[Often] Hemingway's fictional women emerge as more admirable than his men: braver, more faithful and loving, more responsible. (p. 6) [Hemingway expressed his view of the morality of compensation, in which nothing can be given or taken without an equivalent] in the metaphor of finance—a metaphor which runs through the fabric of [The Sun Also Rises] as a fine, essential thread. It is Jake Barnes who explicitly states the code of Hemingway's novel…. Jake reflects that in having Lad...

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"...

One of the most persistent themes of the Twenties was the death of love in World War I. All the major writers recorded it, often in piecemeal fashion, as part of the larger postwar scene; but only Hemingway seems to have caught it whole and delivered it in lasting fictional form…. Hemingway seems to design an extensive parable. Thus, in The Sun Also Rises, his protagonists are deliberately shaped as allegorical figures: Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are two lovers desexed by the war; Robert Cohn is th...

In the following essay, Bloom argues that although Hemingway is better known for his life and personality than for his literary production, Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises is an important contribution to literary and cultural history.

Hemingway's narrator [in The Sun Also Rises] seemingly represents "the true moral norm of the book," but he appears as such only to the prejudiced reader, prejudiced by the bias of the narrator's authoritative voice…. Read the novel from Cohn's point-of-view, and you end obversely in bias against Jake Barnes and his sophomoric code and his friends who damn Cohn by it. Reversal of intention: that Hemingway consciously schemed it so is evidenced by the fact that his n...