The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Modernist

Lost Generation

Post-War

189 Pages

"The Sun Also Rises captures that peculiar feeling of being young, wounded by life, and desperately searching for meaning in a world that suddenly makes no sense. Hemingway's spare prose somehow conveys more emotional truth than pages of florid description."

Synopsis

The Sun Also Rises follows a group of American and British expatriates as they travel from Paris to Pamplona, Spain for the Running of the Bulls and the San Fermín Festival in the mid-1920s. The story is narrated by Jake Barnes, an American journalist rendered impotent by a war wound, who is in love with the sexually liberated but emotionally damaged Lady Brett Ashley. Despite their mutual affection, Jake's condition makes a physical relationship impossible. The novel begins in Paris where Jake socializes with fellow expatriates including Robert Cohn, a Jewish writer and former boxer who becomes infatuated with Brett. When Brett arrives in Paris with her fiancé Mike Campbell, tensions rise as Jake, Mike, Brett, Cohn, and Jake's friend Bill Gorton decide to travel to Spain for fishing and the fiesta. In Pamplona, Brett becomes enchanted with a 19-year-old bullfighter named Pedro Romero, initiating an affair that sends Cohn into jealous rages and further strains the group's relationships. After the fiesta ends in emotional wreckage, Jake retreats to San Sebastián where he receives a telegram from Brett in Madrid needing help after ending things with Romero. The novel concludes with Jake and Brett in a taxi, acknowledging the impossibility of their relationship with Brett's famous line, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Our Take

The Sun Also Rises stands as the definitive novel of the "Lost Generation"—those who came of age during World War I and found themselves spiritually damaged and morally adrift in its aftermath. Hemingway's revolutionary prose style—spare, declarative, and deliberately understated—perfectly embodies the novel's themes of emotional repression and the inadequacy of language to express profound trauma. What makes the book enduringly powerful is how it captures a particular historical moment while exploring timeless human struggles: the search for meaning in the absence of traditional values, the complexities of sexual relationships, and the attempt to maintain personal dignity amid physical and emotional wounds. Jake Barnes exemplifies the Hemingway code hero—stoic, disciplined, and authentic despite his suffering—while Brett Ashley represents both the new sexual freedom of post-war women and the emotional cost of that liberation. Beyond its character studies, the novel offers a vivid portrayal of expatriate life, contrasting the artificial sophistication of Paris with the primal authenticity of Spain's bullfighting tradition. The fiesta sequence, with its ritualistic violence, excessive drinking, and sexual tension, creates a powerful metaphor for the generation's desperate attempt to feel something genuine after being numbed by war. Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing—where the deeper meaning lies beneath the minimal surface details—revolutionized 20th-century literature, showing how fiction could suggest emotional depths through what remained unsaid. Nearly a century after its publication, The Sun Also Rises remains essential reading for understanding both the cultural moment that produced it and the timeless human condition of searching for meaning amid personal and collective trauma.

The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway