However he or she begins, somewhere early in any novel an author must introduce the book's conflict (that is, the situation wherein the protagonist, the main character, lacks something that is not easy to obtain). In a way, conflict is story, as we read, consciously or unconsciously, to see if and how the protagonist will get what he or she wants. Will Odysseus arrive home safely to regain control of his kingdom? Will Hamlet kill his uncle, as instructed by the ghost of his father? Will Jane Eyre survive childhood and adolescence?
When offered a story lacking a conflict, most readers lose interest sooner or later, no matter how nuanced the characterization or poetic the description, no matter how sparkling the dialogue or original the style. Reading a conflict-free novel would be like listening to a piece of music that lacked a melody, or even what musicians call tonality. Or like looking at a painting of . . . nothing — nothing identifiable, that is. And in fact, this is just the sort of Modern music and art that was being made in the early 1920s, by European innovators like the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Pablo Picasso, when Hemingway was living in Paris and crafting The Sun Also Rises. Certainly, there was a context for Hemingway's artistic experiment. Yet that by no means assured the book's aesthetic success.
The novel contains other structural oddities as well. Like many novels before it, The Sun Also Rises begins with exposition. And yet the background offered in the book's first pages concerns a character who is not even at this novel's exact center. Reading the book for the first time, we assume that Robert Cohn will be our hero, only to discover that he is instead a kind of foil for the story's protagonist — an anti-protagonist if not quite an antagonist. (We never learn this sort of background information about Jake at all — where and how he grew up, much less the specifics of his wartime experiences.) Hemingway delays including an actual scene until the book's fourth page. And the aforementioned conflict isn't explicitly stated until the book's fourth chapter, in Jake's apartment, when he asks Brett, "Isn't there anything we can do about it?" (Jake answers his own question: "And there's not a damn thing we could do.")
