The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: Summary & Notes

• The Lost Generation: traumatized by war, adrift in peace
• Traditional values have been destroyed
• Masculinity redefined: Jake's wound symbolizes an entire generation
• The fiesta and bullfighting represent authentic experience
• Some wounds don't heal
• Living well is a kind of courage

• Literature students
• Anyone interested in the 1920s
• Hemingway fans
• Those exploring themes of masculinity and trauma

Quotes

• It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
• That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
• Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.
• As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
• It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
• He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife.
• “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
• “This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
• You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
• Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.