris for several days of fly-fishing in the Basque country before joining the others in Pamplona. These chapters are the only ones in which the novel's pressure releases: the fishing is good, the wine is cold, and the conversation between the two men is as close to happy as anyone in the novel gets. The contrast with what follows — and with what these men cannot say to each other — is the point. Hemingway makes his best case for the restorative power of the natural world here, and makes it indirectly.

No. 2 · The bullfighting. The San Fermín bullfights are described with technical precision — verónicas, the faena, the kill — in the same flat observational tone Hemingway uses for everything else. This is the iceberg at maximum pressure: the bullfight is not described symbolically or emotionally, just technically, and the emotional weight accumulates through the precision itself. Romero's performance is the standard against which every other character's behavior is silently measured. He does not perform courage; he exercises it.

No. 3 · The final taxi. The novel's last scene: Brett and Jake share a taxi in Madrid. Brett says, "Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together." Jake says, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so." The exchange is the iceberg's eighth above water: two lines that contain the entire weight of everything the novel has not said. "Isn't it pretty to think so" is one of the most precisely devastating final lines in American fiction. It says: what we could have had is a story, not a life.

Read the standard Scribner paperback first; the Hemingway Library Edition is for second reads.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone who wants to understand Hemingway's prose style from the inside: this is the first full-scale demonstration, and it is more varied and more emotionally complex than the iceberg reputation suggests.
• Readers interested in American modernism and the Lost Generation — what "lost" actually meant in practice, in the daily life of people who survived a catastrophic war.
• Anyone who wants to understand bullfighting as Hemingway saw it — not as brutality but as a ritual that required genuine courage and genuine skill, performed in public, without safety.

Skip it if you are…

• Deeply hostile to Hemingway's masculine codes: the novel is not uncritical of those codes, but it inhabits them thoroughly, and the critical distance is implied rather than stated.
• Looking for psychological depth in the psychological realist sense: the characters are rendered through behavior and dialogue, not through interior analysis.

Read it once quickly for the story; read it again attending to what is not said. Every crucial emotional moment is communicated through what a character orders to drink, where they look, what they describe and what they don't. The dialogue in particular: Hemingway's characters never say what they mean, and the space between what they say and what they mean is where the novel lives.

The bullfighting chapters require patience if the subject is foreign; resist the temptation to skim. The technical precision is the argument.

• Ernest Hemingway — A Farewell to Arms (1929). The war novel that precedes this one chronologically: the war that produced the Lost Generation, rendered directly.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby (1925). The companion American modernist novel: a different version of the same post-war world, more lyrical and more explicitly romantic, published the year before.
• Ford Madox Ford — The Good Soldier (1915). The British proto-Lost Generation novel: the same preoccupations — war, love, damage, what cannot be said — with a more elaborate narrative structure.

1. The novel never states Jake's wound directly. What does Hemingway gain from this omission? What does the reader feel that they would not feel if it were stated?
2. Robert Cohn is treated with contempt by the other characters. Is the novel endorsing this contempt, or is it critical of it?
3. Pedro Romero performs bullfighting with complete grace under pressure. Why does Hemingway make this the novel's standard for excellence? What does the bullfight measure?
4. Brett Ashley has been read as a femme fatale, a liberated woman, and a war casualty. Which reading does the novel support? Can it support more than one?
5. The final line — "Isn't it pretty to think so" — is one of the most famous endings in American fiction. What is Jake refusing? What is he accepting?
6. The epigraph from Gertrude Stein says "You are all a lost generation." Does the novel agree that its characters are lost? What have they lost?