The Sun Also Rises Is Really a Novel About Everything Its Characters Avoid Saying

Hi Bookish Besties, I first read The Sun Also Rises in high school, and what surprised me most was how modern it felt. The conversations were clipped, everybody seemed restless, nobody wanted to explain themselves properly, and the characters moved through Paris and Spain as though changing cafés or countries might somehow solve whatever was happening inside them.

At that age, I was fascinated by the atmosphere. Paris, Pamplona, crowded tables, bullfights, travel, complicated relationships, and people who seemed both glamorous and completely miserable made the book feel very different from what I expected a 1920s classic to feel like.

After more than twenty years of reading Hemingway, I notice something else much more strongly now. These characters are constantly moving, but very few of them are actually getting anywhere. They drink, travel, argue, fall in love, sleep with the wrong people, watch bullfights, take trains, go fishing, and make plans. Beneath all that movement is a generation carrying wounds it does not know how to talk about.

That is the version of The Sun Also Rises I find most interesting now. It is not simply a Lost Generation novel about disillusioned expatriates having an extended European social life. It is a book about what people do when the old rules no longer seem useful but they have not figured out what should replace them. And at the center of all that uncertainty are Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley, two people who love each other and still cannot turn that love into the life either of them might want.

Spoiler note: This guide discusses the full plot, relationships, and ending of The Sun Also Rises. If you want to read the novel completely fresh, come back after you finish.

The Sun Also Rises: The Quick Summary

Published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises follows American journalist Jake Barnes and a circle of expatriates living in post-World War I Europe. Jake has been physically wounded during the war in a way that affects his sexual relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, the woman he loves. Brett loves Jake but continues having relationships with other men, including Mike Campbell, Robert Cohn, and eventually the young bullfighter Pedro Romero.

The group travels from Paris to Spain, where they attend the fiesta and bullfights in Pamplona. Alcohol, jealousy, resentment, desire, and long-simmering tensions eventually explode. By the end, Jake and Brett are together again briefly, but nothing fundamental about their relationship has changed. They can imagine a different life. They cannot actually have it. That gap between desire and reality is where I think the entire novel lives.

What Is The Sun Also Rises About?

On the surface, The Sun Also Rises is about a group of American and British expatriates traveling through France and Spain after World War I. Jake Barnes works as a journalist in Paris. He is in love with Brett Ashley, a charismatic Englishwoman who is engaged to Mike Campbell but moves through several romantic and sexual relationships during the novel. Robert Cohn, a writer and former boxer, becomes infatuated with Brett, and that infatuation eventually pulls him into conflict with the rest of the group. The characters later travel to Pamplona for the fiesta of San Fermín, where drinking, bullfighting, jealousy, and personal resentment intensify.

But the plot is not really why the book lasts for me. The important story is underneath it. Jake and Brett want something they cannot make work. Cohn wants romance to behave like the stories he has read. Mike wants Brett while knowing he cannot control her. Everybody keeps performing some version of confidence while revealing how insecure they actually are. The war is technically over. Its damage is not.

The Sun Also Rises Plot Summary

The novel opens in Paris, where Jake Barnes introduces Robert Cohn, an American expatriate writer who feels dissatisfied with his life. Cohn becomes increasingly restless and romanticizes the possibility of travel and adventure. His ideas about life often seem shaped by books, which immediately places him slightly out of step with characters who have become suspicious of grand ideals after the war.

Jake, meanwhile, is deeply attached to Lady Brett Ashley. Brett is beautiful, charismatic, independent, and engaged to Mike Campbell. She and Jake clearly love one another, but Jake’s wartime injury makes the sexual relationship Brett wants impossible. That impossibility creates one of the novel’s deepest tensions. The feelings are real. The relationship still cannot become what either of them imagines it might have been.

Brett, Jake, and Robert Cohn

Before the group goes to Spain, Brett and Cohn have an affair. Cohn becomes convinced that the relationship means more than Brett believes it does, and this difference is crucial. Cohn continues to pursue her with a romantic expectation that belongs to an older kind of story. Brett does not.

By the time everyone arrives in Pamplona, Cohn’s attachment has become increasingly uncomfortable for the entire group. Mike taunts him. Jake resents him. Brett wants distance from him. Cohn refuses to accept the situation as clearly as everyone else does. The result is not simply a love triangle. It is a collision between different ideas about romance, masculinity, entitlement, humiliation, and what people owe one another after intimacy.

