Comparing Ernest Hemingway’s Life to His Characters in The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway is arguably the 20th centuries’ most revolutionary author. After altering prose to read as active text instead of the popular use of reflection, Hemingway was able to influence an entire generation of new writers. Hemingway’s writing, specifically that of his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, strongly reflects his life through its characters and settings.

The front piece of The Sun Also Rises introduces two different ideas for the overall plot of the novel. In particular, the first quote credited to Gertrude Stein is, “You are all a lost generation.” The Lost Generation was coined by Stein, a famous feminist artists and writer in the 1920s who befriended many ex-patriots after World War I. Stein used the term to “describe all the disillusioned young men who had survived WW1 and who seemed to end up in France with no real purpose, but because of its relatively low cost of living.” France became the new home to these men, who were known to drink heavily and live “empty” lives because of their physical and mental setbacks caused by the war. They were said to have “lost their faith in the moral guideposts that had given them hope before, [therefore] they were ‘Lost.'” 2

Hemingway was one of these men. He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois before moving to Kansas for a job at the Kansas City Star. During this time, he was refused several times by the army before being taken on as an ambulance driver at age 19. After returning from war severely wounded on the lower half of his body, he relocated to Paris, where he became close friends of Stein, Ezra Pound, and several other artists. Though Hemingway would later disregard the relevance of Stein’s comment in reference to the novel, he was undoubtedly part of The Lost Generation.

Much like the book’s protagonist, Jake, Hemingway was a journalist prior to the war and retreated to Paris after the injury, where he drank heavily and became most interested in his hobbies of fishing and hunting. In The Sun Also Rises, a chapter features Jake on a fishing trip, which serves as an idyllic getaway from his troubles regarding his unfulfilling life.

Jake was distressed largely because of his insufficiently caused by war wounds. Though the exact wound was undisclosed, the reader is aware that Jake is unable to participate in sexual intercourse. His ex-lover, Lady Brett Ashley, became married during the war and is in the process of divorce, yet will never be with Jake again, despite her emotions for him. Instead, Brett and Jake drown themselves in alcohol and endless partying, while Jake goes home alone each evening, and Brett participates in meaningless sex with multiple partners.

“Don’t you love me?” Jake asks Brett in Book 1.

“Love you? I simply turn to jelly when you touch me,” she replies. Yet they are unable to be together based upon Jake’s disability.

Hemingway has written largely about his hobbies and what he knows. His most famous works were based upon big turning points in his life: A Farewell To Arms (the war,) Death in the Afternoon (travel,) Green Hills of Africa (big game hunting.) The Sun Also Rises touches on all most of the themes that Hemingway later expanded separately into larger pieces. Because of this pattern, it is easy to believe that The Sun Also Rises was written based on his own experiences, especially after the trips to Spain inspired his love for bullfighting.

Yet the most important pieces of information that point to Hemingway’s real-life involvement with similar people and places stems from the proven theory that they are all based on an actual sequence of events. The character of Robert Cohn, the Jewish boxer who had an affair with Brett while in Spain, was the fictional characterization of literary figure, Harold Loeb. Loeb was instrumental in publishing some of Hemingway’s first pieces of work, and the two were good friends up until their visit to the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona in July 1925.

Hemingway writes of Pamplona: “We got into Pamplona late in the afternoon and the bus stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya. Out in the plaza they were stringing electric-light wires to light the plaza for the fiesta. A few kids came up when the bus stopped, and a customs officer for the town made all the people getting down from the bus open their bundles on the sidewalk.”

Also on the trip with Hemingway and Loeb was Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett. A well-known socialite, Twysden was married at the time she had relations with Loeb and was also speculated to have been affiliated so with Hemingway. It was never distinguished how far their relationship went romantically, but it was apparent from the depiction of Brett in The Sun Also Rises, that he felt quite strongly for her. This is what led to the souring of Hemingway’s relationship with Loeb. Hemingway writes of Cohn: “In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor.” Though Cohn is portrayed primarily as a champion boxer, he also has the literary element that signifies his similarity to Loeb.

Like Brett, Twysden also had an affair with the prize bullfighter of the fiesta, Cayetano Ordonez, known in the book as Pedro Romero. This is what spawned the plot of the novel, which he wrote after returning from the trip and having a fall-out with all involved. The novel eventually came to be centered around the Jake and Brett relationship, but focusing also on lack of depth in the lives of the Lost, and ideas of false friendship.

The bull fighting is a large part of the novel, because it was a large part of Hemingway’s reasoning for the book itself. He became so enthralled with the sport that he intended to discuss his (or Jake’s) regret for introducing Twysden (Brett) to Cayetano (Pedro.) 4 He also wanted to portray “the perfect bullfight,” which he re-wrote several times before deciding on the unfolding of the fight itself. But after developing the rest of the characters that attended the fight with him (specifically that of Twysden,) Hemingway knew he had more of a story to tell, and added the beginning details of Robert Cohn and his relationship (or lack thereof) with Lady Brett Ashley.

Hemingway is able to convey the characters and events of The Sun Also Rises so vividly because he experienced them. After publication, Hemingway was no longer affiliated with any of the friends he wrote about in the novel, but the weekend he spent in Pamplona would come to represent the ideas behind a generation that reaching the ages of 100 in 2005.