As discussed elsewhere, Hemingway described not just people but places and things in a new way. One of the pleasures of reading The Sun Also Rises lies in experiencing 1920s Paris and the Basque country of France and Spain via the writer's concrete, specific, creative, and careful descriptions. He does inner states, too, reminding us what it's like to be drunk or sleepy, to feel the joy of friendship or the agony of unrequited love.
Hemingway was a master at writing dialogue, too, a fact rarely remarked upon. Scenes like the one in Chapter XIII that begins "We were sitting in the café . . ." are remarkable for the way in which they overflow with information on the characters and their relationships to each other yet never seem forced or artificial. This is the way people really talk, we think as we read — drunk people, at least. Of course that's not quite true. But Hemingway's dialogue-writing brilliance lay in his ability to imitate dialogue without exactly reproducing it; to put it plainly, he left out the boring parts.
Thus, in writing his first full-length novel, Ernest Hemingway followed the lead of the great Modern artists of the early twentieth century. In the manner of Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions or Picasso's early Cubist canvasses, The Sun Also Rises is a book in which the central question (Will Jake and Brett get together?) is answered only a few pages in. (Imagine if we knew at the outset of Gone with the Wind that Scarlett would never have Rhett for good, at story's end. Hard to conceive of, isn't it?) Hemingway succeeds in his seemingly-impossible quest by virtue of all the other writing-craft elements at his disposal — a considerable arsenal, as it turns out. It is a bravura performance, one that not many writers have equaled, or even attempted, since.
