The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway, the Lost Generation and the Modern World
Hemingway’s first novel, set in Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, is the archetypal novel of The Lost Generation, the group of artists and authors exiled together in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson. F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were its more famous residents and Hemingway their chief scribe. In it he depicts the listless parties and fiestas, drinking and loving and search for identity in an amoral world, where experience and enjoyment are the only pursuits worth having and direction and goals are forgotten in a society broken by war and death. Our main character is Jake, an ex soldier turned journalist who has been injured during the conflict, an injury that has left him impotent, a condition touched on in moments but never specifically discussed. This is a world where the physical damage of half a decade of violence is brushed under a carpet of bright lights and social whirl: ‘Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.’ The lif