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On the surface, Sun would seem to be about male bonding promoted by such activities as bullfighting, fishing, and heavy drinking. Brett Ashely, a woman, is able to join in these activities because she does not behave like a conventional woman of her time (I think that’s fair to say). She cross dresses, is promiscuous, and is a heavy drinker. And she’s a card-carrying member of the lost generation. Oh, but she doesn’t fish. Actually, in a realist sense, I’m not sure she is all

Of all the male characters in The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn is conspicuous for having not fought in WW1, and so, is not technically a member of the “lost generation.” He is a successful writer, trained as a boxer, and Jewish, which, as mentioned, is made a big deal of in the story. Robert Cohn is mentioned straight off in the book’s opening: “Robert Cohn was once middle-weight boxing campion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title,

Well. Last week’s post caused quite a stir. It did say that the characters in Sun are largely static, that Sun lacks the transformational characteristics of a novel, and that Hemingway seemed to portray the lost generation as lost, instead of redeemed, as he claimed he wanted to. There was the hate mail, of course, but most troubling was being followed by the burly bearded fellow with the large-bore hunting rifle who kept shouting that I was an illiterate scoundrel. Hemingway

Some critics say The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s best novel. The writing, the style—something we will delve into more deeply—is powerful. The prose is a joy to read. But, best beloved, is the story a novel? The definition of a novel is “a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes.” Sequential organization implies some order, and a novel’s order typically invol

“Kay, this week a new story, Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. Whoa. Yes, best beloved, Hemingway’s first novel, highly acclaimed and in continuous print since its publication. Continuing the theme of exile, which we saw in much of Mavis Gallant’s work, Sun concerns a group of expatriates living in Paris. The narrator, a first-person narrator who is the central character in the story, is Jacob “Jake” Barnes, a guy who suffered a traumatic groin injury in Worl