The Sun Also Rises
What is The Sun Also Rises about?
What is the main theme of The Sun Also Rises?
Why was The Sun Also Rises controversial?
What is the meaning of the title of The Sun Also Rises?
Who are the main characters in The Sun Also Rises?
What is the significance of Jake Barnes’s injury?
The Sun Also Rises is the first major novel by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. Titled Fiesta in England, the novel captures the moods, feelings, and attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living group of disillusioned expatriates in France and Spain—what would become known as the Lost Generation, a term the novel popularized.
- Title: The Sun Also Rises (in England, Fiesta)
- Author: Ernest Hemingway
- Published: October 22, 1926
- Genre: Novel
- Language: English
- Famous quotes: “You are all a lost generation” and “Everybody behaves badly.…Give them the proper chance.”
The Sun Also Rises established Hemingway as one of the great novelists of the 20th century and introduced his spare, succinct style of writing, which would profoundly influence many other authors. Today the novel is considered one of his masterpieces and a classic work of American literature.
Summary: A story in which “everybody behaves badly”
The Sun Also Rises follows a group of young American and British expatriates as they wander through Europe in the mid-1920s. They are all members of the cynical and disillusioned Lost Generation, who came of age during World War I (1914–18). Two of the novel’s main characters, Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, typify the Lost Generation. Jake, the novel’s narrator, is a journalist and a World War I veteran. During the war he suffered an injury that rendered him sexually impotent. (The title obliquely references Jake’s injury and what no longer rises because of it.) After the war Jake moved to Paris, where he lives near his friend, the Jewish author Robert Cohn. A former boxer, Cohn is in an unhappy relationship with Frances Clyne, another American expatriate, who is desperate for Cohn to marry her and often berates him in the presence of his friends.
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Jake’s former lover, Brett, also lives in Paris. They met and fell in love during the war, when Brett, a volunteer nurse, helped treat Jake’s injuries. It is implied that they are not together because Jake is impotent and Brett is unwilling to give up sex. When Cohn becomes infatuated with Brett and confesses his romantic interest in her to Jake, Jake cautions him against pursuing a relationship with Brett, who is engaged to be married to Mike Campbell, a Scottish war veteran. Both Brett and Cohn eventually leave Paris: Brett sets off for San Sebastian (a small beach town in northern Spain) and Cohn for the countryside.
A few weeks after their departure, the writer Bill Gorton (another of Jake’s friends) arrives in Paris. Together, Jake and Bill decide to go to Spain to attend the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfights. Before they leave, Jake and Bill run into Brett, who has recently returned from Spain, and Mike. Brett and Mike ask to accompany Jake and Bill to Pamplona. In private Brett reveals to Jake that she spent the last few weeks in Spain with Cohn.
Bill and Jake take a train to the south of France, where they meet Cohn. Bill, Jake, and Cohn travel together to Pamplona, where they split up after a few days as Bill and Jake go to Burguete for a fishing trip and Cohn remains in Pamplona. After Bill and Jake return to Pamplona, they are eventually joined by Brett and Mike. Bill and Jake learn that while they were in Burguete, Cohn went to San Sebastian to meet Brett and Mike. Cohn’s incessant tagging after Brett irks the rest of the group, especially Mike. The group stays at a local hotel owned by a man named Montoya, who is also a bullfighting enthusiast and is eager to introduce the foreigners to the sport. Brett and Jake are especially fascinated by the bullfights, and Brett is captivated by a 19-year-old bullfighter named Pedro Romero. While Mike, Cohn, and, incidentally, Jake spar over Brett, Brett runs off to Madrid with Romero.
After the festival ends, Jake, Mike, and Bill leave Pamplona. After a night on his own in the south of France, Jake decides to return to Spain. He soon receives a telegram from Brett asking for help in Madrid. Jake immediately goes to Madrid, where he learns that Brett sent Romero away for fear of corrupting him. The novel ends unspectacularly yet poignantly, with Jake and Brett talking in a taxi in Madrid.
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The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Lost Generation characters and real-life inspirations
In writing The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway drew from his experience in postwar Europe. He was an aficionado of bullfighting and had attended bullfights and the running of the bulls in Pamplona. As for Paris, Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, moved there in 1921 at the suggestion of fellow writer Sherwood Anderson. Toting letters of introduction by Anderson, Hemingway sought out other expatriates, especially Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, both of whom were at the forefront of the Modernist literary movement. Stein in particular introduced Hemingway to key figures in the movement, and the Hemingways began to socialize in the city’s cafés and bars on the Left Bank. A number of the scene’s habitués were the models for the novel’s characters, including:
- Jake Barnes: Ernest Hemingway
- Lady Brett Ashley: Lady Duff Twysden, a bohemian British woman in her mid-30s who had come to Paris while in the process of divorcing her second husband (who had remained in Britain)
- Robert Cohn: Harold Loeb, a wealthy American writer, Princeton graduate, and divorcé who had published a well-reviewed novel, Doodab, in 1925
- Frances Clyne: Kathleen (“Kitty”) Cannell, an American translator, alum of the Sorbonne, and divorcée who was in a relationship with Loeb and later became a fashion editor for The New York Times
- Mike Campbell: Pat Guthrie, a Scottish socialite of alleged aristocratic lineage and former lieutenant in World War I who was Duff’s companion in Paris and Pamplona and was frequently short of funds
- Bill Gorton: Bill Smith, a childhood friend of Hemingway’s, and Donald Ogden Stewart, an American humorist, actor, and screenwriter who was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City and won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Philadelphia Story (1940)
- Pedro Romero: Cayetano Ordóñez (also called “El Niño de la Palma”), a young Spanish bullfighter whom Hemingway had pegged as a “savior” of the sport; many of his descendants, including his son Antonio Ordóñez, became famous matadors
Hemingway made some biographical changes in drafting his characters (unlike Jake, Hemingway was not impotent) but not enough to ward off scandal when the book was published. A number of other famous figures were mentioned in the manuscript, but on the advice of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose success Hemingway both admired and resented, a great amount of backstory (especially about Brett) and the Left Bank scene was cut before publication.
