Until recently, most interpretations of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises have been based on the assumption that the plot reveals no linear progression, but is circular in form. Although critics such as Philip Young have tried to transform this seeming defect into a virtue by suggesting the inseparability of form from content, the recent trend in Hemingway criticism is to reject (as Hemingway himself did) the necessary corollary to this view—that Jake Barnes and his "lost generation" are static characters, incapable of learning and profiting from experience. (p. 321)
Such interpretations still miss Hemingway's subtle development of an ordered and logical sequence of action based on essential and positive changes in Jake's character during the central scenes at Pamplona. In fact, the development of tensions which leads up to [the] central scenes of self-examination and change of thought results in an almost classically Aristotelian "discovery and reversal" of attitudes and goals. Jake demonstrates this change in a series of actions in the latter half of the novel, and the tensions developed throughout are resolved in the final scenes.
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