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| The Sun Also Rises |
Hemingway's first novel is built almost entirely from what it refuses to say. The dialogue is surface, the descriptions are surface, the emotional life of the characters moves beneath the prose like a current under ice — present, powerful, and only occasionally visible. Learning to read this technique is the primary challenge and the primary pleasure of The Sun Also Rises.
Jake Barnes narrates from behind a wound he never directly describes, a war injury that makes the relationship he wants with Brett Ashley impossible in the specific way it is impossible. His love for Brett — and hers for him — is rendered in this gap between desire and capacity, a longing that has no adequate outlet and therefore becomes the novel's permanent undertone. Jake is one of the great unreliable narrators of modernism, not because he lies but because he is so committed to emotional control that he leaves out the things that matter most.
The group of expatriates who populate the novel — drinking in Parisian cafés, moving through Europe with the purposeful aimlessness of people who have nowhere they need to be — are the Lost Generation's most recognizable literary portrait. They are not lost in any dramatic sense; they are functioning, sociable, witty even. What they've lost is harder to name: a relationship to meaning that the war eliminated, along with so many other things.
Spain provides the novel's most vivid and most symbolically loaded material. The festival of San Fermín in Pamplona — the running of the bulls, the corridas, the long days of drinking and the short nights — creates a landscape of ritualized intensity that contrasts sharply with the aimlessness of Paris. Pedro Romero, the young matador, embodies something the other characters have lost access to: a discipline that gives form to danger, a way of conducting oneself in the presence of death that is neither evasion nor despair.
Robert Cohn, the only major character who does not share the others' particular disillusionment, functions as the novel's most uncomfortable mirror. His romantic expectations — formed by novels rather than experience — are exactly the expectations the war educated out of the others, and his inability to give them up makes him both pitiable and, to his companions, obscurely infuriating.
The Sun Also Rises is a novel about the specific texture of a specific kind of damage, and about what people build on top of damage in order to keep moving. What Jake builds is narrative control — the cool, precise voice of someone managing, not quite successfully, not quite unsuccessfully, to get through each day.
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