What Is The Sun Also Rises About

The Sun Also Rises: A Story That Doesn't Really Want to Be About the Sun

Here’s the thing about The Sun Also Rises* — the title promises something grand, something elemental. You expect a novel where the sun rises and sets over sweeping landscapes, where nature itself is the protagonist. But Ernest Hemingway doesn’t write about the sun rising at all, not really. The sun is just there. It rises, it sets, it keeps going. Meanwhile, the people in this book are stuck in a loop of drinking, traveling, and pretending they’re not hurting.

That’s the whole point.

Published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises* is often called Hemingway’s breakthrough novel. It introduced the world to what he later called “the lost generation” — a phrase lifted from Gertrude Stein’s witty dismissal of her expatriate contemporaries in Paris. These are Americans and Britons wandering through post-war Europe, mostly broke, always hungover, and emotionally untethered. They move from café to casino to bullfight, looking for something they can’t name.

And the sun? It rises anyway.

What The Sun Also Rises* Actually Is

At its core, the novel follows Jake Barnes, a journalist and WWI veteran who’s been wounded in a way that makes him unable to consummate a relationship with his girlfriend, Brett Ashley. And she’s beautiful, restless, and impossible to satisfy. Jake loves her, but he also knows she’ll leave him the moment something shinier comes along.

So when Brett starts seeing other men — including a young bullfighter named Pedro Romero — Jake tags along on a trip to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls. He watches her sleep with other people. Now, he watches Romero fight. He drinks too much. He tries to keep his cool.

It’s a love story without a happy ending. A war story without glory. A travelogue that never romanticizes the places it visits.

The novel is also a portrait of masculinity in crisis. Jake and his friends are men who survived a war that made no sense and left them hollow. So they drink, they gamble, they chase women, they watch sports. They don’t know how to be whole again. Anything to avoid sitting still with their thoughts.

Why It Still Matters

People still read The Sun Also Rises* because it captures something timeless about displacement and disillusionment. You don’t have to be a WWI veteran or an expatriate in 1920s Paris to feel untethered. Modern readers recognize the characters immediately — not because they’re complex in a psychological sense, but because they’re real in a behavioral one.

They avoid commitment. In real terms, they treat relationships like transactions. They self-medicate. They confuse excitement with meaning. Sound familiar?

The novel also matters because it helped define how American literature talks about trauma. He made them hollow. Before Hemingway, war stories were usually heroic. He made them honest.

And yes, the title still works, even if the sun never actually rises in any meaningful way. Worth adding: the sun rises regardless of what happens to the characters. Here's the thing — it’s indifferent. That’s the point.

How the Story Actually Unfolds

The Setup: Paris, Drinking, and Emotional Avoidance

The first part of the novel takes place in Paris, where Jake and his friend Bill Gorton (the funny, loud one) hang out with Brett and her various suitors. Think about it: there’s Mike Campbell, Brett’s fiancé, who’s broke and drinking heavily. There’s Robert Cohn, the American who’s in love with Brett and constantly causing drama. There’s a lot of talk about money, not much of it serious.

Hemingway’s style here is spare, almost conversational. He doesn’t explain everything. Also, he doesn’t need to. That said, you know these people. You’ve met them. Or been them.

The tension builds slowly. Brett wants Jake, but she can’t have him. Jake wants Brett, but he can’t give her what she wants. Everyone is waiting for something to happen, even though nothing good is going to happen.

The Trip: Spain, Bullfights, and False Hope

Then they all head to Spain for the San Fermín festival. Also, the energy shifts. Which means the bullfights are beautiful and brutal. Romero, the young matador, is graceful and fearless. He represents everything Jake isn’t — confident, talented, whole.

But the trip doesn’t fix anything. If anything, it makes things worse. Brett sleeps with Romero. Jake watches. He tries to stay cool, but he’s falling apart inside.

The climax comes during the bull run, when chaos erupts in the streets. People get hurt. Relationships fracture. Jake realizes he can’t save anyone — including himself.

The Ending: Nothing Resolves

There’s no big speech. In real terms, no dramatic reconciliation. Jake and Brett ride a bus out of Pamplona, and that’s basically it. They don’t get back together. They don’t make peace. They just keep moving.

It’s frustrating if you’re expecting closure. But it’s also realistic. On the flip side, most things in life don’t end cleanly. So most wounds don’t heal perfectly. Most people don’t learn their lessons.

