The Sun Also Rises

First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises, perhaps the most autobiographical novel of Ernest Hemingway, presents one of the first literary works of post-war modernism. Hemingway is known to have created the first works of the “Lost Generation” movement, which prioritizes the mind state of the period and the characters over the literary criteria.

Having embraced the soul of various cities he has lived in through his life, Hemingway chooses to narrate the incidents and moods, and states of the characters through their relations with the spirit of the space and existing architectural elements. While characters are portrayed as reckless drifters without any purpose or hope in the beginning, through the novel, we see them change in parallel with the environment surrounding them. After leaving the gloomy atmosphere of Paris, where the beginning of the novel is set, we read that the characters start to feel emotions such as passion, love, and envy as they arrive at the joyful, sincere Pamplona.

It is accepted that places also have souls that lead to occurrences of various emotions in the visitor. This soul, the Spirit of the Place, is constituted by both physical features, such as scale and texture, and elements that are abstract and not visible to the eye in the first place, as is history. Following the recognition at the international scale, the concept of the Spirit of Place is now accepted as a reflection of the fact that the soul of the place is constituted by not only the spatial features but also with the events this very place has witnessed throughout history.

Keywords: Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta, Genius Loci, Hopelessness, Joy, Locus, Lonely, Lost generation movement, Pamplona, Paris, Passion, Post-war period, Realistic, Saint-Michel Boulevard, San Fermin Festival, Sense of place, Spain, The architecture of the city, The human psychology, The Sun Also Rises.