Jake and Bill Go Fishing

Before the fiesta begins, Jake and his friend Bill Gorton travel to Burguete for a fishing trip. I appreciate this section more every time I reread the book. It feels like the novel temporarily exhales. Away from Brett, Cohn, Mike, jealousy, nightlife, and the social performance of Paris, Jake seems calmer. His friendship with Bill feels comparatively uncomplicated. Nature offers a rhythm the social world does not.

This is one of the reasons I do not think all the movement in the novel means the same thing. Some travel is escape. Some provides genuine relief. The fishing section gives Jake a temporary version of balance. Then Pamplona happens.

What Happens in Pamplona?

The fiesta intensifies everything already unstable within the group. There is drinking, noise, crowds, dancing, bullfighting, exhaustion, and very little emotional restraint. Jake becomes fascinated by the bullfights and the ritual surrounding them. Brett becomes fascinated by Pedro Romero, a young and exceptionally talented bullfighter.

Romero represents something very different from most of the expatriate men around Brett. He has skill. He has discipline. He belongs completely inside the world he occupies. He does not seem spiritually adrift in the same way. Brett’s attraction to him therefore feels significant beyond simple physical desire. She is drawn toward someone who appears whole in a novel filled with fractured people.

Cohn’s Violence

Cohn’s jealousy eventually turns physical. He attacks Jake and Mike and later confronts Romero over Brett. The fact that Cohn is a skilled boxer matters, because violence becomes one of the few areas where he can assert obvious power. But winning physically does not give him what he actually wants. He cannot force Brett to love him. He cannot restore the meaning he assigned to their affair. He cannot make the group respect him.

That is one of the patterns Hemingway keeps returning to throughout the novel: physical power cannot solve emotional powerlessness.

Brett and Romero

Brett begins a relationship with Romero despite Jake’s own feelings for her. Jake actually helps facilitate their meeting, which is one of the most emotionally complicated things he does in the novel. He loves Brett. He knows she wants Romero. He helps her anyway. That moment tells me more about Jake than any direct declaration of love could. It contains loyalty, pain, resignation, self-punishment, and perhaps a recognition that Brett cannot become somebody else simply because he wants her to.

Her relationship with Romero does not last. Romero wants Brett to become more conventional and change parts of herself, and she eventually leaves him. That decision matters because Brett is often accused of simply moving from man to man without caring about the damage she causes. I think Hemingway gives us something more complicated than that. Brett can be selfish. She can hurt people. She is also unwilling to disappear into the version of womanhood somebody else wants from her. Those things can coexist.

How Does The Sun Also Rises End?

Near the end of the novel, Jake receives a message from Brett asking him to come to Madrid. He goes. Brett tells him that she has ended things with Romero, and says that she sent Romero away because she did not want to ruin him. Jake and Brett spend time together again, and their old intimacy immediately returns. But so does the problem that has always existed between them.

The novel closes with Brett imagining how good things might have been between them. Jake responds with one of the most famous final lines in twentieth-century fiction, essentially acknowledging that the imagined life sounds beautiful. The point is devastating because they are not discussing a future they expect to have. They are discussing a life that exists only in possibility.

The Sun Also Rises Ending Explained

I think the ending works because Jake and Brett have not learned how to magically solve their relationship. Hemingway refuses that kind of resolution. They still love one another. Jake’s injury still exists. Brett is still Brett. The emotional conditions that have shaped the entire book remain.

But something has changed. By the final scene, there is less illusion. Jake and Brett can finally acknowledge the imagined version of their life for what it is: imagined. That is heartbreaking. It may also be the closest either of them comes to honesty.

Is the Ending Hopeful or Sad?

For me, it is both, although sadness wins. The sadness is obvious. These two people can see the life they might have wanted and still cannot enter it. But I also think there is something almost peaceful about the final recognition. They are no longer pretending desire alone can create a different reality. Sometimes acceptance is not happiness. Sometimes it is simply the end of arguing with what is. That is how I read Jake in the final pages.

The Main Characters in The Sun Also Rises

Who Is Jake Barnes?

