From the very first line of The Sun Also Rises, the writer introduces us to characters who are unique and sympathetic, and therefore unforgettable. The novel features not one or two, but five fully three-dimensional figures at its center: Jake, Brett, Cohn, Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell, and Pedro Romero. (Secondary characters include Frances, Georgette, the Count, Harris, and Montoya.) They are different enough from each other that there’s never any confusion as to who’s who, even in scenes featuring nearly all of these characters at once. (This is partly due to the fact that Hemingway brings his ensemble cast onstage one at a time, allowing us to “meet” each player before the next one is introduced.)
Moreover, not one of the characters we encounter in The Sun Also Rises is a “type” we’ve seen before onstage, onscreen, or in another book—though we may recognize Bill or Frances from our real lives. Each of them behaves badly in one way or another, and some do so again and again. And yet we understand the human failings of these imaginary people. As a result, we care about what happens to each of them; when the gang splits up near novel’s end, we’re sorry to see them go.
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.
