The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

4204 Words17 Pages
The epigraph to "The Sun Also Rises'; contains a quote from Gertrude Stein, saying: "You are all a lost generation';. This proclamation is juxtaposed with the passage from the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever';. The message of the former quote clearly conveys that the WW1 generation, of which Jake Barns, Robert Cohn, Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell are the representatives, is forever deprived of moral, emotional, spiritual and physical values. On the other hand, the latter passage gives a lot of hope: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.'; This statement, from which the title of the novel comes, as well as the content of the whole Book of Ecclesiastes, may be the reason for upholding this hope, the hope given by the rising Sun, the hope of forever abiding Earth.

It is a common knowledge that war - "the calamity for civilization';, as the narrator Jake names it - disorganises or even destroys human's inner life, his priorities, his code of values; that war causes a lot of chaos in the way one perceives oneself as well as others; that war deprives man of dignity and (self-)respect. The lives of the (dis)affiliates of the Lost Generation, who have gone through the tragedy of the World War1, epitomise this universal truth. They are constantly coping with finding themselves in the world after the war. It is highly probable that the ethics and morality for them is to be found in the book of Ecclesiastes. The preacher provides the reader, or rather the members of the team of expatriates, with the code of conduct they should follow to find the meaning and the purpose of their lives. However futile and vain life may be, on which Ecclesiastes insists by repeating the statement: "All is vanity and vexation of spirit';, one predominantly should put his life into the hands of God and obey Him.

Do the protagonists manage to find any significance in their post-war existence? Are their lives likely to regain the meaning? Will they manage to "put together the pieces of their shattered personal faiths'; (Maloney 188) to obliterate their painful memories of "that dirty war';?

Book 1 presents the tragic and hopeless situation of the Lost Generation. All the protagonists belong to the degenerated society of the expatria...

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...g life as a constant rebirth, as the "re-entering the earthly paradise'; (Maloney 186) outside the novel, but still within the works of Hemingway, whose crucial message is after all that man can be beaten up, but not lost, that man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Works Cited

Backman, Melvin. "Hemingway: The Metador and the Crucified." Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, American Century Series: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Benson, Jackson J. Hemingway: The Writer's Art of Self-Defense. Minnesota: the University of Minnesota, 1969

Kashkeen, Ivan. "Alive in the Midst of Death: Ernest Hemingway." Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, American Century Series: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Maloney, Michael F. "Ernest Hemingway: The Missing Third Dimension." Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, American Century Series: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Spilka, Mark. "The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises." Hemingway and His Critics. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, American Century Series: Hill and Wang, 1961.

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(http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-178,pageNum-51.html)
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