The Sun Also Rises

Paris represents the cynical, jaded modern world. France, of course, was most closely associated with the slaughter of World War II through its battlefields, and Jake drifts unhappily through this...

The 2014 Scribner Hemingway Library edition of the novel is 321 pages, according to Amazon. The book is of average length for a modern novel. It occurs to me, however, that perhaps this question...

Drink plays an integral part in the story. For one thing, it gives these characters something to do. A great deal of the book is concerned with drinking in bars and restaurants and the kind of...

The impotence that Jake suffers from acts as a very powerful metaphor for the way that war had changed perceptions of masculinity and challenged what it was to be a man. Whereas before, war was a...

Paris is a reflection of the inner selves of Jake, Brett, and Robert. Each of the characters hopes to get something out of their time in Paris, but the city itself is ultimately a reflection of who...

Jake's wound is symbolic of the impotence or lack of power of the American Dream over the young generation coming into its own in the 1920s. The American Dream is a dream of unlimited progress and...

The reason that Brett breaks up with Romero is because she does not want to ruin him. She tells Jake, "He is only nineteen...youo know I'd have lived with him if I hadn't seen it was bad for...

Throughout the novel, life in Spain is presented as more natural, less hectic, somehow more real, than the decadence and phoniness of urban existence in Paris. The unique, primal rhythms of Spain...

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is written using a first person narrator. First person narrators play a role in the action of the story, act as the protagonist (main character), and tend to...

Robert Cohn is one of the main characters in Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, about expatriates living in Europe after World I. The narrator of the novel, Jake Barnes, spends several pages at...

This quote gets to the heart of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. One of the book's primary themes is the search for meaning in a world that seems to be devoid of meaning. After the chaos of...

As the other answers note, Jake Barnes does represent aspects of Hemingway and his life: Hemingway was on the World War I battlefields in France (though as an ambulance driver), he did live in...

In The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn acts largely as a foil to the book's hero, Jake Barnes; he exists to highlight some of Jake's character traits. Robert engages in a number of typically...

I highly recommend you read the conversation between Jake and Brett in the middle of this chapter. There, you will find the answers to your deeper questions. Brett asks Jake if Robert is going on...

Belmonte is so famous and highly paid that even his skill isn't good enough. The narrator says the audience wanted him to be better than he was. The narrator says that he has a wan, yellow face...

The main characters in The Sun Also Rises are expatriates, who have already escaped from their native countries and are spending their lives in continental Europe. They are based on Ernest...

The conversations among the characters in this novel are indicative of the Lost Generation’s dissatisfaction with life that they cannot seem to escape. In Chapter VIII, Frances has left for England...

Jake's stay in Paris has become a lost life for him. Although he scorns the extravagance and decadence that surrounds him, he has been caught up in it nonetheless. The lure of the city nightlife...

Much of the action of the novel takes place in Pamplona during the fiesta. Pamplona is important for each of these characters because it is where, under the influence of the fiesta, they each come...

In terms of the crowd they spend time with, the main difference between Jake and Robert Cohn is that Jake belongs.Robert is always an outsider, because of his personality, his choices, and the fact...

Mike has fought in the war, but he has no medals of his own, having never sent in for the ones to which he may have been entitled. One night he is invited to a "whopping big dinner"which the Prince...

Lady Brett Ashley is the only major female character in the novel. On one level she is important because she is beautiful and alluring (she is likened to the mythical Circe) and the men in the...

Modernism is a literary term that is difficult to define because it encompasses so a broad range of literature. It was a response to the increasing mechanization of life brought on by industrialism...

The previous post was really quite detailed and thorough. You have one of the best answers to the question. I only seek to discuss the last question offered. The "lost generation" is an element...

Jake hits Robert when Robert calls him a pimp because on some level, Jake believes there is some truth to it. Pimps usually do not have sex with their girls, and Jake is incapable of having sex...

Montoya admires those bull fighters who have "aficion" - passion. He keeps their pictures on the walls of his hotel. The ones that lack "aficion" he keeps in a drawer, and one day, Jake explains,...

Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "The Lost Generation" and Hemingway portrays characters who are very much apart of this group. The lost generation felt disillusioned post WWI, and many...

Hemingway and Eliot are both modernist writers. Literary modernism is a period that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth. Its peak was in the years following...

Clearly, any work of literature has a number of themes, and this novel is no exception. However, one clear theme to me is the way the novel explores morality and the various moral codes that the...

Hemingway uses sports in several symbolic ways in his terrific novel The Sun Also Rises. The three primary sports mentioned--boxing, fishing and bullfighting--are all described in a true macho...

As a member of one of the so called "Lost Generation," Jake is a character whose cynicism and disillusionment with life caused by the First World War causes him to lead a life that is characterised...

When the novel begins, Robert Cohn has had a very negative experience with women. Straight out university he “was married by the first girl who was nice to him” (Hemingway). The use of the passive...

The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's novel of the "lost generation," combines elements of realism, naturalism and modernism. Hemingway was certainly following in the footsteps of American writers of the...

Before the bullfight Romero takes off his gold-brocaded cape. He instructs his sword handler to pass it up to Brett, who's sitting at the ringside between Bill and Jake. Jake advises Brett to...

This is a great question, because alcohol use, love, and identity are all major themes in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Below, you'll find an explanation for how each of these themes works...

The Sun Also Rises is a novel with several settings. The general setting is Europe in the period between World War I and World War II. More specifically, the characters in the novel travel between...

Robert won the fight with Jake and Mike because he had been a boxer when he was a student at Princeton. Plus, Jake and Mike were drunk. Robert easily knocked them both out, despite Mike saying he...

Robert has a very romantic view of life. He is very easily influenced, especially by the things he reads in books; "The Purple Land" in particular makes him long for adventure, and instills in him...

In writing this novel, Hemmingway chose to focus on characters who depicted what were known as the "lost generation." This phrase denotes the men and women who, having lived through the horrors of...

In chapter 5 of the book, Robert talks to his friend Jake (Jacob Barnes) about wanting to travel to South America but being held back by Frances. When Jake suggests that he should take Frances with...

In chapter 5, Cohn and Jake have lunch together and Cohn asks Jake what he knows about Brett. Jake tells Cohn about her name, her plans to marry Mike Campbell, and their history together working at...

The presence of Brett Ashley, a beautiful, but emasculating woman who wears her hair combed back more like a man and whose name is even masculine, causes some dissension among the men. For, after...

The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast actually share many similarities, despite the fact that one is meant to be fiction and the other a memoir. both take place in Paris of the 1920s the primary...

The environment or setting of the story, to be comprehensive, includes both time and place. The first reference below explains the historical background of the novel which complements so well its...

To Ernest Hemingway--the ultimate macho writer who lived the life of many of his characters--what could be a more macho sport than bullfighting? And for his character Jake Barnes, a handsome man...

The homosexual men symbolize to Jake a chosen rejection of heterosexuality. This contrasts with his involuntary loss of his manhood through the war accident that has left him impotent. They...