The sun rises the next morning. And the next day. And the next.

Want to learn more? We recommend meaning of the flag of japan and does the earth spin clockwise or counterclockwise for further reading.

What Most People Miss

Here’s what a lot of readers don’t get on the first pass: Jake Barnes isn’t a hero. He’s not noble or tragic or even particularly self-aware. He’s just a guy trying to survive, and he’s not very good at it.

He drinks too much. Here's the thing — he enables Brett’s worst behavior because he’s afraid of losing her. He lies to himself constantly. He judges everyone else while ignoring his own problems.

And that’s why the book works. Hemingway doesn’t pretend his characters are better than they are. They’re flawed, selfish, and often cruel — but they’re also trying, in their own damaged way, to figure things out.

Another thing people miss: the bullfights aren’t just background. They’re the emotional center of the novel. Romero represents purity and skill and grace under pressure — qualities that none of the expatriates possess anymore. He’s young, he’s talented, and he’s not broken by war or trauma.

In a way, he’s what the lost generation used to be before they lost themselves.

What Actually Works When Reading This Book

If you’re picking up The Sun Also Rises* for the first time, here’s what helps:

Don’t expect a traditional plot. This isn’t a mystery or a thriller. It’s a character study wrapped in a travelogue. The story moves forward, but slowly. Let it breathe.

Pay attention to what’s not said. Hemingway’s whole thing is omission — what he called the Iceberg Theory. The real story is underneath the surface. When Jake says he’s fine, he’s not fine. When Brett says she loves him, she doesn’t know what love is anymore.

Read the bullfight scenes carefully. They’re not action sequences. They’re rituals. They’re about dignity, courage, and accepting pain. If you breeze through them, you miss the point.

Embrace the boredom. A lot of the novel is people drinking and talking and doing nothing. That’s intentional. It reflects how empty their lives feel.

Don’t overthink the symbolism. Yes, the bulls represent masculinity. Yes, the sun rising represents indifference. But the book works better if you just let it wash over you instead of hunting for metaphors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Sun Also Rises about WWII?*

No, it’s about WWI. The characters are veterans of the Great War, not the Second World War. The novel was published in 1926, long before WWII began.

Why is the book called The Sun Also Rises if the sun never really comes up?*

The title comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.” It’s about the cyclical nature of life — how things keep happening regardless of what we want or feel. The sun rises whether we’re happy or sad, whether we’re healed or broken.

Is Jake Barnes a reliable narrator?

Not really. He lies to himself constantly. He claims to be okay with Brett seeing other people, but he

He lies to himself constantly. So he claims to be okay with Brett seeing other people, but he spends every evening watching her slip through the crowds of Paris, feeling the sting of his own impotence and the quiet resignation that has become his default setting. This self‑deception is the engine of his narrative; it forces readers to piece together the gaps between what he says and what he feels, and it mirrors the larger disillusionment of a generation that learned to mask pain with cocktail‑laced conversations.

The novel’s power also lies in its structure. This mosaic approach invites the reader to assemble meaning from the fragments, much like the characters themselves are forced to construct identity from the shards of their war‑scarred lives. Rather than a linear plot, it unfolds as a series of vignettes — late‑night bar talks, a bullfight in Pamplona, a train ride to the coast — each revealing a fragment of the characters’ inner worlds. The pacing, deliberately unhurried, allows moments of silence to speak louder than dialogue, reinforcing the theme that what is unsaid often carries the greatest weight.

Beyond the personal dramas, The Sun Also Rises* offers a timeless meditation on authenticity. The expatriates, despite their cosmopolitan veneer, are searching for a sense of purpose that their post‑war lives have denied them. Romero’s unflinching focus, the simple honesty of his movements in the arena, and the quiet dignity with which he accepts each fall serve as a contrast to the aimless drifting of Jake and his friends. In observing him, readers are reminded that true strength may not be measured by bravado but by the willingness to confront one’s own limits.

In sum, the novel endures because it captures a universal truth: the search for meaning in a world that keeps moving, indifferent to our hopes or heartbreaks. On the flip side, its spare prose, its willingness to dwell in the uncomfortable spaces between words, and its unforgettable characters make it a work that rewards repeated readings. For anyone willing to sit with its quiet intensity, The Sun Also Rises* offers not just a story of lost youth, but a resonant reminder that the sun continues to rise, even when we feel forever in shadow.