What happens in Book II, Chapter 9 of The Sun Also Rises?
Book II begins as Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton board a train from Paris to Bayonne, signaling a shift from the café-laden boredom of the French capital to the raw, untamed landscape of Spain. On the train, they share a compartment with a group of American men heading to Pamplona for the fiesta. The relaxed camaraderie during the journey—playing cards, sipping wine, eating sardines, and listening to the rhythmic clatter of the train—highlights Bill as Jake's most straightforward companion. Upon reaching Bayonne, they encounter Robert Cohn and his companion Frances, whose arrival quickly brings back the social tensions from Paris. The group enters Spain by bus, and Hemingway depicts the border crossing with understated significance: the landscape becomes more rugged, the light shifts, and the air starts to hint at the impending corrida. By the end of the chapter, they've arrived in Pamplona, checked into the Hotel Montoya, and met Montoya himself—the true aficionado—whose warm, knowing handshake with Jake establishes a bond of shared passion that will serve as a moral touchstone throughout the novel.
Analysis
Hemingway uses the journey structure in Chapter 9 as a tonal reset, swapping the cramped interiors of Parisian bars for open windows and a changing landscape. The train serves as one of his favorite in-between spaces: characters find themselves suspended between identities, and the enforced closeness of a compartment reduces social interactions to their core elements. Bill Gorton's ironic banter—loose, affectionate, and deliberately absurd—acts as a counterbalance to Cohn's wounded sincerity, and Hemingway highlights this contrast without inserting his own commentary.
The border crossing into Spain is depicted with Hemingway's signature iceberg style. Just a few details—the change in road quality and the different cut of the customs officers' uniforms—carry the full weight of cultural and psychological transition. Spain is framed from the start as a place where authenticity can be found, a contrast to the postwar drift that characterizes the Paris chapters.
Montoya's introduction marks the chapter's most significant craft move. His hotel serves as a refuge for true aficionados, and his silent appraisal of Jake—the handshake that conveys mutual understanding without words—establishes afición as the novel's core value system. Hemingway's writing here is almost liturgical in its restraint: the less said, the more conveyed. The chapter also subtly advances the Brett-Cohn subplot through her absence; Brett has yet to arrive, and her delay is already creating the anxious anticipation that will disrupt the group's fragile balance.
Key quotes from Book II, Chapter 9
“We would be sitting in the car and the syrup and the egg-nog would come in through the window and we would feel it.”
Bill Gorton riffs absurdly on American food during the train journey, establishing his role as the novel's comic deflector of sentiment.
“Montoya shook hands with us and smiled. He had a good smile. He was very pleased with us.”
Jake narrates their arrival at the Hotel Montoya, and Hemingway's flat, repeated syntax enacts the quiet gravity of being recognised as a true aficionado.
“The road came out from the shadow of the woods into the hot sun. Ahead was a river and a mill.”
Crossing into the Spanish countryside, Hemingway's spare landscape description signals the novel's shift toward a world governed by physical, rather than social, reality.