The Sun Also Rises is Essential History in Literary Form
How Ernest Hemingway’s first novel opens historical doors
History and literature are two fields that are remarkably intertwined. This becomes more evident the further back one goes into the past. Writers often make certain assumptions about what their readers know and expect, assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted when a modern audience cracks open a decades or centuries-old book.
In particular, to read Ernest Hemingway in 2024 demands that one accept the premise that a book penned in the early to mid-20th century is worth reading in the present. To read The Sun Also Rises, as I recently did, also demands that one engage with history on a deep level. This novel is filled with unspoken assumptions about a post-WWI world and the emotional angst endured by everyone in the Lost Generation.
Read in that light, it becomes an essential window into the interwar period and the long emotional shadow cast by the decadence of the 1920s.
The Sun Also Rises is — on the surface — a novel about a group of friends who travel through Europe to watch bullfighting. Beneath that surface, it’s an allegory for the Lost Generation, men and women who suffered through World War I and viewed the postwar world with (understandably) jaded eyes. Much of the story takes place in alcohol-infused conversations and revelry, but there’s a dark emotional lens over all of these events that hints at the brokenness hiding in each character.
Jake Barnes, the protagonist, suffered emasculating injuries during the War. He watches affairs and romance take place right in front of him, but is unable to participate in this world. Hemingway rarely states this directly, but it’s clear that Barnes is deeply unhappy. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,” he muses, “but at night it is another thing” (Page 42).
In the modern world, The Sun Also Rises isn’t an easy read. At only 250-odd pages, it’s short and easily consumable. Hemingway’s prose is also famously pithy and lacks flowery language. However, the plot of the book moves at a pace that feels glacial compared to modern novels (to say nothing of film or television). Precious little actually happens to the characters and a reader could be forgiven for thinking that the book ends with few changes having taken place.
To properly understand this book, then, demands that readers have at least a passing knowledge of the First World War, the Lost Generation, and the 1920s (both in America and abroad). It’s one thing to read The Sun Also Rises and recognize that Barnes is a broken and depressed character. But that understanding becomes much richer when one understands that he is indicative of what happened to countless young men and women during this era.
Through story and allegory, Hemingway plumbed the depths of what many of his readers already knew to be true. And this is perhaps one of the greatest values of good literature — to show readers the full meaning of something they may already understand intellectually.
Shattered — whether in mind, body, or both — by a calamitous war, many in Hemingway’s generation were unable to ever really feel part of the world or society again. It should be no surprise then that Barnes is viewed as a stand-in for Hemingway himself. In this light, every drunken conversation, the few moments of conflict, and the failed love affairs take on a new meaning. It’s not that Hemingway wrote vapid or shallow characters, it’s that he spoke for a generation that had been through unspeakable horror and was unable to process it.
This all leads me to where I want to end this brief endorsement for a book that surely doesn’t need my recommendation: read The Sun Also Rises as a work of history. Read it to understand the 1920s and how men like Hemingway were broken by a war of colossal scale. Because in the unspoken misery of its cast of characters, this book helps us understand a unique historical moment sandwiched between two global wars. In that way, it is truly invaluable.
C.S. Lewis had a high view of the importance of literature in history. “The study of the forms and styles and sentiments of past literature, the attempt to understand how and why they evolved as they did, and (if possible) by a sort of instructed empathy to re-live momentarily in ourselves the tastes for which they catered,” he wrote, “seems to me to as legitimate and liberal as any other discipline; even to be one without which our knowledge of man will be defective” (Present Concerns, page 133). I can’t argue as eloquently as Lewis can, but I’ll echo this sentiment and argue that it applies perfectly to Hemingway in general and The Sun Also Rises in particular.
