The Sun Also Rises: The Europe Jake Teaches Us to See

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoilers ahead for The Sun Also Rises.

When Jake Barnes teaches Brett Ashley to watch a bullfight, he begins by redirecting her eyes. Brett, the woman he loves, has been watching horses suffer; Jake asks her to follow the work being done upon the bull.

One movement prepares another. Pedro Romero keeps the animal from exhausting itself too early, turns it without sudden gestures, and preserves its strength for the final encounter. Through Jake’s explanation, horror gets a sequence and a purpose. What Brett sees changes. She can now follow what each action makes possible.

Hemingway then makes a smaller thing carry the whole judgment. Other bullfighters lean against the animal after its horns have passed, producing the appearance of an exposure they have already escaped. Romero lets the horns pass close to him while preserving the line of his movement. The difference is a matter of timing and inches, and we see it separates two kinds of feeling. Jake calls one “real emotion.” We are given enough of its construction to understand why he feels it.

This is a considerable literary achievement for a reader who has little interest in bullfighting, as I do. The prose lends us a discrimination we did not bring to the book. It also introduces a question that accompanies much of The Sun Also Rises: how much follows from learning to see well?

Jake’s knowledge helps make the journey from Paris into Spain wonderfully inhabitable. It gives his voice authority, and membership in a world whose pleasures he knows how to arrange. My admiration for that world remains stronger than my desire to belong to it.

What Jake keeps of a place

The precision of the bullring grows out of an attention that has been selecting for us throughout the journey. In Bayonne, Robert Cohn identifies the cathedral as a good example of an architectural style, a classification Jake promptly forgets. What survives is the dimness inside, followed by the business of finding transport, the price of a car, beer in the square, and air coming from the sea. We experience the town through the alternating demands and releases of moving through it: a practical difficulty settled, a seat found, a breeze felt before departure.

In Pamplona, this preference becomes an explicit editorial decision. The man who arranges Jake’s bullfight tickets is the municipal archivist, surrounded in his office by the town’s records.

“That has nothing to do with the story,” Jake says.

The green baize door stays in the story, along with the wooden door beyond it and the road dust a porter brushes from Jake’s coat. Centuries of possible civic history contract into an appointment; the route by which Jake arrived remains on his shoulders.

There is pleasure and discrimination in this economy. The towns have different temperatures, buildings, approaches, and habits. The bus into the mountains changes what can be seen as it climbs, while Basque passengers share wine and correct the visitors’ way of drinking it. Europe has people capable of answering back, giving things, refusing payment. Its inhabitants repeatedly interrupt the convenience of a purely private itinerary.

Still, Jake’s selection gives us unusually close access to the Europe that matters to Jake. The archivist secures his tickets; the café supplies a position from which to watch; the hotel becomes the place where a passion is recognized. These relations accumulate into a convincing sense of familiarity. They also define its extent. We can feel how a visitor becomes at home within a set of practices without assuming that those practices disclose everything essential about the places he visits.

Montoya, the Pamplona hotelkeeper, supplies the most intimate recognition. He and Jake discuss bulls briefly, discovering through conversation that their feelings agree. The language of admission then becomes bodily. An aficionado touches Jake’s shoulder, as though touch could confirm that an American really possesses the passion. Hemingway lets that gesture do more than a declaration of expertise could: Jake is welcomed as someone whose judgment matters.

The hotel’s photographs make the same distinction visible. Bullfighters in whom Montoya believes receive frames; others remain in a drawer and eventually go into the wastebasket, however flattering their inscriptions. The passion that determines where a face can be displayed also secures a room when the hotel is full. Taste has material privileges, and Jake’s account lets us feel the pleasure of being among those admitted.

The smile Montoya withdraws

That pleasure makes the loss of recognition consequential.

Montoya asks Jake what to do about an invitation for Romero to join the American ambassador for coffee. Both men understand the danger as they see it: foreigners can flatter a young bullfighter away from the people who know his worth. Jake advises withholding the invitation. Later in the same chapter, he brings Romero into the company of his own drunken friends, where Brett’s interest in the young man is unmistakable.

Hemingway sets the two encounters close enough for the contradiction to remain active, then gives Montoya almost no speech. He starts to smile at Jake, sees Romero drinking with the group, and withholds even a nod. The smile has already been established as a sign of shared understanding. Its interruption now measures what Jake has done. We need no fresh account of Montoya’s principles because we have watched those principles confer the intimacy Jake is forfeiting.

