The Sun Also Rises : The Lost Generation

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 11th grade October 2001

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The Lost Generation refers to the spirit of alienation and the feeling of disillusion conveyed in literature and life after World War I. It was done by expatriates seeking different lifestyles and rejecting the values of American materialism. Also, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World War I years. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, were wanton, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. ("http://ok.essortment.com/whatlostgenera_nkj.htm") Ernest Hemingway's personifies the ideas of the Lost Generation and places him in it, through his writings. The novel The Sun Also Rises and short story "Soldier's Home" conveys these ideas.

In the novel, The Sun Also Rises the main characters convey the ideas of the Lost Generation. This is shown in many different occasions in the novel. One occasion is when Jake starts to pray but he almost fell asleep so he prays for the Bullfighters.

"I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing." (Hemingway, 1926, 102-103) This quote shows that Jake had loose morals because he didn't pray for anything really important because he prayed for having fun and a good time in the fiesta. When he was praying for something important it bored him and he almost fell asleep. Further more he couldn't pray as...