What is The Sun Also Rises about?

The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's first novel, published in 1926, and it remains the sharpest portrait of the "Lost Generation" — the young Americans and British expatriates who drifted through Paris and Spain in the years after World War I, drinking heavily and searching for something they couldn't name. The narrator, Jake Barnes, is an American journalist living in Paris; he loves Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful, restless Englishwoman; and he cannot have her, for a war wound has left him impotent. That wound, mostly undescribed, hangs over every page.

What the book is really about is people trying to outrun feeling. Jake and his circle — Brett, the Jewish writer Robert Cohn, the dissolute Mike Campbell, the earnest Bill Gorton — move from café to café in Paris and then to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. They drink too much. They quarrel. Cohn punches people. Brett goes off with a young bullfighter named Romero, who is the one figure in the novel who has genuine skill and dignity. The fiesta is vivid and brutal; the corrida sequences are some of the finest writing Hemingway ever did. Then it all ends, as these things do, in anticlimax.

The novel's power is almost entirely in what it doesn't say. Hemingway's iceberg theory — that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water — is here practiced at the level of character psychology. Jake's wound is emotional as much as physical. The code of behavior that Jake and Bill share — understatement, competence, not whining — is both admirable and a defense mechanism. The prose is declarative, deceptively simple, endlessly imitated and rarely matched.

Readers who want plot will find this novel frustratingly event-light. But readers who are drawn to mood, to the texture of being young and aimless and vaguely damaged in a beautiful city, will find it almost unbearably true. It pairs naturally with Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast and sits in dialogue with Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a document of the 1920s. Anyone who has lived abroad, or been in love with someone they couldn't have, will recognize something in Jake Barnes.