The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Author: Ernest Hemingway · 1926
Plot
Jake Barnes is an American journalist in 1920s Paris. He was wounded in World War I — the specific wound is never named on the page, but the entire novel is shaped by it: he was left impotent, and the woman he loves is a woman he cannot sleep with. Her name is Lady Brett Ashley. She’s English, divorced, twice, currently engaged to a bankrupt Scottish aristocrat named Mike Campbell, and she drinks like she means it. She loves Jake. Jake loves her. They can’t do anything about it. “Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me,” she tells him in a taxi, and it’s one of the most painful sentences in modern literature because she means it and it doesn’t matter.
Around them drifts the expatriate scene — bored, broke, alcoholic, brilliant. Robert Cohn is a Princeton man, a former college boxing champion, a writer who has published one novel and is romantically miserable. He has a brief affair with Brett during a weekend in San Sebastian and spends the rest of the novel unable to accept that it’s over. Bill Gorton, Jake’s friend from America, is a drunk with a sense of humor. Mike is Brett’s fiance, tolerant when sober, vicious when drunk, which is most of the time.
Jake and Bill escape Paris for a trout-fishing trip in the Basque mountains of Spain. These are the calmest pages in the book. They hike up from Pamplona to a river near Burguete, catch fish, read books, drink wine cold from the stream. For five days nothing goes wrong. Then they come down to Pamplona for the fiesta of San Fermin, and the rest of the party arrives — Brett, Mike, Cohn — and the fragile peace shatters.
What unfolds over the seven days of the fiesta is something between a bender and a nervous breakdown with hundreds of other people in it. The town is drunk around the clock. The bulls run through the streets at dawn and are killed in the ring in the afternoon. Cohn follows Brett around like a dog nobody wanted at the party. Mike — sensing that Cohn had Brett first — mocks him in public with escalating cruelty. Jake tries to keep the peace. Then Brett falls for a nineteen-year-old bullfighter named Pedro Romero. She tells Jake: “I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.” Jake introduces them. Romero’s manager and the hotelkeeper Montoya — the serious aficionados — understand instantly that Jake has betrayed them: he has handed their untouchable young master to an English woman who will ruin him.
Cohn, who has already been belted once by Jake, snaps completely. He is still a boxer. He beats up Jake, flattens Mike, breaks into Romero’s hotel room and beats the bullfighter to a pulp. But Romero keeps getting up. Every time Cohn knocks him down he rises again, and eventually Cohn, out of horror at what he is doing and at what Romero simply refuses to stop being, breaks down sobbing. The next afternoon, battered and swollen-faced, Romero fights two bulls perfectly. Then he and Brett disappear together.
A few days later Jake is alone in San Sebastian swimming in the ocean — water as the novel’s only reliable consolation — when he gets a telegram from Brett in Madrid. She needs him. He drops everything, takes the train. When he arrives she tells him she has sent Romero away. “I’m not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children.” She is proud of this. She deserves to be. It’s the one thing she actually does in the novel. Then she and Jake go out for a last drink and a last taxi ride. She leans against him and says: “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.” He looks at her, and says the last line of the book: “Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
What the Book Is About
The famous epigraph is Gertrude Stein’s — “You are all a lost generation” — and Hemingway is both agreeing with it and refusing it in the same novel. Yes, these people are wrecked. Yes, the war has stripped them of religion, of purpose, of the ability to take anything seriously including themselves. But the second epigraph is from Ecclesiastes: the sun also rises, the earth abides, the rivers keep running. Something survives. Not them, maybe — but the world they are staggering through.
The central argument of the book is about what you do when the old structures have collapsed and all you have left is your own behavior. Jake says it plainly to Cohn, early: “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” The only things that still mean anything in this world are small, strict, personal codes of behavior — what Hemingway later called “grace under pressure.” You pay your bills. You don’t make trouble for people. You keep your mouth shut about your own pain. You admire the people who do their work well. You despise the fakes.
The bullfight is the novel’s icon of all this. In Chapter 13, Jake defines afición: “Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.” Real aficionados recognize each other silently — a hand on the shoulder, a nod. In a world where nobody believes in anything anymore, this underground community around the bull-ring is the closest thing to a moral order the book offers. Pedro Romero fights with “the absolute purity of line in his movements.” He is the novel’s one picture of what integrity looks like when you strip away everything else. He’s nineteen, he doesn’t drink, and he confronts death in front of a crowd every afternoon without flinching. “I’m never going to die,” he tells Brett. He means it the way bullfighters have to mean it.
Jake’s closing line — “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” — is devastating precisely because it is, at last, the exact right response. He has stopped pretending. The romantic illusion that he and Brett could somehow have been happy together is the very thing the novel has spent 250 pages demolishing. He will go on living, paying his bills, writing his dispatches, and not lying to himself any more than he has to. That is the Hemingway ethic in its finished form, and this is the book where it gets invented.
The Cast
Jake Barnes. The narrator and the survivor. What’s been taken from him (the war wound, and by extension everything the war took from everyone) is never described; what we see is what he built in the hole where it was — stoicism, precision, a reporter’s distance from his own feelings. “I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people.” At night, alone, the mask slips: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” His breakthrough by the end of the book is not happiness. It’s the ability to say “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” without flinching. He has given up the last illusion. It is, in its way, a victory.