Themes, the influence of Gertrude Stein, and the Hemingway style
Hemingway credited Gertrude Stein with coining the term Lost Generation. Stein, referring to Hemingway and his writer friends, reportedly told him, “You are all a lost generation”—a remark Hemingway used as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises along with a passage from Ecclesiastes that inspired the book’s title.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.…
As bitter as the term Lost Generation may be, it is fitting. The Sun Also Rises captures the existential disillusionment characteristic of those whose worldview was shaped by the horrors of the so-called “war to end all wars.” Its main characters—Jake, Brett, and their acquaintances—are mentally, emotionally, and morally lost. Their lives lack meaningful foundations and their romantic attachments are fleeting. Although they regularly go out together, their revelry is often joyless. Fueled by alcohol, the expatriates wander from bar to bar, fighting senseless battles over women and sex. All of the characters (especially the war veterans) use alcohol to distract themselves from their inner lives and the unpleasant feelings they associate with the war. As Jake tells Brett when she complains about Cohn and Mike’s fighting over her and Cohn’s clinginess, “Everybody behaves badly.…Give them the proper chance.”
Hemingway renders the disorientation and distractedness of the Lost Generation in sparing prose, devoid of sentimentality and flowery language. He had labored at perfecting this style, influenced by his experience as a journalist as well as Stein’s avant-garde, idiosyncratic writing, which relied heavily on repetition and extreme simplification. He shared some of his early writing with her, and her mentorship transformed his work. She worked with him to develop a stripped-down prose style that incorporated word repetition to build rhythm.
The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.
In The Sun Also Rises, he barely develops the interior lives of his main characters. By withholding key details about their mental and emotional states, he conveys the fundamental emptiness of the expatriates’ lives. The technique is also a classic example of Hemingway’s “iceberg theory,” in which he proposed that writers convey more emotion by what they omit from a story and what remains “below the surface.”
Reception and legacy
The Sun Also Rises received mixed but mostly positive reviews upon publication. Generally speaking, reviews were split between those who were sickened by what they perceived as the pornographic character of the novel and those who were impressed by Hemingway’s sparse, direct prose. Some reviewers criticized the content of the novel but complimented the author’s writing style. Hemingway’s contemporary Virginia Woolf, for example, critiqued his characters but said of his prose:
Each word pulls its weight in the sentence. And the prevailing atmosphere is fine and sharp, like that of winter days when the boughs are bare against the sky.
Other titles that were considered for The Sun Also Rises included “River to the Sea,” “Two Lie Together,” and “The Old Leaven,” all of which come from the Bible.
The Sun Also Rises and its characters have been variously interpreted by critics and scholars. Some early critics cast the novel as a satire. Others have deemed it a serious literary effort to portray and ultimately condemn the aimless lifestyle of the Lost Generation. In either case, the novel was tremendously successful commercially. Published by Scribner’s in 1926, the first printing of the novel was a relatively small run of 5,090 copies. Less than two months later the novel was in its second printing, with many more printings to come. Following the commercial success of the novel in the United States, a British edition was published by Jonathan Cape under the title Fiesta in 1927. The novel has been in continuous print since its publication.
The book’s antisemitism has long been controversial, with many critics deeming Robert Cohn an antisemitic caricature rather than a fully rendered character. Others have defended the novel’s frank portrait of the prejudices concerning class, race, and religion that typified American and British society, both at home and abroad. Much of the most offensive dialogue is uttered by the character Bill Gorton. Decades after the book was published, writer Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the models for Bill, told the Connecticut Review that this aspect of the novel was true, calling the Lost Generation’s antisemitism “a form of social snobbishness, something that people simply took for granted.”
Nevertheless, Hemingway became a literary star, and for many readers his debut remains the definitive portrait of the Lost Generation and the expatriate community in Paris. His book also brought greater attention to Pamplona’s Fiesta de San Fermín, which a century later continues to draw tourists who seek to follow in the footsteps of Hemingway and his characters.
Adaptations
In 1957 The Sun Also Rises was adapted into a feature film directed by Henry King and starring Tyrone Power (Jake), Ava Gardner (Brett), Errol Flynn (Mike), Mel Ferrer (Cohn), Eddie Albert (Bill), and Robert Evans (Romero). A television miniseries appeared in 1984, featuring Hart Bochner (Jake), Jane Seymour (Brett), and Robert Carradine (Cohn).
