The Sun Also Rises Report
Hemingway’s Hero Of the segments of American society scarred by the anguish of the First World War, the damage was most severe amongst the younger generation of that time. Youthful and impressionable, these people were immersed headlong into the furious medley of death and devastation. By the time the war had ended, many found that they could no longer accept what now seemed to be pretentious and contradictory moral standards of nations that could be capable of such atrocities. Some were able to brush off the pain and confusion enough to get on with their lives. Others simply found themselves incapable of existing under their country’s thin façade of virtuousness and went abroad, searching for some sense of identity or meaning. These self-exiled expatriates were popularly known as the “Lost Generation” a term credited to Gertrude Stein, who once told Hemingway: “That’s what you all are. All you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourself to death.”1 Many of these individuals tended to settle in Paris, a suitable conduit through which to pursue their new lifestyle. Content to drift through life, desperately seeking some sort of personal redemption through various forms of indulgence, these people had abandoned their old value system and heroes, only to find difficulty in finding new ones. A great deal of new literature was spawned in an effort to capture the attitudes and feelings of such individuals to reinvent a model of sorts for a people sorely lacking any satisfactory standard to follow. At the forefront of these writers was Ernest Hemingway, whose Novel, The Sun Also Rises, became just such a model, complete with Hemingway’s own definition of heroism. Many of the characters in the novel represented the popular stereotype of the post WWI expatriate Parisian: wanton and wild, with no real goals or ambitions. Mike Campbell, Robert Cohn,
Cited: Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Simon & Schuster Inc. New York. 1926. Author Unknown. The Kaplan Calendar of Events. http://www1.kaplan.com/view/calendar/event/preview/1,270,715-3,00.html 1999. Monahan, Kerrin, Ross. Dramatica Storytelling Output Report . “The Sun Also Rises.” http://www.dramatica.com/dCritiques_folder/dAnalyses_folder/the_sun_also_rises.html 1998