Lady Brett Ashley. The book’s most misunderstood character. On the surface she’s a chaos agent — drinking, sleeping around, breaking hearts. Underneath, she is a woman who has lost a fiance in the war, two husbands to alcoholism and violence, and the man she actually loves to a wound he can’t do anything about. She is famously promiscuous and famously miserable. “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.” But she does one real thing in the novel, and it saves her: she sends Romero away. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” She has no religion, no moral code she inherited from anyone, no model. She constructs, on her own, a personal standard of decency and meets it. In Hemingway’s world that is a kind of sainthood.
Robert Cohn. The outsider. A Jewish Princeton boxing champion, an unassimilated romantic, a man who has read too much bad fiction and believes in it. He’s the one character in the novel who has not been through the war, and Hemingway uses him, almost cruelly, to expose what the old pre-war romantic posture looks like against the reality the others have survived. “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” His tragedy is that he won’t learn. When Brett dismisses him he cannot accept it and eventually breaks down weeping in Romero’s hotel room after the beating he has just administered. He’s the book’s steer — gored, mocked, hanging around where he isn’t wanted — and Cohn himself sees this without recognizing himself in it when he looks at the corrals and says, “It’s no life being a steer.”
Pedro Romero. Hemingway’s ideal: pure technique, purity of line, nineteen years old, unspoiled. He barely changes through the book because he has nothing in him that needs changing. After Cohn beats him bloody, he fights two bulls the next day and does not make a single concession to the pain. He is what everyone else in the novel stopped being long ago, or never was to begin with.
Mike Campbell. The drunk aristocrat. Broke, charming, and, when he’s had enough, capable of startling cruelty — especially toward Cohn, whose presence he correctly diagnoses as a humiliation. “I’m a tremendous bankrupt. I owe money to everybody.” He ends the fiesta passed out in a hotel. He is what Jake would become if Jake ever let himself.
Symbols
| Symbol | What it signals | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The bulls / the steers | The group’s social dynamics made visible — Romero is a bull, Cohn is a steer, everyone else is somewhere on the spectrum | The unloading of the bulls into the corrals at Pamplona |
| Water / bathing | The only reliable cleansing the novel offers — temporary, physical, wordless | Jake swimming in the ocean at San Sebastian after the fiesta: “I swam out under water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone.” |
| The bull-fight | Pure confrontation with death; the one surviving ritual in a world of frauds | Romero’s performance after Cohn’s beating: “the absolute purity of line in his movements” |
| The taxi | Enforced physical closeness between Jake and Brett — everything they can’t have compressed into a back seat | The Paris taxi in Book I; the final Madrid taxi in Book III |
Key Debate
Can you run from yourself? Cohn wants to escape to South America because he can’t stand his life. Jake tells him, flatly, that he has tried it, and that it does not work: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” This is the book’s core claim. The expat scene in Paris is itself a gigantic experiment in geographical escape, and the novel watches, coolly, as it fails. The only people who are actually anywhere are the ones who have an internal code to stand on — Romero with his afición, Montoya with his standards, Count Mippipopolous with his arrow-scars and his aged brandy (“It is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”). Everybody else is moving at high speed in order not to have to feel where they are.
How It’s Written
Hemingway invents his own sentence here. Short, declarative, loaded with concrete nouns, allergic to adjectives, almost never describing feelings directly. Dialogue carries most of the weight — characters talk in clipped exchanges, and the drama is usually what is not said. When somebody is about to cry in this novel, what you get is a sentence about a bottle, or a window, or a road. The technique is what Hemingway later called the iceberg: one-eighth visible on the page, seven-eighths underneath, and the reader feels the submerged mass without being told about it.
The first-person narration lets him do this even more exactly. Jake reports events with a journalist’s precision. He only lets emotion through at night, alone in bed, when “it is another thing.” The emotional peaks of the novel are always this quiet. Brett’s “we could have had such a damned good time together” and Jake’s one-line reply land so hard precisely because the prose has trained you, for 250 pages, to hear what is beneath the restraint.
Opening and closing are deliberately mismatched. The book opens with a long, gossipy, slightly bored biography of Robert Cohn — romantic, wordy, beside the point. It ends with two people in a taxi and one line. In between, the novel teaches you how to read the ending.
Connections
- a-farewell-to-arms — Hemingway’s companion novel to this one, written three years later. The Sun Also Rises is what happens to the survivors after the war; A Farewell to Arms is the war itself, the romance that the Lost Generation is still grieving.
- arch-of-triumph — Remarque’s German-refugee counterpart — the same Paris, roughly the same years, the same lost people, but seen from the other side of the war. Two halves of the same European cataclysm.
- civilization-and-its-discontents — Freud’s late analysis of why civilization can no longer make its members happy maps directly onto the Parisian expat scene: the old sublimations — religion, nation, family — have cracked, and nothing coherent has replaced them.
- nausea — Sartre’s existential drift twelve years later. Roquentin in Bouville is Jake Barnes pushed one further inward: no war wound, no bullfight, no Brett, just the bare experience of a contingent self in a contingent world.
- the-trial — modernist alienation in its purest form: Kafka’s K. and Hemingway’s Jake are two faces of the same early-twentieth-century situation, a self deprived of the institutions that used to tell it what it meant.
Lineage
Predecessors
- a-farewell-to-arms (chronologically later but narratively earlier) — the war itself, which the Sun’s characters have already survived
Successors
- arch-of-triumph (1945) — the Lost Generation story told from the German refugee side
- nausea (1938) — the existential interior opened up further, without the war context
- the-trial (1925) — simultaneous modernist alienation in its most abstract form