Another distinction between Jake’s biased judgments and wholesale narrative unreliability preserves both sides of this scene. His account remains capable of reporting the look that condemns him. I would extend the distinction to the kinds of authority his narration earns: the eye that explains Romero’s timing can be exact while the man who possesses it makes a compromised choice.

Hemingway, again does something interesting, as he gives us the technical explanation and the social breach through the same voice, leaving their incompatibility available to our judgment.

The group’s treatment of Cohn has already made assent to its judgments difficult. Their wit can be quick and their mutual irritation sharply observed, while their antisemitic hostility helps decide who is allowed to spoil the pleasure. After the first bullfight, Cohn distinguishes acknowledging a remarkable spectacle from liking it. The others keep returning to his earlier fear of boredom, as though his response must be corrected before the company can proceed. The novel catches the pressure a shared enthusiasm can exert upon someone who fails to enjoy it properly.

Then a local waiter unsettles the division between those who understand and those who do not. After a man is gored during the running of the bulls, he repeatedly brings Jake’s attention to the wound: through the back, for pleasure, for fun. Jake asks, “You’re not an aficionado?” The waiter has been talking about what happened to a body; Jake asks which kind of spectator he is.

That change of subject exposes a limit in the authority afición has supplied. Membership can explain a difference of response without answering the objection. The waiter belongs to the town and rejects the pleasure Jake has come there to experience. His dissent prevents us from treating Jake’s passion, or Montoya’s, as the single feeling of the place. Hemingway’s Spain contains a disagreement that Jake’s expertise cannot settle.

Beyond the aficionado’s eye

The narration then changes its scale of attention. The gored man becomes Vicente Girones, twenty-eight, a farmer with a wife and two children. Several days pass in a compressed account of the funeral. The family travels home together in a third-class railway carriage, and the train runs out into the fields. For a moment, the story follows people whose lives continue beyond the fiesta that has gathered Jake and his friends.

The next paragraph traces the bull. It receives a name and number, is killed by Romero, and yields an ear that passes from the bullfighter to Brett. She leaves it with Jake’s handkerchief and cigarette stubs in a hotel drawer. The two paragraphs carry their subjects through successive transfers: a body returned to a family and a town; a trophy given, wrapped, and abandoned. What mattered intensely in the ring has an afterlife among things no longer wanted.

This arrangement makes a feeling available that requires no enthusiasm for bullfighting. It also exceeds the waiter’s spoken objection. The named man has acquired dependents and a journey home; the bull’s celebrated death has acquired a neglected remainder. Hemingway moves beyond the morning’s immediate knowledge to show these later destinations, then returns to Jake at the hotel. The brief departure from his routine allows another measure of the fiesta to enter it.

Such passages come to unsettle my reservation because they make it impossible to call this an emotionally empty novel. So does the quieter farewell to Harris, the Englishman Jake and Bill meet while fishing. Harris gives them flies he has tied, hoping their future use will recall the pleasure they shared. An object prepared for sport becomes a way of asking to be remembered. The novel can produce tenderness with very little explanation, and without requiring us to share its characters’ chosen pursuits.

However, the larger experience returns so often to the pleasures of knowledgeable company—where to go, what to order, which performance counts, who can recognize it—that these remain the terms on which I most admire the book. Its movement through Europe is vivid; its social arrangements disclose their own cruelties and failures. What I find less compelling is the invitation to inhabit that particular range of satisfactions for so long. Reading The Garden of Eden earlier may have made the recognizable Hemingway manner feel familiar sooner, but familiarity alone cannot account for the distance: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the Nick Adams stories, and The Old Man and the Sea have reached me more directly even where their circumstances were remote from mine.

The most exact account of that distance stays with what this novel achieves.

Hemingway teaches us to see the difference between an elegant gesture and an empty one, then lets the expert in that distinction fail among people.

We can follow him with pleasure, judge him with increasing independence, and still leave Pamplona less attached to his world than the precision of our visit might have led us to expect.

Sources

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Project Gutenberg 67138. Close readings principally from chapters 10–11, 13, and 15–17; quotations checked against this English transcription. Chapter references avoid pagination differences between editions.

Russell Weaver, The Moral World of The Sun Also Rises (Peter Lang, 2023), publisher’s Introduction and Overview excerpt. The distinction between biased judgment and complete narrative unreliability informs the discussion of Jake’s authority; the extension through bullring instruction and Montoya’s withdrawn recognition is developed here. The full book was not used.