The Sun Also Rises Research Paper

“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone.”- Ernest Hemingway. World War I’s brutal trench warfare left a post-war generation with lost hope and conviction. This post-war generation was coined by writers such as Hemingway as the “lost generation”. As one of the people who first made the term, Hemingway himself served as a war journalist in the horror of WWI. Whether they served in the war or not, the Lost Generation was impacted greatly by it, losing many things dear to them. In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway focuses on different types of loss after WWI to show the lack of productivity and morals of the lost generation. People who go through a traumatic experience tend to seek forms of escape, whether it be alcohol,

When Cohn tries to get Jake to come with him to South America, Jake says “Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that."(pg.19) Jake himself has wandered to try to find a better place. After this, Cohn says that he is sick of Paris, and Jake states that he will feel the same there as he feels right now. Jake obviously has had experience in escaping his problems, but he still does it often due to his enormous psychological strain. Jake knows what is happening to Cohn, but can only go through with it because he knows it cannot be stopped. Jake and his friends cannot be productive due to their constant desire for distractions from their pain. Hemingway knew that the lost generation had turned to escapism to deal with their problems, and shows it through the many characters in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway illustrates the lives of soldiers after WWI by showing the effects of Jake Barnes’ war injury on him psychologically. Jake’s injury