The Sun Also Rises | Circularity in The Sun Also Rises

In this excerpt, Robert W. Cochran disagrees with the body of criticism which finds The Sun Also Rises overtly cynical, focusing instead on the circularity of the human condition.

Emphasis in the considerable body of criticism in print on The Sun Also Rises rests with the cynicism and world-weariness to be found in the novel. Although Lionel Trilling in 1939 afforded his readers a salutary, corrective view, most commentators have found the meaning inherent in the pattern of the work despairing. Perhaps most outspoken is E. M. Halliday, who sees Jake Barnes as adopting “a kind of desperate caution” as his modus vivendi. Halliday concludes that the movement of the novel is a movement of progressive “emotional insularity” and that the...

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