Jake is the narrator and emotional center of the novel. He is an American journalist living in Paris after serving in World War I. A wartime injury has left him unable to have the kind of sexual relationship Brett wants, though Hemingway is deliberately indirect about the exact nature of the injury. That omission matters. Jake’s wound affects his masculinity, his relationship with Brett, his sense of self, and his position among the other men in the book. But Jake rarely explains those feelings to us. We see them indirectly. That is classic Hemingway.

When I first read the book, Brett was the character who fascinated me. Now I notice Jake’s restraint much more. He appears composed. He works. He travels. He participates. He helps Brett even when helping her hurts him. But that composure is not the same thing as peace. Jake has learned how to function around pain, and that distinction feels important. Functioning is not healing, and I think The Sun Also Rises understands that extremely well.

Who Is Lady Brett Ashley?

Brett Ashley is one of Hemingway’s most memorable characters because she refuses to sit neatly inside the role everyone seems to want her to occupy. She is charismatic, sexually independent, emotionally complicated, and capable of both tenderness and selfishness. Men desire her constantly. They also resent her for behaving as though that desire does not give them ownership. That is where I think discussions of Brett become interesting.

When I was younger, I saw Brett primarily as glamorous and tragic. Now I see someone who is just as damaged and restless as the men around her but is judged differently for the ways she responds to that damage. She hurts people, and that should not be romanticized. But the men hurt people too. They drink excessively. They become possessive. They fight. They project fantasies onto her. They blame her when those fantasies fail. Brett is not innocent. She is also not the sole cause of everybody’s unhappiness. I find her much more interesting when I refuse both extremes.

Who Is Robert Cohn?

Robert Cohn is an outsider within the expatriate group. He is a writer, a former boxer, and one of the few major characters who did not serve in World War I. That difference matters because Cohn has not experienced the same kind of wartime disillusionment as Jake and some of the others. He remains more romantic. He expects feelings to mean something stable. He believes his affair with Brett should carry a recognizable emotional consequence. The others find that naïve.

Cohn can be frustrating. He refuses to accept Brett’s rejection. He becomes jealous. He turns violent. But he is also repeatedly mocked and excluded, including through antisemitism, and that is one of the aspects of the novel that modern readers should not glide past. The group’s treatment of Cohn reveals ugliness in characters we may otherwise find sympathetic. Hemingway does not give us a comfortable circle of wounded friends. He gives us damaged people who are fully capable of damaging one another.

Who Is Mike Campbell?

Mike is Brett’s fiancé. He is charming, insecure, frequently drunk, financially unstable, and intensely jealous. He knows Brett is unfaithful, and that knowledge does not prevent him from staying. His cruelty toward Cohn often feels like an attempt to regain some sense of control in a situation where he has very little. Mike is another example of the novel’s interest in masculinity under pressure. He performs confidence while revealing insecurity constantly.

Who Is Bill Gorton?

Bill is one of the characters I appreciate more on reread. His friendship with Jake provides humor and relief in a novel crowded with romantic tension and resentment. Their fishing trip gives us a version of male friendship that does not depend entirely on competition. Bill still participates in the group’s attitudes and prejudices, so I do not want to turn him into the uncomplicated Good Friend. But his relationship with Jake offers something the romantic relationships often cannot: companionship without impossible expectations.

Who Is Pedro Romero?

Pedro Romero is the young bullfighter Brett becomes involved with in Pamplona. He matters symbolically because Hemingway presents his bullfighting as controlled, disciplined, authentic, and rooted in tradition. Romero appears to know exactly what he is doing, and that confidence distinguishes him sharply from the expatriates. They drift. Romero performs. They search. Romero belongs. Brett’s attraction to him therefore feels almost inevitable. But even Romero eventually wants Brett to change. His apparent wholeness does not make their relationship workable.

The Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises

You cannot discuss this novel without discussing the Lost Generation. The phrase became associated with the generation shaped by World War I and with American expatriate writers living in Europe during the 1920s. But I think the term becomes much more useful when we stop treating it as a glamorous literary label. These people are lost. That is the point.

The old expectations around heroism, romance, religion, masculinity, work, and social order have become unstable. The characters are trying to construct lives after a war that destroyed faith in many of the structures they inherited. They do not know what should replace them. So they move. They drink. They travel. They seek sensation. They attach themselves to relationships. The activity creates the appearance of life moving forward. Emotionally, many of them remain stuck.

