“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits… All the rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. A roman а clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris’s Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spirtually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and honor have yet to lose their currency, the novel captured for the generation that would come to be called “Lost” the spirit of its age, and marked Ernest Hemingway as the preeminent writer of his time. It is semi-autobiographical, written by an individual who felt as disillusioned and abandoned by society as the rest of the generation did.Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. In the period following the First World War, one novel emerged as the dominant literary work that best captured the disorder felt by the common man. To such people, these novels became their defining elements, and by resurrecting their individualism, they had found a point of departure from which they could finally rebuild their lives. The works of the most successful writers of this generation literally became bibles to those who thought they had lost their identity but had rediscovered themselves in these books. Because of the stream of consciousness, started by James Joyce and further developed by other authors like Virginia Woolf, literature had the tools and could therefore describe the feelings and outlooks of an entire generation.
It was during this time that literature in an attempt to capture the attitudes, emotions and opinions of the generation took a different tone and view. They became social exiles and were abandoned by their country and left to rediscover and redefine themselves in a world that had stifled their hopes, dreams and beliefs, in a world that after the war looked superficial and was based on economical values. Many of the generation left their homes to roam the world, to look for better morals and better lives unable to identify with either pre- or post war values, both of which, after the war, seemed deceptive and perverted. The survivors who came of age during this era just after WW I, were termed the Lost Generation, they were left disjointed and alienated from both the world before and the new world that emerged after. Society had been devastated by a global conflict that resulted in unprecedented death, destruction and resentment. The years immediately following World War I were besides hope also characterized by anger, discontent, and disillusionment. The hope was based on old values and thoughts and on unstable economical and political forces. The new inventions like cars, airplanes, radio, electric light, which in the twenties resorted into house-hold appliances like washing-machines and vacuum-cleaners. The Communist uprising in Russia that had as a consequence a completely new map of the world and which wiped out the last of the autocratic nobility. The early years of the Twentieth century were dominated by the First World War which dragged the United States in a war it did not want. The period I would like to describe is called the roaring twenties, its generation The Lost Generation. The cultural settings of an era are due to many factors. No, an entire generation living in a vacuum, feeling completely alienated of their time, waiting for the future, waiting for their lives to start. Not an individual who feels stranded in the wrong time, in the wrong place and perhaps even on the wrong planet. However, what is more interesting to me, sometimes an entire generation in a certain cultural setting, environment and time, can experience a feeling of alienation, estrangement, of having no ties with the past and no ties with the present or the future too. These are the individuals, of whom I could give you many examples.
They feel alienated and left out, or they are strange in the eyes of others, eccentric even, they do not fit in their time and the set of moral and aesthetic standards they live in. Because of this they live different lives than their generation and the cultural setting and standards of their era would expect them to live. What I would like to show you by writing this essay is that for many individuals in many different generations, for some less for others more explicit, the time they live in does not fit their outlook on life.
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