The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, 1926 Charles Scribner’s Sons
My dog Scooby, born 2006
For readers being introduced to Hemingway the first time, his writing style will be initially perceived as stark, and lacking the luster of his contemporaries. What I learned in reading The Sun Also Rises, in a series of epiphanies occurring about once every ten pages, is that this is the purest form of literary metaphor I’ve ever read. It’s a purity that can only be filtered through Hemingway’s unadorned writing style. Any decoration of prose would only have weakened his voice. As such, a century later his voice retains all its power.
On the surface, The Sun Also Rises is about a group of expatriates scattered and drifting from their native countries after World War I, the war that was to end the rest of them. Their drifting empties them into Pamplona, Spain, in time to bear witness to the yearly fiesta’s fireworks, running of the bulls, and bull fights, while saturating their experience with drink. Through the unaffected voice of American war veteran Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s characters accept and suppress their feelings of artificiality, hopelessness, and restlessness. Hemingway’s command is that those feelings partake of a gradual transference as the pages are turned. By the end, the invested reader, as I was, is left internalizing the remnants of those feelings left in the novel’s wake. Enhancing the story’s effects is the taut line of unrequited love braided into the narrative. All the other feelings the characters ache from are bound by this.
With all the bravado and masculinity surrounding the Hemingway ethos, The Sun Also Rises proffers Hemingway’s heightened understanding of vulnerability, and that the craft of writing is the most pertinent way for expressing it. Throughout the narrative, Jake fortifies a wall built with impassivity and a front of control. Hemingway allows the reader to peer over it. In a revelation of what lies on the other side, Jake reflects that “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
My naivety was in believing that this novel was truly going to be about bullfighting; the actual bullfighting scenes span only a few pages. Hemingway, in the greatest display of his mastery, renders this ferocious sport with a simple elegance that only he could do. From his hand, both the sport and the writing perform a graceful choreography. A moment it which the reader anticipates being appalled transforms into a moment of admiration.
That transformation of what is expected into an understanding of truth is Hemingway’s power. We expect to read of the characters’ drunken, distant excursion to a celebratory week of festivities. In truth, the emptiness of life clings to them. As gripping as Hemingway’s transcriptions of the drunken turmoil, or the velocity of the celebration are, still more affecting are the quiet moments after these scenes where Jake’s anxieties and confusion drift back in. Being a perceptive narrator, he sees those same anxieties reflecting back at him from his companions. And yet, as much camaraderie is involved, the coping process remains a singular endeavor.
Finally, to return to the metaphor, Hemingway is deft enough for it to escape an immersed reader’s notice. Jake Barnes’s physical and psychological pain from the war manifests itself acutely. There is a scene, near the end of this novel that encapsulates how this novel is metaphorical of that conflict. Jake muses that “In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished…The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square.” In this novel, a group of loosely bound acquaintances from various nations and motives converge on a European town for a time of incessant clamor, chaos, and danger. As Jake knows, the ensuing quiet is just as unsettling.
Reading The Sun Also Rises in 2020 is a reminder that the human reactions to transformative events remain the same. Nearly a century after its publication, feelings of restlessness and uncertainty are as prevailing today as they were when Hemingway so powerfully rendered them.