Five-minute digest

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Summary

The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's first novel, a portrait of the 'lost generation' of expatriates in Paris and Spain after the First World War. Its title and one epigraph come from Ecclesiastes 1, the other epigraph from Gertrude Stein: 'You are all a lost generation.' The narrator, Jake Barnes, is an American newspaperman in Paris whose war wound has left him unable to consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley, a charming, restless English aristocrat on her way to a second divorce. Their group drinks heavily in the cafés of Montparnasse. Robert Cohn, a wealthy Jewish American writer and former boxer, falls hopelessly for Brett after a brief affair and follows her everywhere, to the irritation of the others, who mock him with antisemitic remarks. Jake and his friend Bill Gorton travel to Spain for trout fishing in the Basque mountains at Burguete, a peaceful interlude of friendship and nature. Then the group reunites in Pamplona for the fiesta of San Fermín, with its running of the bulls and bullfights. Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, a bankrupt drunk, is there too. Brett falls for the young matador Pedro Romero, a figure of courage and integrity in the ring, and Jake, against his own code and his friendship with the hotelkeeper Montoya, introduces them. Cohn, jealous, beats Jake, Mike and Romero with his fists, but Romero refuses to be defeated and fights brilliantly the next day. Brett leaves with Romero but soon sends him away, saying she will not be 'one of these bitches that ruins children'. She telegraphs Jake from Madrid; he rescues her, and in a taxi she says they could have had a good time together. Jake replies: 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' The novel is admired for its spare style, its 'iceberg' technique of leaving emotion beneath the surface, and its picture of wounded people seeking meaning in drink, sport and ritual. Its moral world is bleak, but Jake's attempt to live by a code, his visits to church, and the epigraph from Ecclesiastes invite reflection on vanity and the search for meaning. Published in 1926, it entered the US public domain on 1 January 2022.

Top Lessons

Vanity of vanities
The epigraph from Ecclesiastes frames a life of pleasure that brings no rest.
Related across the library
- Memoirs, Lesson: Logistics is the hidden plot of war
  Logistics is the hidden plot of war. Sherman narrates rivers, railroads, forage and hospital boats with as much care as combat. His war is a problem of moving and feeding men, and the Meridian raid shows that destroying an enemy's means of supply can matter more than defeating its army in battle.
- Saint Joan, Lesson: The private conscience and the public authority
  The private conscience and the public authority. Joan obeys her voices before the Church, and her king and peers alike before her own judgment. Warwick and Cauchon see in this the coming conflicts of Protestantism and nationalism, and the play lets each side argue in its own terms.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Lesson: Redeeming the time
  Redeeming the time. Hal's soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2 tells the audience that he will throw off his idle life when it will shine brightest. The play keeps asking whether this is wisdom, calculation or a young man's excuse, and it lets Hal prove himself only at Shrewsbury. Reformation is promised early and earned late.
- Walden, Lesson: Conscience and the state
  Conscience and the state. The night in jail mentioned in "The Village" is argued out fully in "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," printed with Walden in the library text. Thoreau holds that a man must not lend his support, even through taxes, to an injustice such as slavery, and must accept the penalty openly.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Lesson: Fathers and sons
  Fathers and sons. The king wishes Hotspur were his son, and Northumberland fails his son at the decisive hour. In Act 3, Scene 2 father and son speak openly at last, and at Shrewsbury Hal saves his father's life. The play is a family drama inside a civil war.
Courage and integrity
Romero's courage in the ring contrasts with the drifting expatriates.
Related across the library
- Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, Lesson: Stress reveals system design
  Stress reveals system design. Conflict exposes whether a person or institution can process ambiguity. Under pressure, rigid systems fail faster than adaptive ones.
- Scots Wha Hae (Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn), Lesson: Courage under threat
  Courage under threat. Bruce asks every man to choose between flight and the risk of death. Courage is a decision.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Lesson: Courage at the end
  Courage at the end. Chapter LXVIII shows a besieged city divided by quarrels over the church union and outnumbered many times over, yet its last emperor stays at his post and dies with his men. Gibbon, who rarely praises Byzantine rulers, gives Constantine Palaeologus a soldier's honor, and contrasts him with the commander who left the wall.
- Twenty Years After, Lesson: An oath at the Place Royale
  An oath at the Place Royale. Divided between Mazarin and the Fronde, the four could easily kill one another on the Vendomois road. Instead they meet by night, explain their conduct, and swear that their swords will not cross again. Dumas makes friendship a promise renewed by speech, candour and forgiveness, not a feeling that survives on its own.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Xix What Happened To Them At Surinam And How Candide Got Acquainted With
  at least as wretched as he but Candide hoped that the philosopher would entertain him during the voyage All the other candidates complained that Candide had done them great injustice but he appeased them by giving one hundred piastres to each XX WHAT HAPPENED AT SEA TO CANDIDE AND MARTIN The old philosopher whose name was Martin embarked then with Candide for Bordeaux They had both seen and suffered a great deal and if the vessel had sailed from Surinam to Japan by the Cape of Good Hope the subject of moral and...
Prejudice
The characters' antisemitic mockery of Cohn is ugly. The novel exposes, and partly shares, the prejudices of its age.
Related across the library
- Heart of Darkness, Lesson: The lie that saves
  The lie that saves. Marlow, who hates lies, tells the Intended a comforting falsehood. The ending asks whether some truths are too dark to deliver.
- The Prophet, Lesson: Work as love
  Work as love. Almustafa says work is love made visible. Compare Colossians 3:23.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Lesson: Fathers and sons
  Fathers and sons. The king wishes Hotspur were his son, and Northumberland fails his son at the decisive hour. In Act 3, Scene 2 father and son speak openly at last, and at Shrewsbury Hal saves his father's life. The play is a family drama inside a civil war.
- The Red and the Black, Lesson: Hypocrisy
  Hypocrisy. The novel shows a society in which success demands pretense.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Lesson: Love as a source of meaning
  Love as a source of meaning. On a dark march to a work site, Frankl talks inwardly with the image of his wife, not knowing whether she is alive, and discovers that love reaches beyond the physical presence of the beloved. Love is one of the three main ways he says meaning is found.

