Just as Jake Barnes opens The Sun Also Rises talking about Robert Cohn as an oblique way really to focus on himself, so Hemingway, by virtue of omitting many direct references to WWI, makes his narrative rise and set on war. In his comments on the festival of San Fermin, Jake charges his language with war images. As he walks around the city on the opening day, Jake pairs Spanish events with wartime equivalents. The "fiesta exploded" (157); the café was "like a battleship stripped for action" (158); smoke from a rocket announcing the fiesta "hung in the sky like a shrapnel burst"  (158). The fiesta, like the war, persists even in the rain, keeping up "without any pause" and being "only driven under cover" (174). The frantic running en masse to the corrida, the climbing of a ladder to get up into the bull ring (paralleling the up and over motion in the trench)--all these movements mimic the front lines. And as they jam into noisy, packed Spanish cafes, Jake's Parisian party loses itself in the crowd: "The hum went on, and we were in it and a part of it" (166). Hemingway's fiesta is a retooled warfront, and each of the characters must then relive their war experience both individually and collectively.

If the setting of Pamplona acts as a recreated warfront, then it is the toreo and the torero that serve as clear metaphors for the soldier. Montoya is the spiritual secret keeper of bull-fighting, the priest of sorts, and he presents this mystery as something that insiders instinctively "knew about," keeping if from "outsiders,"  men like Robert Cohn, who would find "something lewd about the secret" because they "would not understand" (136). Cohn, always the outsider, of course doesn't "get" the corrida de toros. Unlike the veterans and the VAD, he feels squeamish because of the gore--the only one in the party to react this way--and is "'afraid I may be bored'" (166). The spiritual significance of the toreo is lost on him. Compare Cohn and Brett's reactions. Brett, who the men express concern for before the action in the ring begins, "'didn't feel badly at all'" by even the horses being slaughtered, and in fact, is so mesmerized by the transcendent experience that she "'couldn't take her eyes off them'" (170). Brett reacts so strongly to the grace and artistry of the torero that perhaps her desire for Pedro Romero, a beautiful, unblemished, pure 19-year-old, stems from her memory of an equally young and perfect lover who died years ago when he "kicked off with the dysentery" (46). Replace the word aficionado with war veteran--or war wounded--and the parallels between the bull ring and the battlefield become even clearer.

These complementary spaces (the bull ring and the battlefield) also make room for a discussion of competing masculinities. The conversation comparing bulls to steers offers these characters an indirect way to talk about manhood, brotherhood, and the war. The toros, the very image of muscled masculinity, are the animals capable of breeding. In contrast, the steers are castrated as calves. This lack of testosterone makes steers the tame, unsexed peacekeepers sacrificed for the unity of the herd (can't we see Jake often filling this role?). As a toro, to be alone is to be dangerous. The party from Paris offhandedly toys with the implications of this steer-toro symbiosis and symbolism, Bill going so far as saying, "'Don't you ever detach me from the herd, Mike'" (145). For as much as these people alienate themselves throughout the novel, they also go to extraordinary lengths not to be alone, to be forge makeshift groups and communities as they wander Europe. As with the toros, being alone is dangerous. Only the collectively lived nightmare becomes bearable.

Jake finds a kind of catharsis in it all. As he explains to Brett, the toreo acts as "something more that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors" (171-172). Such a description, one rife with greater meaning and order, stands in direct contrast to the senseless spectacle of his war service "flying on a joke front like the Italian" (38). In the bull ring, there are rules and patterns and scripts for behavior. The crowd knows how the fight will end but feeds off the intoxicating possibility of something going awry, of the bull overcoming its fighter. The men and Brett cannot look away as they watch a colorful, graceful version of combat play out in a controlled environment.

The aftermath of this collective experience models something these characters have been through before. After the performance in the ring ends, Jake describes their shared "disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight" (169). In view of this feeling, called equal parts disturbed and elated, we can't help but make the clear, underlying connection to the disorientating and heady sensation of battle. Paradoxically, wrestling with death often injects soldiers with an incomparable buzz of feeling alive. As the characters watch Pedro Romero, their Spanish soldier, in the ring, they find vestiges of their own brushes with death and life, only recreated and re-imagined. Bull fighting in Spain is the highest form of artistry. Jake and his friends are entranced by "the purity of line through maximum exposure" that Romero creates in the ring (172). In contrast to the unwieldy, nameless machine of trench warfare, there is room in the bull ring for strategy and skill, for artistry and heroism. Unlike the WWI veterans in their moments of combat, Romero is able to dominate his opponent "by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing" (172). Romero grasps what has eluded Barnes' entire war generation. He makes a spectacularly redemptive and creative artistry out of killing and claims for himself individual glory in the process.

All of the characters leave Pamplona changed. Bill, in PTSD language, calls the fiesta experience "'like a wonderful nightmare'" (225). Jake identifies 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" (159). For characters--and a novel--that talk about something by not talking about it, the fiesta of Pamplona and the corrida de toros offer this generation an entire week to "talk" about the war by saying nothing about it at all.