The Sun Also Rises Report Essay -- essays research papers fc

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 faà §ade 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 respe ct 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, and Lady Brett Ashley, and even the prota gonist Jake Barnes all demonstrate some or all of the aforementioned qualities throughout the novel. All seem perfectly content to exist in their own oblivious microcosm, complete with their own 'unique' set of moral values. While the qualities of these characters dominate, to an extent, the flow of the novel, it is important to acknowledge their contrast to Jake and the bullfighter, Pedro Romero. U... ...than an escape from the trappings of real life. Just like Belmonte before him, Romero is eventually destined to deteriorate, and to be faced with an outside world that has no room for chivalry (as Robert Cohn found out). While this happens, we can assume that Jake Barnes will continue as before: confident and self-assured, with a clear understanding and acceptance of his limitations. Jake is Hemingway's hero for a new age in which the old standards of chivalry and romanticism are quite dead. Brett understands this partially, and demonstrates so by her inability to completely fall out of love with him, but she is still driven on by a promise of something more. Something that she saw, if only fleetingly, in the young Pedro Romero. Something that only exists in legends, storybooks and bull-rings. Works Cited Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Simon & Schuster Inc. New York. 1926. Author Unknown. The Kaplan Calander of Events. http://www1.kaplan.com/view/calendar/event/previe w/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