The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Published 1926 · 67,842 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Sun Also Rises to read?

The Sun Also Rises scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Hemingway writes in stripped-down, declarative prose that became his signature style. The vocabulary is deliberately simple, with emotional weight carried through what is not said rather than through elaboration.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Sentences are characteristically short and coordinate, avoiding subordination and abstraction. Hemingway's prose has the rhythm of someone who won't explain or interpret, letting scenes speak through accumulated concrete detail.
Abstraction: 62 out of 100
The novel explores disillusionment, masculinity, and the Lost Generation through Jake Barnes, whose war wound has left him impotent, and his circle of expatriates drinking their way through Paris and Pamplona. Their restlessness becomes a portrait of postwar emptiness.
Information density: 55 out of 100
1920s Paris, the fiesta of San Fermín, and bullfighting culture layer through the narrative. Hemingway builds his world through accumulated attention to drinks, landscapes, and the rituals that structure expatriate life.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
Jake's perspective reveals his observations while withholding his feelings. The reader must interpret the spaces between what characters say and do, understanding the wounds they cannot name.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
The bullfight becomes symbolic of authentic action in a world of posturing. Jake's wound becomes symbolic of the war's damage to an entire generation. The fiesta becomes symbolic of the pursuit of intensity that cannot satisfy.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
Jake maintains ironic distance from his friends' pretensions while his own situation generates irony he cannot escape. The novel is bitter about disillusionment while mourning what has been lost.
Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
The fiesta ends; the characters scatter; nothing has changed. Hemingway offers the famous closing exchange without pretending anything has been resolved.
Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
The novel moves from Paris to Pamplona and back with clear chronology. The structure is accessible, with complexity residing in what the spare prose refuses to explain.

How The Sun Also Rises is regarded

The Sun Also Rises holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

What The Sun Also Rises asks you to hold together

The Sun Also Rises sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. It peaks at Systematic (12), a constellation on pages 156–158. Read from the full text, all 132 passages. What the stages mean.

Where The Sun Also Rises sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (132 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Sun Also Rises scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
Symbol: Formal
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.
Mythos: Irony/Satire v — Fatalistic Natural Cycle (irony v)
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Genre: Novel + Confession
Then all of a sudden I started to cry.

Where the story of The Sun Also Rises takes place

  • Paris and Pamplona, 1926, the main setting
  • Pamplona, Burguete and the Basque border, San Fermín fiesta, July 1925
  • Montparnasse and the Right Bank, Paris, spring to June 1925
  • Bayonne, San Sebastian and Madrid, July 1925

5 things that are true of The Sun Also Rises, with the passage for each

  1. Robert Cohn was once the Princeton middleweight boxing champion, though he disliked boxing and learned it to counteract the feeling of inferiority at being treated as a Jew.

    Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

  2. Mike Campbell says he went bankrupt in two ways: gradually and then suddenly.

    “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

  3. The fiesta in Pamplona runs for seven days without a break.

    The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days.

  4. The man killed by a bull in the encierro is named Vicente Girones, is twenty-eight and has a wife and two children.

    The next day in the paper we read that he was twenty-eight years old, and had a farm, a wife, and two children.

  5. The novel ends with Jake's reply to Brett's remark that they could have had a good time together: ‘Isn't it pretty to think so?’

    “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Scenes in The Sun Also Rises that Frye would name

32 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Confession, untitled
Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by Jake drops his hard-boiled surface in a private, introverted account of his wound and his love.
Agon, untitled
I swung at him and he ducked. I saw his face duck sideways in the light. He hit me and I sat down on the pavement. Cohn's fight with Jake outside the Suizo is the first open physical contest of the rivalry over Brett.
Pathos, untitled
You hear? Muerto. Dead. He’s dead. With a horn through him. All for morning fun. The death of Vicente Girones in the encierro is the sacrificial death scene of the fiesta.
Masque, untitled
the great giants, cigar-store Indians, thirty feet high, Moors, a King and Queen, whirling and waltzing solemnly to the riau-riau. The San Fermín procession, with its giants, dwarfs and dancers, is pageant and spectacle on the page.
Sparagmos, untitled
one shot ahead, caught a man in the running crowd in the back and lifted him in the air. The goring in the encierro is an unmasked image of the body torn open at the heart of the festival.
Agon, untitled
He nearly killed the poor, bloody bull-fighter. Cohn's reported beating of Romero and Romero's repeated rising to fight on form the climax of the contest for Brett.

Books that share these scenes with The Sun Also Rises

About the author

Ernest Hemingway