Within
the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway's works – some seven novels,
fifty odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction — The
Sun Also Rises, is something of a curious exception.
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| *Gov Wike |
Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and
relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite
of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial
successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and The Sea
(1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is one most
wholly satisfying book. Here Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for
his famous understated ironic prose style. And here he also made his first
marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his
brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing
career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the
Hemingway "code", the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue,
and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was
still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the
twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the
structure of The Sun Also Rises.
