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This is another one of those books that I didn't actually like, but am giving three stars to as a result of its literary value. First, lets get over the rather rough questions of why I disliked this book. The first thing is the attitude of Hemingway himself, as revealed through Jake, about masculinity. I find this sort of obsessive veneration of "traditional" masculinity, the masculinity of violence, of "sport", and of sexual assertiveness (the masculinity of the bull-fight and the big game hunt), extremely bothersome. I am upset by the way it invalidates the humanity of femininity, both in men and women. As such, just when I would finally get around to sympathizing with Jake, he or one of the other characters would come out with a comment to the effect of the above and I would immediately lose at least some of my sympathy and respect for Jake's attempts to create meaning in his life. The second reason I did not actually like the book is that I feel Hemingway's "iceberg principle" is much more successful in the short story than in the novel. Over the summer, I read "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and loved it; like with a lyric poem, the story's brevity enabled me to reread the entire thing and probe the depths of the characters' motivations. I could not do that with The Sun Also Rises, so the sections where snippets of dialogue were supposed to contain vast revelations seemed, to me, to be floating out of context. The more compact the story, the more one can say with subtext (at least in my reading experience).

I have been discussing this book, and it does have some remarkable symbolism, or potential for it, depending on your read. For example, the stuffed dogs as a metaphor for the emptiness of the characters and their lives. Also interesting is Jake's impotence (which I did not gather from context even after finishing the book) as a symbol of his greater psychological scars and as a gateway to the discussion of his relationships with Brett and with the rest of his friends (the idea of Jake as a "steer" to his sexually active friends' "bulls" that keeps them from harming each other, especially over Brett). This novel is also a successful exploration of the interaction of hope and despair and of the effects of emotional damage. It is also an interesting picture of the "Lost Generation" mindset and has a chilling message about the potential life has for meaninglessness and permanence. As the title suggests, there is a constant sense that life, or maybe existence, goes on and must go on no matter what knocks one ends up taking along the way.