Brett, Lady Ashley, spun about by her passions, or Jake Barnes, unsexed by the war, or Cohn, who crumbles to pieces beneath the weight of his desire for Brett, are all abandoned people, abandoned by the reasonability of time and left to struggle as they may with the disastrous prospects of living. The book rises to its most colorful and dramatic aspects in the account of the bull-fights and fiesta at Pamplona, a portion that is heightened by some of the finest and most restrained writing that this generation has produced, and there the reader has borne in upon him that these people have no more chance against fate than the bulls against the banderillos (1) of the fighters.