The Major Themes in The Sun Also Rises

Disillusionment After World War I

The war is not constantly described, but it sits underneath the entire book. Jake carries a physical wound. The larger group carries a cultural one. The novel does not need battlefield scenes to show what war has done; its aftermath is visible in the characters’ cynicism and restlessness. They live as though many of the old promises no longer deserve belief.

Love and Impossibility

Jake and Brett love each other. That fact is not really in question. What is in question is whether love is enough, and Hemingway’s answer appears to be no. That may be one of the most adult things about the novel. Love does not erase physical reality. It does not automatically solve incompatibility. It does not make people become different versions of themselves. Jake and Brett’s relationship hurts because the feeling is genuine and still insufficient.

Masculinity and Vulnerability

Jake’s injury makes masculinity one of the novel’s central concerns, but masculinity appears everywhere. Cohn boxes. Mike lashes out. Romero performs courage in the bullring. Jake remains restrained. The men constantly measure themselves and one another through physical ability, sexual relationships, emotional control, money, violence, and social status. What interests me is how insecure all of those performances become. The novel contains a lot of masculinity. Very little of it feels secure.

Escape and Avoidance

Travel is everywhere in The Sun Also Rises: Paris, Spain, Pamplona, Madrid, fishing, cafés, hotels, trains. But movement does not cure the characters, and that is the point I increasingly notice. A change of scenery can create temporary relief. It cannot automatically resolve grief, shame, jealousy, or impossible love. The characters are excellent at leaving places. They are much less skilled at leaving their problems behind.

Alcohol and Excess

Alcohol is so constant in the novel that it almost becomes part of the setting. The characters drink socially, habitually, emotionally, and sometimes destructively. The drinking helps create the glittering expatriate atmosphere associated with the book. It also reveals emptiness. The party keeps going partly because stopping might require everyone to sit quietly with themselves. That interpretation makes the nightlife feel much sadder to me than glamorous.

Friendship and Belonging

The group appears close, but belonging is unstable. Cohn is never fully accepted. Romantic relationships fracture friendships. Jealousy changes loyalties. Jake seems socially connected while remaining deeply private. The novel repeatedly asks what it means to belong to a group when everyone in that group is carrying something they cannot easily share.

The Symbols in The Sun Also Rises

Why the Bullfighting Matters

Bullfighting occupies a large amount of space in the novel, and it can feel alienating to modern readers for obvious reasons. It is violent, and many readers will approach it with ethical discomfort. That discomfort does not need to be dismissed in order to understand its literary role.

For Hemingway, the bullfight represents ritual, skill, courage, danger, physical control, and a direct confrontation with mortality. The expatriates live messy, emotionally confused lives. The bullring operates according to rules. That contrast matters.

What Does Pedro Romero Represent?

Romero represents a kind of authenticity Hemingway admires. He has craft. He knows his role. His actions match the demands of his world. He is not performing sophistication because he is bored. He is doing something dangerous that requires discipline and presence. Whether modern readers share Hemingway’s admiration for bullfighting is a separate question. We do not need to adopt his values completely to understand why the contrast is structurally important.

What Does Fishing Symbolize?

The fishing trip with Jake and Bill gives the novel a quieter counterpoint to Paris and Pamplona. There is less posturing, less sexual competition, less noise. Nature does not solve Jake’s problems, but it gives him a space where those problems loosen their grip temporarily. This is a pattern that appears elsewhere in Hemingway: the natural world often offers clarity that social life does not. I would not call it a permanent escape. Jake still has to return. But temporary peace still matters.

What Does the Title The Sun Also Rises Mean?

The title comes from Ecclesiastes and evokes the recurring movement of the natural world. The sun rises. The sun sets. Generations come and go. Human drama feels enormous to the people experiencing it, while life continues. That is a humbling frame for this particular group of characters. Their heartbreaks matter. Their jealousy matters. Their wounds matter. But the world is larger than all of them.

Is the title hopeful? I think it contains more hope than the characters usually allow themselves. The novel is filled with repetition and circular behavior. People make mistakes. People travel. Relationships fracture. Another day still arrives. That does not promise that everything gets better. It suggests continuation. Sometimes that is the only hope Hemingway offers.