Verified Quotes

“You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Book I, Ch. 2 (Project Gutenberg #67138).Quote card

The Horse and His Boy, Lesson: A hidden hand in hard things
A hidden hand in hard things. In the fog Aslan tells Shasta that the lions that frightened him, the cat at the tombs, and the lion who pushed his boat ashore as a baby were all Aslan. Events that felt like bad luck were care. The book teaches that providence is often seen only looking back.
Stuart Little, Lesson: Disappointment and keeping on
Disappointment and keeping on. The canoe evening with Harriet goes wrong, and Stuart's sulking makes it worse. The next morning he is on the road again. The book lets a hero be disappointed and even foolish, and still shows him choosing to go on.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lesson: Courage with courtesy
Courage with courtesy. Reepicheep is the smallest member of the crew and the bravest. He fights Eustace to teach him manners, comforts him when he is a dragon, and goes willingly to the end of the world.
The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter VIII
Love was the first Motion, and thence a Concern arose to spend some Time with the _Indians_, that I might feel and understand their Life, and the Spirit they live in Resting in his tent on a rainy day on the road to Wehaloosing in 1763, he considers why he undertook the journey.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, the address to the peoples
From whence has he so many Eyes to watch you, if you do not give them? One of a string of questions showing that the tyrant's eyes, hands and feet all belong to his subjects.

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Book III, Ch. 19 (Project Gutenberg #67138).Quote card

A Farewell to Arms, Book III, Chapter XXV
Rinaldi, worn out by the summer's operations, drinks heavily and fears he has syphilis.
The Gulag Archipelago, Lesson: The line through every heart
The line through every heart. Solzhenitsyn refuses to divide the world neatly into the guilty and the innocent. Reflecting on how he too might have become an interrogator had his life gone differently, he concludes that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart and shifts over a lifetime. This is the moral centre of the work.
The Scarlet Letter, Lesson: Revenge deforms the healer
Revenge deforms the healer. Chillingworth's medical intimacy becomes predatory because it serves vengeance rather than care. The novel warns that knowledge of another person's vulnerability carries ethical danger.
Homilies on the Gospel of John, Summary
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple. Augustine's central concern is to lead hearers from visible signs to invisible truth. Water, bread, light, blindness, shepherding, friendship, and love become occasion...
Wuthering Heights, Medical lens
Wuthering Heights is a major medical-lens novel: Catherine's delirious illness and childbirth death, Hindley's alcoholism, Linton's chronic invalidism, Heathcliff's obsessive grief and self-starvation, and repeated deathbed care make the body central. The novel is also rich for trauma and attachment studies, though retrospective diagnosis should be hedged. Illness often expresses social and emotional violence rather than functioning as neutral plot device.

Medical Lens

The novel depicts chronic heavy drinking and the lasting effects of war wounds and trauma on the narrator.

Alcohol WAR Wounds Trauma Shell Shock

Book I, Ch. 4
Jake's sleeplessness and memory of his wound.
Book II, Pamplona
Days of constant drinking.

The Sun Also Rises

Summary

Top Lessons

Vanity of vanities

Courage and integrity

Prejudice

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens