The Sun Also Rises: Summary & Analysis

Ernest Hemingway Modernist fiction Novel

Published 30 September 2026 · Updated 30 September 2026

Summary of The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway narrated by Jake Barnes, an American expatriate journalist in postwar Paris left impotent by a war injury, whose unfulfillable love for the promiscuous, independent Lady Brett Ashley structures the novel's portrait of the disillusioned Lost Generation. Following Jake and his circle of expatriate friends from the cafes of Paris to the bullfighting festival of Pamplona, Spain, the novel traces their aimless pursuit of pleasure and distraction as a response to the spiritual emptiness left by the First World War.

Plot summary

Hemingway's famously spare, understated prose style mirrors the novel's central theme of emotional numbness among characters unable to process or articulate the trauma and disillusionment left by the war.

Beginning

Jake Barnes, an American journalist living in Paris and rendered impotent by a wartime injury, describes his social circle of fellow expatriates, centered around his unfulfillable love for Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman who moves freely between lovers, including the obnoxiously persistent Robert Cohn, whom Brett briefly takes as a lover before losing interest.

Rising action

The group travels to Pamplona, Spain, ostensibly to fish and watch the annual bullfighting festival, but tensions among them escalate steadily: Cohn's continued infatuation with Brett despite her rejection creates persistent friction, jealousy simmers among the group's various romantic entanglements, and their days blur together in a haze of heavy drinking that only thinly masks their underlying dissatisfaction and aimlessness.

Ending

Brett becomes infatuated with a young, talented bullfighter, Romero, and pursues an affair with him despite the group's disapproval and Cohn's jealous violence toward Romero, ultimately abandoning Romero as well once she recognizes she would only corrupt his youthful integrity. In the novel's final scene, Brett, alone again and reflecting wistfully on what might have been with Jake, muses that they could have had such a good time together; Jake's famously ambiguous closing reply, that it is pretty to think so, underscores the impossibility of their love and the novel's broader sense of thwarted possibility.

Characters & setting

Hemingway uses the group's restless movement between Paris and Spain, and their constant drinking, fishing and bullfight-watching, to dramatize a generation seeking distraction from trauma it cannot directly confront or articulate.

Jake Barnes

Jake's war-inflicted impotence, rendering his love for Brett permanently unconsummated, functions as both literal plot device and symbol for the broader emotional and spiritual wounds the war left on his generation.

Lady Brett Ashley

Brett's serial romantic entanglements and refusal to settle into a conventional relationship, including her eventual renunciation of the younger Romero out of a rare act of self-restraint, make her the novel's most compelling embodiment of a generation's restless, unsatisfied search for meaning and connection.

Robert Cohn and the expatriate circle

Cohn's earnest, old-fashioned romanticism about Brett makes him an object of the group's contempt and violence, his outsider status within the cynical expatriate circle highlighting the era's harsh, disillusioned code of behavior.

Themes, symbols & analysis

Hemingway's title, drawn from Ecclesiastes, points toward the novel's argument that life persists cyclically regardless of individual disillusionment, offering a note of endurance amid the characters' aimlessness.

The Lost Generation and disillusionment

The novel's expatriate characters, adrift in postwar Europe and unable to find meaning through work, love or traditional values, embody Hemingway's portrait of a generation psychologically wounded and disillusioned by the First World War.

Masculinity and impotence

Jake's literal wartime impotence serves as a broader metaphor for a masculinity left unable to fulfill its traditional roles and desires in the war's aftermath, a wound none of the novel's male characters can fully overcome or even articulate directly.

Escapism through ritual and pleasure

The characters' heavy drinking, travel and fascination with the ritualized violence of bullfighting represent attempts to find structure, meaning or authentic feeling amid a broader sense of purposelessness, with only the disciplined bullfighter Romero offering a genuine model of integrity.