Why Hemingway’s Writing Style Matters So Much Here

The Sun Also Rises is one of the books that taught readers how Hemingway’s restraint works. The prose can look simple. The emotional structure is not. Jake rarely narrates his feelings at great length. Instead, we infer them from what he does. A change in subject matters. A drink matters. A pause matters. Who goes where with whom matters. The dialogue often carries more tension than the words themselves openly acknowledge.

That is why I think the novel can feel strangely flat to readers who expect the narrator to interpret every emotional moment for them. Hemingway makes us do more of that work. When you adjust to it, the silences become loud.

How the Iceberg Theory Works in The Sun Also Rises

The Iceberg Theory is useful here because Jake’s wartime injury is one of the most important facts in the novel, yet Hemingway never turns it into a long medical or psychological explanation. We understand enough. The unspoken material creates pressure. Jake’s inability to have the relationship he wants with Brett affects almost everything, but he rarely narrates that frustration directly.

That omission mirrors Jake himself. He lives by restraint. The style and character reinforce each other, which is one reason I think the novel is such a strong example of Hemingway’s technique.

Has The Sun Also Rises Aged Well?

Some parts have. Some require serious context and criticism. The prose remains strikingly modern. The emotional avoidance remains recognizable. The questions about masculinity, romantic frustration, alienation, and postwar disillusionment remain rich. But the novel also contains antisemitism, racial and ethnic stereotypes, gender attitudes, and cultural assumptions that modern readers may find disturbing.

I do not think the useful response is to pretend those things are not there because the book is a classic. They are there. They affect how we read the characters. In particular, the group’s antisemitic treatment of Robert Cohn should complicate any temptation to romanticize the expatriate circle as simply glamorous lost souls drinking beautifully in Europe. They can be wounded and cruel. Those truths coexist.

Is Brett Ashley a Feminist Character?

I would be cautious about applying a simple label. Brett is unusually independent for a female character in a 1920s novel. She controls her sexuality more openly than the men around her want her to. She resists Romero’s attempt to reshape her. She refuses to become easily respectable simply because that would make other people more comfortable. But independence does not automatically make someone admirable in every situation. Brett can be careless with other people’s feelings. She can be selfish.

I think her complexity is precisely what makes her worth discussing. The modern temptation is often to either condemn a female character for hurting people or rescue her from all criticism because social restrictions shaped her. I do not think Brett needs either treatment. Let her be complicated. The men certainly are.

Is Jake Barnes a Tragic Hero?

I would call Jake tragic before I would call him conventionally heroic. His defining conflict is not something he can defeat through courage or force, and that is important in a Hemingway novel. Jake cannot conquer his wound. He cannot make Brett want a different kind of relationship. He cannot physically overpower the problem. His challenge is endurance.

That makes him a very different kind of Hemingway man from someone like Pedro Romero. Jake’s strength is quieter. Whether that strength is healthy acceptance or prolonged emotional self-denial is one of the questions that keeps the character interesting.

Is The Sun Also Rises a Love Story?

Yes. It is just not a love story that believes love automatically creates a workable relationship. Jake and Brett’s relationship is the emotional spine of the novel. Their tragedy is not that they fail to love each other. It is that love cannot solve what separates them. That makes the relationship much sadder to me than a simple story of unrequited love. Jake’s feelings are returned. They still cannot have the imagined life.

What Is the Main Message of The Sun Also Rises?

I do not think the novel has one tidy moral. But if I had to describe what it means to me, I would say The Sun Also Rises is about people trying to build meaningful lives after the stories they were taught to trust have stopped making sense.

War damaged the idea of heroic sacrifice. Jake’s wound complicates conventional masculinity. Brett rejects conventional female behavior. Cohn still believes in romantic narratives that everyone else distrusts. Mike cannot create security through engagement. Travel cannot solve disillusionment. Alcohol cannot permanently quiet it. The characters have freedom. They do not necessarily know what to do with it. That feels remarkably modern.

Why The Sun Also Rises Still Resonates

The specifics are very 1920s. Most of us are not expatriate journalists taking trains from Paris to watch bullfights in Pamplona. But the emotional pattern is familiar. We distract ourselves. We travel. We go out. We stay busy. We pursue relationships that cannot give us what we actually need. We convince ourselves a new place will create a new self. Then eventually we are alone with whatever came along for the trip.

That is the part of the novel that has grown stronger for me over time. When I first read it, I noticed how modern the characters looked. Now I notice how exhausted they are. If you’re deciding whether this is the right first Hemingway for you, my guide to where to start with Hemingway can help.

