The Sun Also Rises

The Lost Generation Finds Its Voice

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, published in 1926, announced a new voice in American fiction and named a generation. Gertrude Stein had told him that young men who had served in the war were “a lost generation” — directionless, unable to reconnect with the civilian values they had left behind — and Hemingway used the phrase as an epigraph and the idea as the novel’s subject.

Jake Barnes is an American journalist in Paris, a veteran whose war wound has left him sexually incapable. He is in love with Brett Ashley, a beautiful, troubled Englishwoman who loves him in return and cannot remain faithful to anyone. Around them moves a circle of expatriates — Robert Cohn, Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell — who drink heavily, travel restlessly, and maintain surfaces of wit and irony over feelings they cannot express.

Paris: The City as Emotional Weather

The Paris of The Sun Also Rises is rendered in a series of short, precisely observed scenes — bars, restaurants, the rue de Rivoli, the Left Bank cafés where Hemingway himself spent his early years. The city is simultaneously beautiful and empty: a place to be rather than a place to become. Jake’s routine is meticulous and slightly compulsive, the precision of a man keeping darkness at bay through habit.

The novel’s emotional key is established in an early scene where Jake, alone in his apartment, thinks about Brett and cries. It is over immediately. He does not let himself dwell. This compression — the acknowledgement and the suppression of feeling in a single paragraph — is Hemingway’s method applied to character.

Pamplona: The Fiesta as Revelation

The novel’s great section is the fiesta at Pamplona: the running of the bulls, the corrida, the nights of drinking and dancing that briefly make the characters feel genuinely alive. Hemingway had been to Pamplona himself and brought a careful observer’s precision to the bullfighting sequences — the specific movements of specific matadors, the quality of different bulls, the relationship between skill and danger.

The bullfighter Pedro Romero — brave, skilled, utterly unself-conscious in his art — is the novel’s positive moral figure: someone who does his work with absolute commitment regardless of the audience, the commentary, or the cost. He is, implicitly, who Jake wants to be and cannot.

Robert Cohn’s Function

The novel’s treatment of Robert Cohn — the Jewish Princeton boxer who is explicitly excluded from the code values the other characters share — has been extensively criticised as anti-Semitic, and the criticism is warranted. Cohn functions as a foil whose romanticism and sentimentality are contrasted with the other characters’ ironic detachment, and his Jewishness is presented as connected to these failings in ways that reflect Hemingway’s prejudice.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The novel that defined American expatriate modernism — formally brilliant and ethically compromised in exactly the way its generation was.

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The Biographical Origins

Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises in 1925 in Paris and Madrid, drawing directly on his own experience: the fiesta at Pamplona he had attended with his first wife Hadley and a group of friends in 1923 and 1924, the bullfighters he had watched and admired, the social world of the Left Bank cafés. The novel’s characters are thinly veiled portraits of real people — Harold Loeb as Robert Cohn, Lady Duff Twysden as Brett Ashley, Pat Guthrie as Mike Campbell — and their originals recognized themselves immediately, causing lasting damage to several friendships.

Hadley Hemingway would later say that reading the book was like having her husband’s actual life handed back to her as fiction, and that the experience was not comfortable. The roman à clef dimension has always complicated the novel’s reception: knowing that Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, and that Loeb had an actual affair with Twysden, does not simplify the novel’s treatment of Cohn, who is presented with an anti-Semitism that is partially the anti-Semitism of the narrator Jake Barnes and partially, uncomfortably, that of the author.

The Iceberg Theory in Practice

Hemingway described his compositional method in A Moveable Feast and in interviews as the “iceberg theory”: the writer knows the full story, but suppresses seven-eighths of it, allowing only the surface — the visible eighth — to appear on the page. The emotion, the meaning, the subtext are all submerged, but their weight is felt by the reader as surely as if they had been stated.

The Sun Also Rises is the first major expression of this theory. Jake’s war wound — the nature of which is never specified, but which has left him sexually incapable — is mentioned once, obliquely, and never again. Brett’s love for Jake, and its impossibility, is never directly declared. Robert Cohn’s romantic obsession with Brett is rendered through his behavior rather than his inner life. The result is a novel of almost no interiority that is entirely about the interior lives of its characters — a paradox that Hemingway resolves through the pressure that the unsaid exerts on the said.

Paris and the 1920s

The Paris of The Sun Also Rises — the specific geography of the Left Bank, the named cafés and restaurants, the rue de Rivoli and the Place de la Contrescarpe — is so precisely rendered that it has shaped the image of 1920s Paris for generations of readers who were not there. Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921 with Hadley and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, and spent the next four years learning to write with a seriousness and discipline that A Moveable Feast records with loving retrospective clarity. The Paris sections of The Sun Also Rises are the direct product of that apprenticeship: a young writer using his city as his material while also rendering it as an emotional condition, a place where freedom and rootlessness are indistinguishable.

The fiesta at Pamplona — the running of the bulls, the corridas, the nights of communal drinking and dancing — represents the novel’s alternative to Paris: a place where the Lost Generation’s characteristic irony is briefly suspended and genuine feeling becomes possible, at the cost of violence, jealousy, and the exposure of everyone’s worst impulses. The fiesta both reveals and destroys the group’s fragile social equilibrium, and the novel ends in Paris again, stripped of its illusions.

The Novel’s Enduring Influence

The Sun Also Rises defined a prose style and a cultural attitude that shaped American fiction for decades. The stripped declarative sentences, the ironic surface over suppressed feeling, the code of behavior that judges people by what they do rather than what they say — these became the template for a generation of American writers who read Hemingway as their model. His influence is visible in Raymond Carver, in Joan Didion, in any contemporary writer who withholds.