What happens in Book II, Chapter 13 of The Sun Also Rises?
Book II, Chapter 13 begins with Jake Barnes and his friends—Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell, and Brett Ashley—arriving in Pamplona for the San Fermín festival. The town buzzes with excitement, as peasants, wine, and noise fill the streets. The young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, enters the story as the fiesta kicks off. The running of the bulls races through the chapter, and the group watches from the crowd, drinking heavily and soaking in the spectacle. Cohn lags behind, clearly uncomfortable and feeling more isolated from the others. Meanwhile, Brett becomes captivated by Romero during the bullfights, her interest obvious to everyone around. Jake, acting as the group's mediator and interpreter of Spanish culture, navigates social situations with practiced ease, but his detachment shows signs of strain. The chapter wraps up with the fiesta in full swing, as the noise and rituals of Pamplona consume individual worries in a shared, impersonal celebration.
Analysis
Hemingway uses the fiesta as a structural and thematic outlet: the collective chaos of San Fermín both reveals and alleviates personal wounds. Chapter 13 exemplifies what Hemingway referred to as the iceberg theory — the visible excitement and wine contrast with the underlying tensions of erotic rivalry, emasculation, and displacement. The prose tightens around action and sensation, avoiding introspection even as the emotional stakes rise. Jake's narration is particularly controlled here, meticulously documenting sights and drinks with a journalist's precision while the reader senses what he keeps unspoken.
The introduction of Romero acts as a tonal shift. He enters not through drama but through Brett's perspective, which Jake conveys with the detachment of someone who has learned to observe his own loss. This indirectness is the chapter's most skillful move — desire is expressed through observation instead of confession.
Cohn's sense of alienation is depicted spatially: he is always slightly out of focus, present but disconnected. Hemingway refrains from commentary; Cohn simply doesn't match the fiesta's rhythm, and this rhythmic exclusion conveys everything.
The fiesta motif — noise, crowd, ritual — serves as an ironic contrast to the novel's central theme of sterility. The bulls are vigorous, the crowd is ecstatic, and the wine flows freely; yet the characters of the Lost Generation remain, at their core, unable to transform energy into meaning. Hemingway's sentences remain short and direct, echoing the fiesta's relentless momentum while subtly undermining it.
Key quotes from Book II, Chapter 13
“The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.”
Jake reflects on the suspension of normal moral and emotional consequence that the fiesta creates, framing the entire Pamplona sequence as a kind of willed unreality.
“I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what it would be like to have a horse, and then one day gets a horse, and it is not the same as the horse he thought about.”
Jake's interior metaphor surfaces briefly, articulating the gap between desire and its object — one of the novel's governing ironies.
“Brett was watching him. So was I.”
Jake's terse double observation as Romero performs captures the erotic triangle in miniature — desire, witness, and loss compressed into five words.