The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is one of the earliest and most important novels by Ernest Hemingway. The story tells of a group of British expatriates who travel to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The story is based on the real experience in Hemingway’s life. During his stay in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the Pyrenees he lived through the similar events. The work investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity. It also touches upon the topic of Lost Generation - young intelligent people that got decadent, dissolute, and irretrievably damaged by World War I. Yet, in this work, he proves they are still resilient and strong. This novel also demonstrates Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of writing. The surface of the plot is a turbulent love story between Jake Barnes–a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex–and the promiscuous divorcee Lady Brett Ashley. Yet, the lower levels of the novels raise the questions of the lost generation and the relation between the man and nature.