You can get a copy of The Sun Also Rises on Amazon or Bookshop.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Sun Also Rises

What is The Sun Also Rises about?

The Sun Also Rises follows journalist Jake Barnes and a group of American and British expatriates living in Europe after World War I. The novel centers on Jake’s impossible relationship with Lady Brett Ashley and the group’s journey from Paris to Pamplona, where jealousy, drinking, bullfighting, desire, and conflict intensify.

What is the main theme of The Sun Also Rises?

Major themes include postwar disillusionment, impossible love, masculinity, vulnerability, alienation, escape, excess, belonging, and the search for meaning after World War I.

Why are Jake and Brett unable to be together?

Jake sustained a wartime injury that affects their ability to have the sexual relationship Brett wants. They love one another, but the novel makes clear that love alone cannot resolve the practical and emotional limitations between them.

What does the ending of The Sun Also Rises mean?

The ending acknowledges the imagined life Jake and Brett might have had together while also recognizing that it will remain imagined. I read the final scene as sad but unusually honest: they can finally see the fantasy without pretending it will become reality.

What does the title The Sun Also Rises mean?

The title comes from Ecclesiastes and evokes the repeating cycles of nature and human life. The sun continues rising despite individual suffering, suggesting continuity and perhaps a restrained form of hope.

Why is The Sun Also Rises considered a Lost Generation novel?

The characters embody the disillusionment, restlessness, alienation, and uncertainty associated with the generation shaped by World War I. Their travel, drinking, relationships, and search for experience reflect a broader struggle to find meaning after inherited values have been damaged.

What does bullfighting symbolize in The Sun Also Rises?

For Hemingway, bullfighting represents ritual, skill, courage, danger, and authenticity. The discipline of Pedro Romero contrasts with the emotional disorder and aimlessness of the expatriate characters.

Is Brett Ashley a bad person?

I think that is too simple. Brett hurts people and can behave selfishly, but the men around her also project expectations onto her, become possessive, and behave destructively. She is more interesting when allowed to be contradictory rather than reduced to either villain or liberated heroine.

Why is Robert Cohn important?

Cohn functions partly as an outsider whose romantic idealism contrasts with the group’s postwar cynicism. His treatment also exposes the cruelty and antisemitism of other characters, complicating any romantic view of the expatriate circle.

Is The Sun Also Rises autobiographical?

The novel is fiction, but Hemingway drew heavily on people, places, relationships, and experiences from his expatriate life in Europe. Several characters and events have recognizable real-life inspirations.

Is The Sun Also Rises difficult to read?

The prose is relatively direct, but the emotional subtext can make the novel more challenging than the sentences suggest. Hemingway often expects readers to infer meaning from omissions, dialogue, behavior, and what characters refuse to say.

Final Thoughts

When I first read The Sun Also Rises in high school, I was struck by how modern everybody seemed. They traveled. They drank. They had complicated relationships. They behaved badly. They moved through Europe with an ease that made the whole book feel almost glamorous from a distance. More than twenty years later, glamour is not the word I would use.

Now I see how much of the movement is avoidance. I see Jake functioning around a wound he cannot fix. I see Brett refusing to become the person the men around her want while still hurting people in the process. I see Cohn clinging to romantic stories that everyone else has stopped believing. I see Mike turning insecurity into cruelty. And I see a group of people trying very hard to keep moving because stopping might force them to admit how lost they actually feel.

That is why the novel lasts for me. The Lost Generation part is historically specific. The emotional avoidance is not. Neither is loving someone you cannot build a life with. Neither is discovering that changing cities does not automatically change you. Neither is realizing that the stories you once believed about love, strength, adulthood, or success may not fit the life you actually have.

And that final scene between Jake and Brett still gets me, because Hemingway does not give them a grand reconciliation or a dramatic goodbye. He gives them an imagined life. They look at it together. Then reality remains reality. For a writer famous for saying very little, Hemingway manages to leave an enormous amount sitting inside that silence.

If you’ve read The Sun Also Rises, I would love to know what changed for you on a reread, Bookish Besties. Did you find yourself more sympathetic to Jake, Brett, Cohn, or somebody else entirely? And do you read that final conversation as complete resignation, or is there still a little hope left in it?